Learning about and engaging with the environment involves the integration of many disciplines and combines the classroom experience with work in the field, fusing theory and practice. At The New School the nucleus of this engagement is the Tishman Environment and Design Center. It is a place for students and faculty from all colleges and schools to gather, interact, and explore shared experiences. It facilitates research, curriculum development, internships, and fieldwork opportunities. It stimulates critical thinking and builds relationships through lectures, public programs, workshops, and conferences.
The center is exactly that, a center of creative work and experience that allows students and faculty to explore the curriculum, share and interact on projects, and research and work with the community at large to explore opportunities for collaboration.
Our environment is the larger New York metropolitan area. There are many opportunities to work with towns, cities, states, non-governmental groups, corporations, other universities, and other organizations. Through the Tishman Environment and Design Center, we hope to connect students and faculty to this broader coalition to enhance learning, civic engagement, and research.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Got Agriculture or Environment education/experience? We have opportunities departing in 2012 available. Send us your resume! Or share/reblog this if you know someone who has what we are looking for!
Tiny parks are on a roll in San Francisco: Two dumpsters full of greenery, with four more to come, add a bit of nature to the streets of a paved-over downtown neighborhood. Some scoff, but others are willing to give the “parkmobiles” a go.
Photo: Dave Vetrano takes a coffee break at a parkmobile in San Francisco’s South of Market district. Credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times
(Source: Los Angeles Times)
Mark Bittman of the NYTimes: Profits Before Environment
Bittman nails the Obama administration today in this surprising (to me) piece on the current trend of profits over environment. He connects a lot of dots, but brings it together in the end. (I’d counter by saying that Obama was in a fix - he has had to choose jobs and stimulus over the environment).
I think this section is worth quoting in full:
Sacrificing the environment for profits didn’t stop with Bush, and it doesn’t stop with genetically modified organisms. Take, for example, the Keystone XL pipeline extension. XL is right: the 36-inch-wide pipeline, which will stretch from the Alberta tar sands across the Great Plains to the Gulf Coast, will cost $7 billion and run for 1,711 miles — more than twice as long as the Alaska pipeline. It will cross nearly 2,000 rivers, the huge wetlands ecosystem called the Nebraska Sandhills and the Ogallala aquifer, the country’s biggest underground freshwater supply.
If Keystone is built, we’ll see rising greenhouse gas emissions right away (tar sands production creates three times as many greenhouse gases as does conventional oil), and our increased dependence on fossil fuels will further the likelihood of climate-change disaster. Then there is the disastrous potential of leaks of the non-Wiki-variety. (It’s happened before.)
Proponents say the pipeline will ease gas prices and oil “insecurity.” But domestic drilling has raised, not lowered, oil prices, and as for the insecurity — what we need is to develop wiser ways to use the oil we have.
They say, too, that the pipeline could create 100,000 new jobs. But even the Amalgamated Transit Union and the Transport Workers Union oppose the pipeline, saying, “We need jobs, but not ones based on increasing our reliance on Tar Sands oil.”
Sounds as if union officials have been reading the writer and activist Bill McKibben, who calls the pipeline “a fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent,” and NASA scientist Jim Hansen, who says the oil Keystone will deliver “is essentially game over” for the planet.
Game over? No problem, says the State Department (read the rest below:
Source: NYTimes
A map of the proposed Keystone XL, also called Tar Sands, pipeline.
It could carry crude oil some 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast in Texas.
A friendly and safe new source of oil for the U.S. or an environmental disaster waiting to happen?
centerforinvestigativereporting:
Watch a 15-minute clip of DIRTY BUSINESS, an investigative documentary from the Center for Investigative Reporting that reveals the true social and environmental costs of coal power and explores the murky realities of “clean coal” technology.
O'YES They Did: Rainforest Added to Endangered List
obon:
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) today added the rainforests of Honduras and Indonesia to its list of world heritage sites that are endangered.
O’BON’s take: save our forest. Much applaud to UNESCO.
Photo credit & source: Huffington Post
E.E.A. to adopt base aviation emissions standard
The European Economic Area Joint Committee has adopted an emission base standard on the region’s aviation industry.
The E.E.A. is a group which unites the 27 European Union member states along with three European Free Trade Association states – Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway – into a single market.
(Source: thedailyfeed)
