The Butterfly Generation

For Climate Coverage, Real Heat is Online

February 6, 2010 in Happening Now, Journalism, Visualizations | Leave a comment

If Arctic sea ice slides into the ocean – but no one hears about it – did it still happen? While climate change and other environmental stories proliferate around the globe, the number of full-time journalists specifically dedicated to these stories seems to be evaporating. And this on top of a wave of general newsroom layoffs: one report puts the number of journalists laid off in the last 2 years at 50,000 – a rate nearly 3 times that of other professions in the currently bottom-up US economy.

None of this has gone unnoticed. A few well-done pieces have been zipping around the Net lately, including one from the Yale Climate Media Forum titled, “Why the Decline and Rebirth of Environmental Journalism Matters”. The piece calls the combined layoff and lack of attention an “e-beat deadzone”, evidenced by both major metropolitan newspapers and the CNN’s and MSNBC’s of the world stripping science and environmental coverage to the barest of bones.

To get a sense of perspective, I did a little sniffing around at the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism for data on recent media reporting trends. In the week of Dec. 14 – 20, 2009 – which contained arguably the biggest environmental story in years, the COP15 Climate Conference – saw “climate change” garner just 11% of that week’s “newshole” (the word belongs to Pew – what kind of terminology is that?!). The infographic below shows how that 11% stacked up against the other top 10 most-reported stories of that week:

Transparency notes: Here’s the raw data and here’s where I built the visual. Click that second link to interact with a larger version if you have trouble reading the labels.

11% isn’t that bad – right? But that was during the Copenhagen conference, which convened political leaders from every corner of the globe. What are the everyday numbers like for “climate change” – the baseline percentage, on “nothing special” days? From what I’ve seen in Pew’s numbers, it just barely scrapes 2%.

But the real story might have very little to do with traditional media, because the action around climate is increasingly happening online. Pew’s numbers back this up. For the week of Dec. 7 – 11, 2009, which encompassed the first half of the conference in Copenhagen, “global warming” was one of the top 4 topics in blogs and dominated the social media sphere with more than half (!) of news links dedicated to the subject. It’s probably no surprise that digital media is picking up some of the slack in environmental reporting since journalism seems to be heading in a similar direction anyway. But the very legitimate objection lobbed at blog-driven news holds for environment stories: who’s gonna do the well-researched, professional, resourced and trustworthy reporting? This piece from FAIR does a great job of pointing to a bunch of online outposts that might be able to fill in some gaps. Some highlights: Grist.org, the well-loved hub for dedicated enviros, seems to be growing like crazy – a good thing – and the newer Climate Central looks to be a promising source for layman-friendly/science-backed climate coverage.

So what’s true for journalism as a whole is also true for environmental reporting: new business model needed! There’s tremendous promise in the web, but I think truly robust environmental journalism will require an “ecosystem” of print/tv/web reporting that pieces the many shards of these stories into a cohesive and factual whole.

Andy Revkin: “This I Believe”

February 4, 2010 in Culture, Unchecked Growth | Leave a comment

“Climate change” says NYT environment reporter Andy Revkin, “is not the story of our time. Climate change is a subset of the story of our time, which is that we are coming of age on a finite planet and only just now recognizing that it is finite.”

Revkin, after more than 25 years as an environmental journalist, has had more time to contemplate that story than most – so it’s no surprise that he’s put together one of the best distillations of the sustainability “story” I’ve heard. He pointed recently, via Twitter, to video of his speech at the annual Headwaters Gathering at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, where he spoke briefly about climate, growing up, and the prospect of 1 billion teenagers on planet Earth.

This notion that we’re heading toward – or are currently in – a moment in time where human activity breaches thresholds of environmental change to dramatic effect is really, really powerful. The thousands of bits of environmental science we’ve accumulated over the last half century or so – from atmospheric chemistry to rainforest ecology to marine biology – add up, like a photo mosaic, to a story about limits and thresholds. Of course, the non-predictive nature of science means that this “moment” may not really be a moment at all – it might be a long and increasingly turbulent series of bumps and jolts dragged out over years or decades. But in the long marathon of geologic time, it becomes a moment – and one that, for us, means we really do live in a particularly special time. In response to all that, Revkin poses this question:

“We’ve spiked from 1 billion to 6,7 billion people – headed toward 9 – before something happens. And is that a soft landing – a soft transition – or is it a real hard knock? That is the question of our time. And climate is a subset of that question…We have to ask ourselves as a species: What do I want to be when I grow up?”

There’s been some attempt to assign grasp-able names to the “hard knock” scenario, with “Peak Everything” and Paul Gilding’s “The Great Disruption” being among the most well-known. The problem, of course, with the concept of Doom Around the Corner is that it has an embarrassing history (Nostradamus and Chicken Little come to mind). But as much fire as these names might draw from the peanut gallery of detractors and skeptics, they help to tell a story about the future, about change, and about our relationship with nature. And today, when change seems to blaze by faster than ever, a story might be exactly what’s needed to feel at home in a world where “normal” becomes an increasingly confused and meaningless word.

The Farmer & The Philosopher

January 26, 2010 in Civil Society, Detroit, Happening Now | Leave a comment

Woah. I’ve been thinking for awhile that, right now, Detroit is the most interesting city in America. This seals the deal. Detroit Lives!, a creativity-factory of sorts with a mission to revive, remix and re-inspire Detroit has just come through with a long-awaited documentary about what was once the Motor City, titled The Farmer & The Philosopher. I just checked it out for the first time minutes ago and it looks great and inspires. For some reason, I can’t get the video posted on the blog, but check it out here.

Detroit-based author and Huffington Post contributor Toby Barlow puts the city this way:

“I often say Detroit is the city of the future because it’s either going to rise like a phoenix from the ashes and be this wonderful, interesting place…or every other city is going to wind up like we are. Because they’ll all be de-industrialized, they’ll all be emptied out, they’ll all give up on their civic government, they’ll all be abandoned. So we get to decide. And the city doesn’t have to rebuild itself as Houston, it doesn’t have to rebuild itself as Atlanta, it doesn’t have to even rebuild itself as Portland. It’s going to be something totally unique to Detroit.”

Indeed. I posted thoughts on why Detroit might be America’s first post-growth city here, which dove-tail nicely with another point Barlow makes: in the coming age of climate change, guess which city is poised to be prime geographic real-estate? I wrote recently about freshwater scarcity as a pressing ecological limit, which is decidedly less of a problem for the water-rich Great Lakes region Detroit calls home. And, as Barlow notes, sea level rise, heat and drought – some of the worst predicted effects of climate change – are primarily coastal problems.

Granted, this is a lot of long-view speculation from the editorially-lax blogosphere, but Barlow points out something else that rings awfully true these days: “The idea of a place without hope – having hope – is a story people really want to hear.”

That’s Detroit. And that – in some ways – is the Butterfly Generation. We’ve been painting ourselves into a collective corner for decades – maybe centuries. But have we ever been so globally interconnected? Have we ever been so wired together? Has there ever been such an impressive web of passionate advocates in civil society? NYT’s Andy Revkin called it a coming of age story on a finite planet. In Detroit, you could call it hope.

For the curious, check out some other Detroit thoughts here:

Detroit: America’s First Post-Growth City?

Unreal Estate

Local Resiliency from the Ground Up

Detroit’s Eastern Market: The Anti-Whole Foods

Cities: Intelligent, Wired & Connecting

January 26, 2010 in Government, Happening Now, Technology, Transparency | Leave a comment

Cities. They’re the spots on Earth where issues of social tension, economic inequality and environmental impact intersect and sizzle the hottest – all mashed against a buzz of people with different ideas and different backgrounds living together in the same space. They also might be the keys to sustainability.

This post is coming together in the middle of University of Illinois Chicago’s Innovation Center, where I’m sitting in a sea of laptops and iPhones glinting blue light off the glasses of their owners. Terms like Gov2.0, open-source and data visualization are being thrown around with much enthusiasm – and I’m feeling not unlike a goldfish out of his bowl.

I’m at CityCamp Chicago, a 2-day event billed as an “unconference” for people interested in getting city governments to open their data about things like crime, transit, infrastructure and the political process to the public. Nearly everyone here is a techie of one kind or another, most of whom are interested in snagging that data and building social media sites and mobile phone applications that’ll pave the way for greater “urban usability” (they love that phrase). The catch-all term for these cutting-edge processes is Gov2.0 – or using citizen-created social technology to make governments more transparent, efficient, participatory and usable.

I’m here as part of my work with Nonprofitmapping.org, but am also looking to bone up on what the tech community is doing around sustainability. A whole lot, as it turns out – most of which isn’t being tagged as “sustainability.” But whatever Gov2.0 is billed as, it appears to be good for democracy, good for neighborhoods, and good from an environmental perspective.

2 brief examples:

*Cities don’t treat all their citizens equally. Releasing government data to the public means that those stories won’t remain uncovered for long – or, for that matter, unsolved. NPO’s, intrepid citizens, and neighborhood leaders can arm themselves with the specifics of where and what goes to whom – giving them the tools to fix those problems in ways that city governments simply can’t, for budgetary or political reasons.

*Cities might be the keys to sustainability. That’s because they’re dense, creative places where the following equation is being put together: wiredness + open data = efficiency. And efficient in several realms: economic, time, energy, materials. You could go on. We already know that dense cities like NYC boast lower per capita carbon emissions than their rural and suburban counterparts. And that same city just released its data about public transit, soon to be transformed by the public into time-saving, carbon-cutting, civic-engaging iPhone apps. Other data might get bike routes traced, community gardens mapped, and traffic congestion avoided. All of this is getting done by eager programmers and citizen journalists at a cost-savings to government.

So – while not always pertaining directly to the topical concerns of sustainability – this stuff might represent the gritty grunt work of making the larger ideas possible. Neighborhoods have to be strong to grow cultural change. People have to feel like they have a meaningful say in local government before they can care for the world around them. And energy and materials efficiency can’t happen without the data flows to back it up.

One of the designing themes of the Butterfly Generation is “better not bigger.” I’m getting the feeling that that’s exactly what’s taking place in this room. The conversations today around innovative, citizen-led participation in government and city operations sound like the very definition of making existing systems better – and often with a cut in net resource intensity. More to come on cities, Gov2.0, and technology’s interesting role in cultural change. But for now, here’s a recent tweet from @AlexSteffen that’s got my thinking juices flowing: @AlexSteffen: Young climate fighters: head to the cities, dig in, find your allies and get creative!

Funny that the rush of urban life is being touted as our ecological savior, right? Yeah – irony not lost. Many interesting things to say/converse about this, but…when it’s light outside.

Image credit: Flickr/wrkng

The Hot, Dry & Inconvenient Truth

January 18, 2010 in Ecology, People & Nature | 1 comment

More than any other resource limit, the availability of freshwater might be poised to rush up on us the soonest. Unlike energy, there is a clear limit to the amount of freshwater on Earth – and an even tighter limit on the amount that is available for human use (some is dirty, or locked up in ice caps – and ecosystem functions need their share too). And unlike oil, water is immediately necessary for human survival, and a limiting factor in food production.

The expected effects of climate change on global rainfall patterns might be the most inconvenient of them all. Warmer temperatures are projected to drive precipitation extremes even further, making dry places drier and wet places wetter. So if your region is drought-prone now, look out. Otherwise buy an umbrella. Here are two maps to illustrate the point: the first is a map of currently water-stressed areas highlighted in red, and the second is a map of expected percentage change in precipitation for the period 2090-2099, relative to 1980-1999.

Current water stress levels, from 1995 data.

Projected changes in precipitation, from Dec-Feb & Jun-Aug, for 2090-2099, as a result of climate change.

Now imagine laying map #2 over map #1. All the areas in red – the regions expected to be hardest hit by drought – are the spots already stressed by water scarcity. “Inconvenient” is one way of putting it. And this, I think, is before factoring in the extra pressure on water resources exacted by world population growth. To get a sense of the population factor, here are maps of the “annual renewable water supply per person by basin for 1995 and projections for 2025.” And that’s minus climate change.

This interview with Steven Solomon, author of the new book, Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, And Civilization, is a reminder to yours truly in the comfortably water-rich Great Lakes region that scarcity isn’t merely a scientist’s projection. It’s already happening. And “epic” it certainly seems to be. Ice pack high in the Himalayas , whose spring thaws give life to nearly 3 billion people, has shown recent signs of recession. According to Solomon, such a disruption might have riotous effects in places like already-fragile Pakistan, who may see “one third of its water from in the Indus River—its main water lifeline—dry up from the lost glacier melt. At the same time, its population is increasing by 30 percent. So in the next 15 years, we can imagine a country that’s already on the brink, dealing with a loss of 30 percent of its water while the population increases by 30 percent.”

Bad news. Because water scarcity is the ultimate existential problem: if you’re thirsty, you need it now. That’s playing out in Haiti currently, where the unfolding humanitarian crisis there has, in some instances, expressed itself in violent skirmishes over drinking water. Haiti’s population is about 9 million; a dry Ganges is about 333 times worse.

So: fresh water availability is starting to look like the first cement wall that’s awaiting both economic and population growth – and one that’s spatially discrete but globally relevant.

Notes on the Visuals

I’ve been getting more and more interested in the way visualizing data can help tell stories, so I spent much of this weekend hunting around for a map that overlays future rainfall projections on to a map of current water availability. Nada. Does the data exist for such a map? Has no one produced it? Or do my internet research skills need polishing? Finding nothing, I figured I’d mine rainfall data from the IPCC, UNEP or UNDP – but no machine-readable data seems to be out there. Am I missing something?

If data on these topics isn’t readily available, I hope someone pushes for their availability – because getting such things into the hands of the public could make for some interesting new insights into the challenges that lie ahead. For those curious, I did find ClimateWizard.org, a very cool web project that comes close to what I just described. These guys have made available customized interactive maps of climate projections – but with kinda tight legal stipulations on use. No Creative Commons out there for climate data?

If you know of machine-readable data sets along these lines, please shoot me an email or leave a comment below. I’d love to try my hand at some original map overlays!!

The maps above come from the very helpful offerings of WRI’s EarthTrends and the IPCC. Find the first here and the second here (on page 16 of the pdf).

Are We Getting the Story Straight on Climate?

January 7, 2010 in Happening Now, People & Nature | 2 comments

2009 was a big year for climate change coverage in the media. Last year saw the first serious discussion of cap and trade legislation in Congress, unsuspecting climate scientists on the receiving end of an email hacking fiasco, and COP15, the first international summit to attempt a world treaty on climate change since the Kyoto Protocol. And I think my local radio station had “climate change” right up there with “Twitter” as one of the big keywords of the year in their New Year’s wrap up – which says a lot considering the ridiculous hype Twitter has been showered with this year.

There’s been an obvious uptick in climate coverage in the mainstream – see this graph to get a sense of how it’s spiked significantly just in the last year. But compare climate to the raft of other stories making their way around the news cycle and media coverage starts to look less impressive. Can you even find climate in this infographic about media coverage in 2009? (click for bigger version)

In a way, it’s hard to blame mainstream media for the weight they’ve put on environmental coverage – and climate in particular. For one, it’s a tough argument to make considering the term “green” has gotten so cloying (at least to me) that Will Ferrell has even threatened to kick your ass if you litter or drive or eat a Snicker’s bar without a biodegradable wrapper. But more than that, climate change is such a strange story – one that doesn’t really fit the way media currently works, or, for that matter, how a lot of our institutions work. Environmental change happens slowly and often in far away places. It’s scientifically abstract. And it’s hugely complex. It’s hard to understand what we’re supposed to do about it either politically or individually (NYT environment reporter Andy Revkin dives into all of these difficulties in this blog post).

So in some ways, climate change is a story that gums up the traditional news process. But are we even telling the right story to begin with?

Last year, in an answer to a question posed by a Columbia University journalism student during a Q&A session, NYT’s Andy Revkin said, “Climate change is not the story of our time. Climate change is a subset of the story of our time, which is that we are coming of age on a finite planet and only just now recognizing that it is finite.” Video of that Q&A is here – it’s 20 mins long, beware.

I think Revkin nails it. He’s one of the few reporters I’m aware of that seems comfortable taking the long view of what climate change really represents: a small but significant chapter of our changing relationship with the natural world. Maybe it’s because Revkin isn’t really a climate reporter specifically – he covers environment as a whole. Or maybe it’s because he’s been in action as an environmental journalist for decades before climate became a fashionable topic. Whatever the reason, I think Revkin has it pitch-perfect when he says that our relationship with nature is really “a coming of age story” – a slow, collective dawning that we’re citizens of a very real, physical, and finite world. Our future is a shared future – not one that’s dictated just by personal utility curves, but one that’s anchored firmly to the rest of the living world in very specific ways.

As Revkin leaves NYT for other ventures, it’ll be interesting to see who’ll try to get their arms around these stories in his place. And, with the journalism world on its head these days – and with climate change casting an unpredicatable shadow over this next decade – it will be very, very interesting to watch this story take shape.

Image credit: GOOD magazine

Our Ecological Report Card

January 2, 2010 in Data Flows, Ecology, Happening Now | Leave a comment

When you’ve got a goal in mind – say, for instance, the restoration of your planet’s life-support system – somebody’s gotta drop you a report card from time to time. Looks like the United Nations Environment Programme is handing them out this year, as they’ve compiled a TON of data sets from various environmental indicators and churned out several excellent infographics, like the one posted below.

If you need to zoom-in for a closer look, go here.

I won’t try to pick apart the data – you can see the results for yourself – but I can’t help but notice that while it seems our ozone troubles may be behind us (thanks, Montreal Protocol!), we’re lagging hard in the forests, oceans and atmosphere departments. Progress in legislation and renewable energy development is moving along swimmingly, evidently, which triggers this question: if we’re doing so well in those departments, why are the Himalayas losing snowpack while a trash “continent” bobs around in the Pacific?

But, hey, you might say: the effects of current legislation won’t be felt in ecological terms for decades to come, and didn’t the Copenhagen folks agree on that REDD thing??

Yeah, they did. I think. But the point is that I don’t think we should be too quick to pat ourselves on the back for our stellar achievements in “governance” when deforestation rates, carbon emission rates and ocean acidification rates are climbing faster than my blood pressure when that new Lady Gaga song comes on.

But enough nitpicking. I really intended this post to highlight the power of visualizations (like the one above) to tell stories about otherwise non-human friendly datasets. It’s a cool field that’s grabbed my interest of late, especially for use in telling data-driven stories. With the natural world changing rapidly in response to our activities, I think data is what we’ll be swimming in in the 2010’s. Pictures beat numbers anyday, in my opinion, so I’m planning on making a few of my own visualizations in the near future. Stay tuned for those.

So there’s our report card. Let’s see if we can pull the move I pioneered in grade school and intercept it from the mailman before physics and chemistry have a look and send us to bed with no dinner and a bad case of climate change.

Connecting with Nature, Via Technology

December 30, 2009 in Culture, Data Flows, Happening Now, Technology | 1 comment

The human connection to nature is looking pretty frayed these days, to say the least. Whether the claim that the current generation of kids can identify 1000 corporate logos and only 10 plant species is accurate or not, it’s pretty clear that the vast majority of us would fail Environmental Science 101. You can go on for days about why this is the case – from the creep of advertising into our private lives, to the dominance of market logic in everyday thinking, to our love affair with digital screens over time spent walking around the real world.

But that’s another post.

What’s interesting is the increasing potential for some of that same distracting technology to actually help us increase our ecological literacy. The iPhone, the handheld universe that would have looked like magic 10 years ago, can run a bunch of new applications that can connect users with real time information related to their local, physical world. One application, called Locavore, feeds readers a list of what foods are in season in their region, and which nearby markets are currently carrying them. A knowledge set that in generations past had been culturally embedded and practically necessary now might be carried forward digitally – and accessible externally, online, much like entries in an encyclopedia.

Another application, AlertMe, is a kind of pocket-size smart grid for your house, letting you review, adjust and customize home energy use on the move. Unplug the microwave when you’re away, ramp up ambient temperature when you wake up and come home from work, and monitor your personal energy use data anywhere, anytime. We’ve never had so much raw data and micro-control over individual energy impact before. It’s pretty unreal, and might give us as much facility and understanding regarding energy flows as we already have about Google searches and global current events.

IBM, to its credit, is all over these ideas. If you read magazines or spend much time online, you’ve probably bumped into ads for their “Smarter Planet” campaign, which looks to be an umbrella name for the inroads they’re making into software that connects managers and urban planning-types to data about energy, infrastructure, water, public health and more. It’s a great idea. As resource constraints close in on us, operating without any intelligence about our interfaces with the environment isn’t going to fly.

I think all of this speaks to the power of technology to change the game, so to speak, about what is deemed possible to know about the world. And an ironic twist too – because, as some environmentalists have bemoaned for decades, technology is frequently the arbiter of environmental damage – the arms that do the dirty work unwittingly baked into our cultural and economic systems.

These newer uses of technology, as a means for connecting us to our physical relationship with the world, throw that whole talking point into question, I think. Technology seems like an extension of ourselves, reflecting the soundness of our own agendas but also influencing the new alleys our creativity travels down. In the new issue of Orion magazine, a fascinating interview with renaissance man and Wired founder Kevin Kelly, asks the question, “Is technology spiritual?” Kelly seems to think so.

Without trying to answer any of those thick questions, I think it’s safe to say that technology will play a starring role in the move toward sustainability – but maybe not for the reasons usually cited. The traditional environmentalist’s anti-tech stance isn’t imaginative enough, I don’t think. But the reminder that it’s ultimately the real, physical world that ought to be the ends of technology is still totally relevant. I’m betting the Butterfly Generation, then, will be shaped just as much by technology as it will by a renewed engagement with the natural world.

What do you think? Is technology a valid, if ironic, way of reconnecting with nature?

Is There Life After Growing Up?

December 19, 2009 in Culture, Unchecked Growth | Leave a comment

That was the semi-snarky (it’s OK, the commentator is a friend – Erik, from the Orion Grassroots Network, which you should all check out and support) question posed at the end of this post about an interview NYTimes.com did with long-time environmentalist Gus Speth, in which Speth outlines a bit of his thinking on the problematic relationship between economic growth and sustainability.

It’s a great question. In fact, it might be one of the most important questions of the century. Not kidding. Because we can’t talk convincingly about questioning economic growth if we can’t provide an alternative vision. Who’ll want to listen to that? Erik’s question leads the conversation toward that alternative vision, so I wanted to highlight it in a blog post.

So: if economic growth has to be rethought in the face of our building environmental and social crisis, is there life after growing up? What does it look like?

Well, I don’t know. That’s up to us as a society and each of us as individuals with hopes for the future. But here’s my attempt at an answer in the short interchange at the bottom of that post:

—

Erik, on December 15, 2009 at 10:09 pm:

Is there “life after growing up?”

Scott, on December 19, 2009 at 9:20 pm:

Erik,

No! There’s no life after growing up! It’s time to get serious, put on the suit and tie, buckle down in our cubicles, and start bringing bean dip to “parties.” And pretend to like classical music.

No, seriously, this is a great question because we can’t talk convincingly about questioning economic growth if we can’t provide an alternative vision. Who’ll want to listen to that? I think life after growing up means ditching a few very particular cultural artifacts we live with today, namely tying success to income, individualism without community involvement, and believing the natural world is separate from the human world.

But we can trade that stuff for better stuff. And “better” in the sense that the new stuff is more appropriate for a world where ecological limits are a reality. Like: making knowledge cheap and natural capital expensive, open source internet culture, urban gardens, workplace flextime, bikeable cities, wi-fi everywhere, tying success to social impact and personal integrity, rediscovering the natural world, more transparent and participatory systems and democracies, livelier blocks and main streets. Tom Friedman’s mustache.

You could go on. And please do! Because we need many, many, many different answers to your question posed in public and in private – on the news, in line at the grocery store, at the bar, at the dinner table. Everywhere. Starting now.

—

Environmentalism has been complaining for awhile that it’s not diverse enough, not effective enough and not broad enough. And for a long time, while the doom and gloom forecasting was proceeding as scheduled, articulations of exactly what would make us a better society were lacking too. That has begun to change, as many environmentalists have lately made a point of “visioning” - or coming up with a set of ideas about what that new future will look like. It’s a step forward, sure – but I like Erik’s question because it’s more pointed. It asks, specifically: what’s after growth? What will we do if we can’t grow anymore? How can we live in a prosperous way without squeezing more and more energy and materials through our economies?

Like I say in the answer to Erik, we need many, many different answers to this question. Environmentalism is now becoming cool in public – but I have a hunch that if we talk in bold, specific and concrete ways about the future…Soon it’ll be a reality. So ask and answer away: here, in the super market, at work, at home. Everywhere. Starting now.