Getting to Green

Should first-year students be assigned shared readings about adaptation to climate change? And if they were, what would that mean for curriculum?

As a signatory to the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment, Greenback recently filed an update to its public Climate Action Plan. But, title aside, the plan isn't just about climate, nor is the update.

Will extreme weather, fueled in large part by climate change, change politics? Will it change our society?

Katharine Hayhoe is an associate professor of geoscience at Texas Tech, a climate researcher who has suggested the northeastern USA prepare for hotter summers and shorter winters, and the deeply Christian wife of an evangelical preacher. She was invited by Newt Gingrich's co-author to contribute the opening chapter on climate change to an upcoming book on environmental entrepreneurship. Of course, that was before Newt decided to run for the presidency, felt the need to atone for his moment on the couch with Nancy Pelosi, determined that "conservatism" referred to conserving destructive momentum rather than conserving the earth, and spiked Hayhoe's chapter which explained why environmental entrepreneurs were any more valuable than the inventor of the next pet rock or chia head.

Nope, no thoughts about mathematics. Well, no thoughts that are explicitly about mathematics although -- where sustainability is concerned -- math is always implicitly part of the conversation.

This morning, as I prepared to walk from my car to my office, I noticed that I'd parked beside a Honda Civic with a label on its left rear side window. The label bore the word "econ" and a greenish symbol that reminded me of the EPA's official seal. When I looked at it closer, though, there was no explicit EPA tie-in, just the suggestion of one.

Two discussions of recent events, by their extreme difference in tone, have me wondering.

A correspondent pointed my attention to Dylan Walsh's NY Times green blog entry from yesterday.