Tag Archives: Energy

Learning from Butterflies

By climate change, Crisis narratives, energy, , , , , ,

Learning from Butterflies: Understanding and Predicting Butterfly Responses to a Warming Climate

In this engaging talk, professor Leslie Ries (Department of Biology, Georgetown University) will discuss how the life and migration patterns of monarch butterflies reveal a complex response to our warming world. Using research from professional biologists but also measurements and observations from citizen scientists, professor Ries discusses new uses for the large amounts of data we can gather about insects and other animals.

March 29, 2017,  at 1 pm in Battelle-Tompkins 228.

About our speaker

Leslie Ries is the Project Director of the North American Butterfly Monitoring Network. Leslie’s background is in butterfly ecology and her interests are in using butterfly data to understand how ecological communities respond to climate and land-use change. Ries is an ecologist who focuses on patterns at both medium and large scales. She has worked both in the fields of landscape ecology and biogeography with her focus mainly on butterflies. Over the last 10 years, she has shifted from a field approach to using large databases, mostly originating from citizen science monitoring networks. Citizen science greatly expands the scale at which we can collect data and thus explore problems and solutions that are increasingly global in nature.
Ries focuses on several facets of citizen-science, including the use of these data to answer large-scale ecological questions, especially those related to climate and land cover; developing statistical tools to extract the most robust information from the data; designing systems to support data management, visualization, and sharing; and developing “knowledge” databases that compile life history and other trait data to enrich multi-species analyses. In addition to carrying out and enabling large-scale ecological research, Ries has also been working on methods to integrate big-data approaches into undergraduate education, and she is also increasingly interested in informal education opportunities as well. She is currently affiliated with Georgetown University where she continues work on the physiological limits to growth imposed by extreme temperatures. Combining lab and field research with large-scale distribution data could provide a powerful approach to exploring the impacts of changing land cover and climate at regional, continental and global scales. To view more of her work and research  here.

Energy Policy Today

By energy humanities, , ,

Energy Policy Today: The Environment, the Economy, and Contemporary Politics

April 12, 2017 at 1pm Battelle-Tompkins 228

 

 

 

Many companies and sectors are reevaluating their carbon footprint. They are seeking alternate ways that incorporate the use of sustainable energy. With growing populations, the declining access to other natural resources and the repercussions of having exhausted them, the future of energy has become a highly discussed and challenging topic.

 

 

About Our Speaker:

 

Claire Brunel is an assistant professor at American University. She is particularly interested in
providing empirical evidence of the links between environmental policies and international competitiveness. For example, she asks whether policies that encouraged the use and the development of renewable energies in the OECD led to an increase in domestic innovation and manufacturing, or rather to a rise in the licensing and importing of foreign technologies. Other works examine the role of the offshoring of polluting industries in emissions reductions of EU and US manufacturing and how to measure the stringency of environmental policies.

 

 

 

 

Claire Brunel not only sees the intersection of environmental economics and international trade, she continues to seek new information that points to it. Brunel recently collaborated with Georgetown Professor Arik Levinson on a project that measured the stringency of environmental regulations. The project examined whether regulations in the U.S. contributed to policies regarding investment, labor demand and international trade. Her current work pertains to the progress and study of solar panel subsidies, the co-benefits of environmental regulations in the U.S. and trade diversification patterns of developing countries.

 

The Energy of Objects: Loving and Loathing Our Material Things

By American University, energy, Investigations, ,

In this engaging and creative discussion, writer and cultural critic Arielle Bernstein explores the emotional power of objects, from everyday things to precious mementos and historical documents.

March 1, 2017, 1 pm at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

 

Arielle Bernstein learned the value of preserving material things from her Cuban-Jewish mother, who grew up under Fidel Castro, and whose own parents had immigrated from to Havana from Poland to escape the Holocaust. Clutter was seen as a source of warmth and comfort, from the cans of Café Bustelo that her mother would save for storage growing up, to the useful gifts of socks, toothbrushes, and jars of peanut butter, that her parents still bring her when they come to visit. Yet the messages she received from mainstream American culture taught her a different narrative, one in which clutter was seen as a source of shame, rather than joy. From advertisements that tell consumers they’ll be happier abandoning their old shoes, handbags, and electronics for the latest trend, to salacious shows like Hoarders that emphasize the way that unchecked keeping can manifest as mental illness, to spring cleaning articles in magazines that encourage readers to purge many of the same items they sold them over Christmas, American culture is consumed by both the allure and danger of material possessions.

In her book-in-progress CHASING EMPTY-AN AMERICAN HISTORY OF LOVING AND LOATHING OUR MATERIAL THINGS, Bernstein argues that today’s minimalist trend has been co-opted into just the latest consumer trend, one that sells products meant to replace old things with new ones, rather than simply scale back. While Marie Kondo and many other online minimalist gurus earnestly urge consumers to change their attitude towards material things, the advent of new minimalist products, from tiny houses, to minimalist shoes, to minimalist toothbrushes, has transformed minimalism into yet another consumable product.

This talk will offer a rich and compassionate look at the challenges of deciding which things to keep and which things to discard, and how the way in which minimalism has been co-opted by consumer culture ends up obscuring the power of preserving and valuing the things we choose to keep.

About our speaker

Arielle Bernstein is a writer, professor, and cultural critic who lives in Washington, DC and has been teaching in AU’s Writing Studies Program since 2008. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic , Slate Magazine, Salon, and The Rumpus, among other publications. She is represented by Christopher Rhodes at The Stuart Agency.

You can find her personal narratives and book, film reviews up at The Rumpus and  The Millions.

Additionally, her fiction has been featured in PANK 10, Literary Orphans,  The Puritan, The Rattling Wall Issue 4, Connotation Press and many other journals.

 

Follow her on Twitter: @NotoriousREL

 

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Profane Energies / Sacred Narratives

By anthropocene, climate change, energy, energy humanities, environment, , , ,

How does religious thought inform and affect environmentalist activism? Join us for a lecture by Evan Berry (Department of Philosophy and Religion, American University), on the role of faith traditions in framing debates about climate change.

Profane Energies/Sacred Narratives

                 On Religion and Environmentalism

Wednesday February 15, 2017,  1 pm at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

In the run up to COP21, the international convening that produced the Paris Agreement on climate change, religious leaders and indigenous communities were important contributors in framing a global moral call to action. Yet hardly one year later, climate politics again seem intractable; many religious groups, especially here in the United States, remain skeptical about climate science. In this talk, professor Berry draws from his work on  the relationship between nature and religious thought in order to elucidate recent cultural and political debates.

 

About our speaker

Evan Berry is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at American University and Co-Director of the Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs master’s program. His research examines the intersections among religion, globalization, and climate change, and seeks to advance knowledge about the role of religious actors in contemporary environmental controversy. Beginning with the premise that religion and religious ideas serve to locate human beings in the natural order, his scholarship concentrates on the cultural particularities of environmental ethics—the ways that different religious perspectives generate divergent ecological orientations. Pursuing these questions through both ethnographic research and philosophical reflection, his current work includes a study of religious civil society groups actively engaged with the challenge of climate change. His book, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism, was recently published by the University of California Press.

 

 

 

 

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Screen Shot 2016-06-26 at 10.03.33 AMEvan Berry’s recent book, Devoted to Nature, explores the religious underpinnings of American environmentalism, tracing the theological character of American environmental thought from its Romantic foundations to contemporary nature spirituality. During the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, religious sources were central to the formation of the American environmental imagination, shaping ideas about the natural world, establishing practices of engagement with environments and landscapes, and generating new modes of social and political interaction. Building on the work of seminal environmental historians who acknowledge the environmental movement’s religious roots, Evan Berry offers a potent theoretical corrective to the narrative that explained the presence of religious elements in the movement well into the twentieth century. In particular, Berry argues that an explicitly Christian understanding of salvation underlies the movement’s orientation toward the natural world. Theologically derived concepts of salvation, redemption, and spiritual progress have not only provided the basic context for Americans’ passion for nature but have also established the horizons of possibility within the national environmental imagination.

 

 

Follow Evan Berry:   @ecothought