Tag Archives: Public Intellectuals
The Ecomodernists: A new way of thinking about climate change and human progress
Making progress on climate change and energy in an age of extremes.
The Ecomodernists: Journalists reimagining a sustainable future
Sept. 3, 2017 — In The Planet Remade (2015), journalist Oliver Morton imagined a future scenario where the Earth’s climate has been changed by geoengineering. A collective of countries with little power in world affairs secretly agrees to a low-cost plan to cool the planet. With funding from a billionaire, the collective flies several planes Continue Reading »
Models of knowledge-based journalism: Brokering knowledge, dialogue, and policy ideas
April 1, 2017— In 2013’s Informing the News, the eminent journalism scholar Thomas Patterson comprehensively reviewed the evidence in support of the well-worn criticisms of our contemporary news system. Journalists too often: give equal weight to accurate representations and faulty facts and flawed opinions, focus on conflict and strategy over substance, and favor personalities, dramatic Continue Reading »
MIT rejects fossil fuel divestment but is still a leader on climate change
October 23, 2015 —The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced this week a new climate change action plan that rejects calls from activists to divest its endowment from the fossil fuel industry. The best way for the university to tackle climate change, argued MIT senior leaders, is through active engagement of “fossil fuel giants that have mastered Continue Reading »
A call for greater diversity of thought in Environmental Studies courses
May 15, 2015 —Even before Jacqueline Ho enrolled in her first environmental studies course at college, her thinking about climate change had been shaped during her years growing up in Singapore reading books by the environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben. At college, ideas first planted by McKibben were reinforced in courses where she read classics Continue Reading »
Ecomodernists spark rhetorical heat as views clash over nature, technology, and progress
May 11, 2015 —For the first time in earth’s long history, human activities threaten not just local ecosystems but the global environment through climate change, ocean acidification, and other urgent problems. We have so much impact on the planet today that some scientists argue that we have crossed into a new geological period — the Anthropocene, Continue Reading »