Too often, the classroom has been a battleground in which science loses out to ideology — either directly, as with fights to equate biblical accounts of creation with research illuminating natural selection, or indirectly, when fears of such fights cause teachers or administrators in a more subtle way to skip or skim over science that has big implications for society.

It’s no surprise that such battles have erupted over global warming of late. Libertarian and environmental groups for years have engaged in state-by-state skirmishes aimed at influencing how climate is taught. Laurie David, one of the forces behind “An Inconvenient Truth,” lashed out at the National Science Teachers Association for declining an offer of tens of thousands of free copies of the film even though it had partnered in the past with big corporations on previous educational material on the environment. The group fired back.

Now, as Leslie Kaufman reports in The Times, there appears to be some overlap emerging between those pressing for equal time for non-evolutionary explanations for life’s diversity and those demanding equal time for skeptics’ arguments about the causes and significance of climate change.

I asked Anthony Leiserowitz at Yale about this, recalling that a recent survey he helped conduct of attitudes on climate, Six Americas, detected a strong tendency of those dismissing human-caused climate change to be evangelical Christians. I also sought a reaction from Randy Olson, the biologist/filmmaker who has made irreverent, captivating documentaries about both the evolution fight and climate wars. You can read their thoughts below.

But first, I also want to draw attention to an effort by the online education team at The Times’ Learning Network to draw out both kids and teachers on the issue of climate in the classroom. I encourage educators and students to weigh in both here and on their Web page about how climate science and policy are handled in school. Here’s what they wrote:

What Have You Been Taught About Global Warming?

Yesterday we posted a lesson on discussing global warming in the classroom. In today’s Times there is an article about how those opposed to teaching evolution are linking it to objections to teaching global warming as well. What and how have you been taught about global warming by your teachers? At home? How do you think schools, teachers and textbooks should address this topic? Why?….

Students: Tell us how your teachers have addressed the issue of global warming. Does it conflict with what you have learned elsewhere? Do you think you have had enough “climate literacy” to make up your mind on this controversial issue? What do you think textbooks should include on the topic of climate change? Why?

Here’s what Anthony Leiserowitz at Yale had to say about today’s news story on a possible creation-climate overlap:

Basically [it's] in line with what we’ve seen in the survey data for many years, but it seems to be intensifying. You’re right – global warming “Dismissives” are far more likely to describe themselves as “born again” or evangelical (55 percent vs. the national average of 27%).

On evolution: In response to the statement, “Human beings, as we know them today, evolved from earlier species of animals” 77 percent of Dismissives disagree (64 percent strongly). The national average is 53 percent agree (35 percent strongly).

On the creation of the world (related to the Big Bang): 62 percent of the Dismissive agree that “Just as the Bible says, the world literally was created in six days.” The national average is 54 percent.

They are no different, however, than the rest of the country in their response to this statement: “Overall, modern science does more harm than good.” Only 19 percent of Dismissives agree with this statement. The national average is 20 percent.

So, while they may be predisposed to link their opposition to evolution, the Big Bang theory of the universe and global warming together, they don’t appear (based on this limited data anyway) to have dismissed all science, at least not yet.

Here’s Randy Olson’s reaction (to both the news article and Dr. Leiserowitz’s findings):

I think you can look at this issue in terms of passive vs. active elements. What Leslie’s article and these polls are about is the more passive/symptomatic side of it — the people who feel the same way about the issue, much of which is just a function of them being skeptical of everything (like the Kennedy assassination, etc.).

But the question is how much of an active element is there at the larger scale — are there organizations working to tie the two issues together…. I just don’t see it as a serious trend at the moment. There just isn’t the demographic cohesion….

What’s your view?

After three years of meetings and study, a broad array of conservation groups, government scientists and other experts on North American wildlife policy have produced a road map for restoring some large free-roaming populations of bison in the North American plains. The hurdles are many, with one of the biggest simply finding ways to acquire broad stretches of land that can accommodate the wandering species. Another is consolidating a maze of local, state and federal policies that treat the animals in different ways. Many Western states, for instance, classify bison as livestock and not wildlife, the report authors say, hampering how they can be managed in the wild. Here’s the full report on restoring bison. (The video above is courtesy of the Wildlife Conservation Society.)

In Canada, there is a proposal to establish a roaming herd in the Rockies between the Banff and Jasper National Parks.

In the United States, elbow room is the biggest challenge. As wild bison herds in Yellowstone National Park have expanded, they have spilled into nearby grazing lands for cattle, with more than 1,000 of the animals slaughtered in 2008 as a result. In a test of a new way to deal with the overflow, Ted Turner is hosting some Yellowstone bison on his ranch, under an agreement that would allow him to keep some of the progeny for his restaurant chains and meat business. Under the plan, according to USA Today:

After five years, Turner will return the 88 bison and 25 percent of their offspring. He will keep 75 percent of the offspring, projected to be 185 animals….

Shifting patterns of land use and human populations in the West could, for the first time, offer up a chance of “rewilding” some of that sprawling region. Obviously the result will never be what was once called wilderness. But great animal migrations and assemblages are a spectacular thing to witness. Can we, or should we, get comfortable with what amounts to an engineered “Eden”?

To meet the Obama administration’s targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, some researchers say, Americans may have to experience a sobering reality: gas at $7 a gallon.

To reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector 14 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the cost of driving would simply have to increase, according to a report released Thursday by researchers at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The research also appears in the March edition of the journal Energy Policy.

The 14 percent target was set in the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget for fiscal 2010.

In their study, the researchers devised several combinations of steps that United States policymakers might take in trying to address the heat-trapping emissions by the nation’s transportation sector, which consumes 70 percent of the oil used in the United States.

Most of their models assumed an economy-wide carbon dioxide tax starting at $30 a ton in 2010 and escalating to $60 a ton in 2030. In some cases researchers also factored in tax credits for electric and hybrid vehicles, taxes on fuel or both.

In the modeling, it turned out that issuing tax credits could backfire, while taxes on fuel proved beneficial.

“Tax credits don’t address how much people use their cars,” said Ross Morrow, one of the report’s authors. “In reverse, they can make people drive more.”

Dr. Morrow, formerly a fellow at the Belfer Center, is a professor of mechanical engineering and economics at Iowa State University

Researchers said that vehicle miles traveled will increase by more than 30 percent between 2010 and 2030 unless policymakers increase fuel taxes.

[From Andy R.: March 4, 7:58 a.m. | Update ] Rush Limbaugh weighed in on this post yesterday, as some may have surmised given the spike in comments, and the tenor of many. Some important points were raised by his audience, including a listener calling from his car in Nebraska to say how a gas tax would unfairly burden workers in sprawling states with no public transportation options. I’ll be posting more from the research team on some of this.

Nearly every person on the planet lives in a hazard zone of some sort, with the possibility of a severe storm or shaking ground or bomb or some other disturbance disrupting daily life for many days, if not weeks. Having the capacity, as a household and community, to respond and get by without help for a while is vital. A lot of resilience is afforded through a little planning and investment.

If I’d followed my colleague Tom Zeller’s advice and invested in a wood-stove-style insert for my fireplace — as I’ve muttered about for years — my family wouldn’t have had to sleep in a 45-degree house for four days in the wake of the epic snowstorm in the Northeast last week. (Although we still would have had to melt snow on our propane stove to flush the toilets; watch the video below for more survival tips from the snow zone.)

Preparing for the inconvenience of no heat or tap water for a few days — which can count as a disaster in prosperous countries — is a far cry from preparing for a potent hurricane or devastating inevitable seismic hit. But the benefits of some training and a little equipment are clear at every scale. The team of quake rescue volunteers I wrote about last week in the Bagcilar district of quake-threatened Istanbul has already helped respond to a terrorist bombing, a severe flood and a fire. As the lead organizer there explained to me, citing China’s earthquake as an example:

China has the biggest civil defense capability in the world, but it still took three or four days to reach the collapsed towns. If there is the big one here [or anywhere], you are all alone to cope with whatever you have, at least for the first 72 hours.

Below you can read more useful background on how to prepare for disaster, sent by Ilan Kelman, a senior research fellow at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo. (Another focus of Dr. Kelman’s is how disasters, from quakes to climate disruption, foster –or don’t –cooperation among nations, a topic I touched on as United States Navy ships steamed toward the Haiti quake zone.) Read more…

I’m dealing with a disaster of microscopic dimensions, being among the 200,000 households in the Northeast still lacking electricity, heat and flushing toilets three days after an astonishing dump of snow.

But I was able to get online long enough to reflect on the message sent to the Pacific Northwest from the great earthquake in the southern hemisphere.

That message is a clear “get ready.”

[UPDATE: Here's a video explaining how subduction faults generate such potent earthquakes and tsunamis, created by Steven Ward, a geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz:]

The Pacific “ring of fire” doesn’t stop at the equator. While my print story and post on quake threats last week focused on the seismic peril facing millions of poor people living in fast-growing cities in quake zones, there are plenty of prosperous places that have not adequately responded to their exposure to enormous, and inevitable, earthquake risk. Read more…

Today was a snow day for my younger son (video evidence below) and tens of thousands of other kids in the Northeast — all part of the remarkably snowy winter experience in much of the United States, Europe and a variety of other places in the Northern hemisphere, even as parts of Greenland have been balmy and rainy (one reason is that the Arctic Oscillation is once again in one of its extreme negative phases).

I’m not going to write about this in the context of global warming. Folks on all sides of the climate policy debate have already done this, while some knowledgeable commentators, most notably Jeff Masters at Wunderground’s Wunderblog, have clarified how this weather relates to climate.

I’m proposing that we simply pause to honor winter, both for the beauty and hassles, and sometimes hazards, that it poses. After all, if you pay too much attention to snow in the context of climate change, you can threaten readers with a feeling of climate whiplash. A case in point is provided by some of the voices in a pair of articles from Britain’s Independent, one from earlier this year, as the British isles had their snowiest stretch, and one from a decade ago, when winter was so balmy some scientists were proclaiming the imminent end to snow: Read more…

I have an article running in The Times on efforts to move away from what the psychologist Paul Slovic calls “gut” thinking, which tends to make people discount long-term threats even if science has delineated them with crystal clarity. The focus is great earthquakes that, without any doubt, will someday hammer great cities. The case study is Istanbul, but it could just as easily be Lima or Katmandu or Karachi or a host of other fast-growing urban centers in developing countries.

Istanbul is best known these days as a thriving commercial hub and tourist spot, but its record of devastating quakes is etched in centuries of artwork, as seen in the slide show below, with the images drawn from the remarkable collection of earthquake art assembled by Jan Kozak in Prague.

The city’s residents, prompted by a close call in 1999 and energized by the calamity in Haiti, are starting to do something rare — cut the risk of big losses with actions taken before the ground heaves. The story describes how the work, while still deemed inadequate by quake specialists, is coming from both the top down and bottom up, ranging from big investments of money by the World Bank to big investments of sweat and time by volunteers training to dig neighbors out of wreckage.

At the top of this post you can click on a short video I shot of action around Istanbul to cut risks before the quake hits.

The stark reality is that, while earthquakes often capture our attention case by case, we have entered an age where population density and persistent poverty are putting enormous numbers of people in harm’s way. Read more…

There are signs that climate research (and the efforts to communicate it) could emerge bruised but intact, and better off in the long run, in the wake of all the various “Xxxxx-gates” propounded in the climate debate over the last three months. They are preliminary signs, mind you, but they seem significant.

[March 3 | Update: Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists put it this way in a new Times article on trust in climate research: “We need to acknowledge the errors and help turn attention from what’s happening in the blogosphere to what’s happening in the atmosphere.”]

The latest is a proposal to the World Meteorological Organization from Britain’s climate and weather agency, the Met Office, to undertake a new and fully transparent compilation of terrestrial temperature records. You can read the full text here.

And while the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change initially reacted defensively to assaults over some flaws in its influential 2007 reports, it’s clear that some top authors of the next round of reports, especially Chris Field of Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution, see the need for substantial changes in how the assessments are done and the reports written. (Ralph J. Cicerone, the atmospheric scientist who is president of the National Academies, concurred in a recent Science editorial. Bob Watson, the former chairman of the climate panel, has weighed in, as well.)

One early test of Dr. Field’s — and the panel’s — resolve to be more transparent and inclusive is a special panel report on managing the risks from climate extremes being initiated next month. Dr. Field, as a leader of the panel’s bureau on climate adaptation and impacts, was involved in overseeing the creation of that author team.

Here’s the test. Roger A. Pielke Jr., a researcher at the University of Colorado with a long publication record on climate and disaster trends was one of the 31 experts nominated by the United States to be an author of that study, but was not among the 13 chosen. While he has been an aggressive critic of the panel’s practices on his blog, and a frequent target of energy and climate campaigners, Dr. Pielke’s research record in this particular field stands on its own.

There are plenty of potential explanations, of course. Report teams are supposed to reflect geographic diversity, for instance. But Dr. Pielke’s publication record appears to be far more extensive than that of any of the other American researchers chosen to serve on the writing team. (A list of the nominees, sent to me by the State Department, can be found at the bottom of this post; I did some Google Scholar sifting and have yet to find anyone with anywhere near as many refereed papers as Dr. Pielke has on the interface between climate and disasters.) Read more…

It’s time to get back to basics (as in the North Carolina State University chemistry class from the 1920’s pictured above).

Once in a while I try to “review the bidding,” as my former editor Cornelia Dean liked to say when some big breaking story was threatening to overwhelm the newsroom. In this case, it’s not breaking news but a flood of allegations and attacks on 100 years of research pointing to a growing human influence on the earth’s climate. The assaults have been fueled by a batch of liberated/hacked/stolen climate files that, at their root, have yet to be shown to indicate much beyond ill-advised language and strong passions among some climate scientists and by several missteps after two decades of grueling work by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

I’m not saying there’s direct cause and effect, but it’s almost as if the tidal wave of dire pronouncements about the imminent unraveling of the earth’s climate and ecosystems several years ago hit a shore and rebounded in a way that now threatens to inundate the source. More likely, we’re seeing the explosive evolution of the blogosphere as a disruptive force, linked up the chain to talk radio and pundits and creating an echo chamber in which noise can swamp information.

As one metric, simply consider that Watts Up With That, arguably the most popular blog tracked by people rejecting the dominant scientific view of global warming, did not exist when the climate panel’s assessments were rolled out in 2007 yet now, according to its creator, Anthony Watts, has topped 36 million page views.*

Not surprisingly, the public’s reaction to all the turbulence, as reflected in heaps of surveys here and in Europe, has been to tune out altogether.

This all means it’s time to return to the basics, as I did at Dot Earth two years ago in a post called “A Starting Point for Productive Climate Discourse.”

This time, let’s start with Michael Crichton, whose name has been invoked quite often in the comment strings here and elsewhere by those challenging the science pointing to disruptive human-driven climate change. Plenty of elements of his past arguments questioning scientific orthodoxy deserve a thorough airing. But one thing that people forget about Crichton is that he didn’t disagree with the basic science on greenhouse-forced climate change, only with the idea that the sensitivity of the climate system was sufficiently established to justify an urgent response, particularly given other pressing problems, particularly poverty. Read more…

An ad hoc group within the International Whaling Commission has offered a proposal that would sanction some commercial whaling for the first time in decades while reducing the amount of whaling taking place through what amount to end runs around a longstanding whaling moratorium — like Iceland’s expanding hunt of fin whales (video above) and Japan’s  “research” whale hunts in the ocean near Antarctica.

The proposal is to be debated by a small working group of whaling nations in St. Pete Beach, Fla., from March 2 to 4. The United States representative to the commission, interviewed in The Washington Post, withheld judgment.

But a variety of environmental groups strongly criticized the proposal. Patrick Ramage, the director of the whale program for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, put it this way:

This is a proposal for the long-term conservation of whaling, not whales…. It’s a great deal for countries that want to go whaling. What’s not to like? It puts science on hold, the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary on ice, and no restrictions whatsoever on the international trade in whale meat. And after 10 years, all bets are off — no more moratorium and much more whaling.

We don’t need new observer schemes for commercial whaling, we need to make it obsolete. Rather than crafting elaborate proposals designed to please the last three countries killing whales for commercial purposes, the I.W.C. should first require them to respect the moratorium, exit the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary and end commercial whaling conducted under the guise of science.

The basic concept in the proposal echoes a Dot Earth post from last year examining this question: “Could Ending a Ban on Whaling Aid Whales?“

Kashmira Kakati

Few wild animals are more charismatic than tigers and other big cats. And few are more threatened by habitat loss, poaching and other problems.

So a new set of photos, made by automated cameras in a rain forest in northeast India are “an encouraging sign,” according to group of conservation organizations aiming to protect biodiversity hotspots. The photos show that one forest area is home to seven cat species  — clouded leopards, marbled cats and golden cats, all of which are rare, and tigers, leopards, leopard cats and jungle cats, which are more numerous.

The animals, along with wild dogs, bears, mongoose and other creatures, were photographed in the Jeypore-Dehing forests in Assam, a state in northeast India. The photos were made with camera traps — automated cameras equipped with infrared triggers.

The work, led by Kashmira Kakati, a wildlife biologist, and financed by the Government of Assam and a group of conservation organizations including the Wildlife Conservation Society, suggest that the forest is home to a range of valuable species, scientists familiar with the work said in announcing the findings.

But they said the region is threatened by poaching, oil and gas drilling and unsustainable development, including a hydroelectric project.

Corals around the world, already threatened by pollution, destructive fishing practices and other problems, are also widely regarded as among the ecosystems likely to be first — and most — threatened with destruction as earth’s climate warms.

Todd LaJeunesse Todd LaJeunesse collected a tiny fragment from a cluster of Sarcophyton soft corals in the western Indian Ocean, off the coast of Zanzibar.

But there is reason to hope, researchers are reporting. The scientists, from Penn State University and elsewhere, have produced new evidence that some algae that live in partnership with corals are resilient to higher ocean temperatures. One species, Symbiodinium trenchi, is particularly abundant – “a generalist organism,” the researchers call it, able to live with a variety of coral hosts.

Corals and algae live together in what scientists call a symbiotic relationship. Coral polyps shelter the algae and as the tiny plants photosynthesize they produce sugars the corals rely on for food. When water warms, though, reefs’ brown or green algae partners die, leaving the reefs white. These so-called bleaching events have become more common as ocean waters warm.
Read more…

Andrew A. Lacis, the NASA climatologist whose 2005 critique of the United Nations climate panel was embraced by bloggers seeking to cast doubt on human-driven climate change, has sent in two more commentaries on the state of climate science.

I’m posting them sequentially here. [Here's part 2.] I’m offline for the most part through the rest of the week, so this is all for now on this issue. Here’s the first take from Dr. Lacis, providing his defense of the role of carbon dioxide in warming:

Human-induced warming of the climate system is established fact.

How do we know this to be true? What does it take to get something established as fact? I will try to explain this quandary here the same way that I explain it to myself.

We have come to understand that nothing happens in this world except as allowed by the laws of physics. What this means is that for every physical action there is going to be a well-defined cause, and a well-defined effect. Quantum mechanical weirdness that operates at atomic scale does not invalidate this physical description of the macroscopic range that is of interest.

Human experience has demonstrated that it is through measurement and physics that we understand the world that we live in. The term “physics” includes also the mathematical description of these laws which permits mathematical models to be constructed to conduct virtual experiments of real-world situations.

In this way, by utilizing global-mean decadal-average quantities, we have come to understand that water vapor accounts for 50 percent of the (33 K, 60 deg F) greenhouse effect. Longwave absorption by clouds contributes 25 percent, and CO2 accounts for 20 percent. The remaining 5 percent of the greenhouse effect is split between methane, N2O, CFCs, ozone, and aerosols. Significantly, CO2 and the minor GHGs do not condense or precipitate at current atmospheric temperatures. This provides a stable reference temperature structure for the fast feedback processes to operate and maintain the amounts of atmospheric water vapor and clouds at their quasi-equilibrium concentrations. Hence the strength of the terrestrial greenhouse is sustained and effectively controlled by the atmospheric temperature floor that is provided by CO2 and the other non-condensing greenhouse gases. (More detail is contained in my Greenhouse Tutorial which is a related supporting commentary.)

The bottom line is that CO2 is absolutely, positively, and without question, the single most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. It acts very much like a control knob that determines the overall strength of the Earth’s greenhouse effect. Failure to control atmospheric CO2 is a bad way to run a business, and a surefire ticket to climatic disaster.

My earlier criticism had been that the IPCC AR4 report was equivocating in not stating clearly and forcefully enough that human-induced warming of the climate system is established fact, and not something to be labeled as “very likely” at the 90 percent probability level. It would seem that the veracity of the human-induced warming would hinge on establishing the pedigree of the observed increase in atmospheric CO2. On this point, the IPCC report is crystal clear. Pages 137-140 of IPCC AR4 describe high-precision in situ measurements of atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa, documenting the steady increase in CO2 along with its characteristic seasonal fluctuation. These measurements, supplemented by analyses of air bubbles trapped in ice core samples, show unequivocally that atmospheric CO2 has increased from a pre-industrial level of 277 ppm in 1750 to present day concentrations that are approaching 390 ppm.

The IPCC report also shows the corresponding decrease in atmospheric oxygen, thus providing irrefutable verification that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is linked directly to fossil fuel oxidation. In Chapter 7, the IPCC report states it clearly: “the increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases during the industrial era are caused by human activities”. Undoubtedly, volcanic eruptions have contributed some atmospheric CO2, but this can only be miniscule as neither the 1991 Pinatubo eruption (largest of the century), nor the 1986 Lake Nyos CO2 eruption that killed thousands, so much as registered a blip in the Mauna Loa CO2 record.

In view of all this, the IPCC AR4 Chapter 9 Executive Summary states that: “It is likely (66 percent probability) that there has been a substantial anthropogenic contribution to surface temperature increases in every continent except Antarctica since the middle of the 20th century.” How can this be considered anything other than inaccurate and misleading?

To understand climate change, it is necessary to know the radiative forcings that drive the climate system away from its reference equilibrium state. These radiative forcings have been analyzed and evaluated by Hansen et al. (2005, 2007). They include changes in solar irradiance, greenhouse gases, tropospheric aerosols, and volcanic aerosols. Of these forcings, the only non-human-induced forcing that produces warming of the surface temperature is the estimated long-term increase by 0.3 W/m2 of solar irradiance since 1750. Volcanic eruptions are episodic, and can produce strong but temporary cooling. All of the other forcings are directly tied to human activity. When it comes to radiative forcing of global climate change, it is abundantly clear that whether we like it or not, or whether we care to admit it, it is humans who are driving the bus.

Here’s part 2.

Here’s the second (and final) installment from Andrew A. Lacis of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies providing more detail on his view of the evidence showing a human warming influence on the climate. [Part one is here.] This post builds on his earlier efforts here to challenge arguments of skeptics of human-driven warming. (I’ve added a link or two to Web sites explaining some of the acronyms.)

Greenhouse Tutorial

In the context of global climate, absorbed solar radiation (about 240 W/m2, with 30 percent of the incident radiation being reflected back to space) is the energy source that keeps the Earth’s surface warm. The Planck radiation law determines that a temperature of 255 K (about 0° F) is needed to have energy balance with the absorbed solar radiation. If the Sun were suddenly turned on, the Earth would begin warming, and would keep warming until it reached a 255 K temperature, at which point it would be radiating 240 W/m2 of thermal energy out to space, in equilibrium with the solar energy input.

The global-mean surface temperature of the Earth is observed to be 288 K (60° F). Why is this so much warmer than the 255 K effective temperature of the thermal radiation emitted to space? The reason is that the Earth has an atmosphere that contains gases that absorb thermal radiation. These gases are distributed throughout the atmosphere, and they also must maintain energy balance on a local scale, meaning that the same amount of radiation absorbed (e.g., from the ground), must be re-emitted (in both upward and downward directions) so as to maintain constant temperature. This radiative process of localized absorption and emission of thermal radiation establishes a temperature gradient within the atmosphere, and in so doing, results in heating the ground surface to a higher temperature than would be the case with no atmosphere. This is the greenhouse effect, and it keeps the surface temperature of the Earth 33 K (60° F) warmer than it would otherwise be for the same 240 W/m2 of solar heating. Read more…

Ecoartspace, an organization that focuses on addressing environmental issues through the visual arts (the image below, from a 2009 exhibition, is by Nils-Udo), got in touch with me recently about a planned spring exhibition of small works on paper devoted to a simple question: What matters most?

I brainstormed a bit with Amy Lipton, one of the founders of the nonprofit group, and proposed that the effort get a kick-start by posing that question to an array of people who are involved in examining the human journey — including Dot Earth readers, of course. (This blog has periodically explored the role of the arts in fostering public engagement on the human relationship with the home planet). The responses could provide inspiration or provocation to the artists in their work.

I sent the question to a wide variety of people, from Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to the author Terry Tempest Williams. The initial batch of answers is posted below. What’s your answer?

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon:

What matters most has not changed over time: the quest for dignity, justice, and peace, the essential yearnings for hope and human compassion, the desire to build a better life for our children. These aspirations are at the heart of the United Nations work. What has changed is our ability to provide a decent life for this and future generations on a planet that is under increasing, severe strain. How will we feed, shelter, and educate three billion more people by 2050 in an era of accelerating climate change, resource scarcity and environmental degradation? We need to redefine our relationship to the planet, and in so doing, build a more equitable society for all.

Sylvia Earle, ocean explorer and defender:

Exploring and protecting the ocean tops my list. All life requires water, and most of Earth’s water -– and most living things –- are in the sea. What we have put there in just half a century — hundreds of millions of tons of noxious wastes — and what we have taken out –- hundreds of millions of tons of wild creatures –- have changed the nature of the systems that drive climate and weather, generate most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, regulate temperature, and otherwise are the foundation of our life support. No blue, no green; no ocean, no life. If we fail to take care of the ocean, nothing else matters.

Alec Loorz, youth climate campaigner:

Climate change is the most urgent issue of our time. And it will affect the youth more than anyone else. We, as youth are going to have to grow up to face the consequences of what the world does, or fails to do now. So now is the time for the youngest generation to stand up and take back our future. What is needed is a revolution. A real revolution, more than just changing light bulbs and buying a hybrid. We, as youth need to let the ruling generation know that “iMatter.” And I, along with my whole generation can create a new way of living that values our future just as much as any short term interests. We have the power to make this a reality.

Read more…