Fifty five percent of humanity lives in cities. By 2050, that number will have gone up to to 70 percent. Our future is urban, yet urbanization in it’s current form is threatening the future of humanity and the natural world. Terra Verde host and Earth Island Journal editor, Maureen Nandini Mitra, and Alison Sant, cofounder of the Studio for Urban Projects and author of the book, From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities, discuss this conundrum and the many pathways towards reinventing our cities to be regenerative and equitable.
While cities are cluing in to the power of collaboration to fight climate change, much of the transformative action seen today is originating at the community and grassroots level. How can all segments of society work together towards this common goal—since climate change should matter to all of us? This week, we’re joined by Alison Sant, Co-Founder of Studio for Urban Projects and author of From the Ground Up, to talk about examples on the ground and the unique ways in which cities are working to mitigate and adapt to climate change while creating equitable and livable communities. Like she says, “The best examples of this work bring together the energy of community activists, the organization of advocacy groups, the power of city government, and the reach of federal environmental policy.”
Language is constantly shifting to capture changing popular thought. How is our growing understanding of global climate change – as a scientific, political and cultural phenomenon – reflected in our everyday language? The Studio for Urban Projects believes that the way we think about nature is critical to how we perceive our role within the environment and address problems – such as the imminent crisis of global warming.
The current popular focus on climate change is projected as a new and contemporary event when in fact the seeds of this investigation have been laid in scientific dialog since the 19th century. Though the “natural greenhouse effect” was first described by physicist John Tyndall in 1859 and the relation between CO2 levels and earth’s temperature in 1896 by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, it is only in recent years that popular culture has caught up with scientific discourse and embraced climate change as an all too real phenomenon. Today the daily weather forecast takes on a foreboding quality as we begin to understand how our everyday actions impact global climate in potentially irreversible ways.
Strange Weather graphs the usage patterns of terms that characterize the dialog around climate change from Internet news sources. These terms, including “carbon footprint,” “greenhouse gasses,” and “polar ice cap,” are juxtaposed with the mundane daily audio stream of New York City weather information broadcast by the National Weather Service. Strange Weather aims to provoke us to think about how our perception of weather must change from an objective measure of natural phenomena to something that complexly and darkly also mirrors ourselves.
Strange Weather grows out of a previous project entitled In Popular Terms: The Evolving Language of Ecology.
In Popular Terms is a visualization that allows the participant to choose from a set of terms such as “sustainable” and to search the Internet for the presence of that term in the context of its contemporary usage. The user can then compare the results against an annotated bibliography that reveals the way these terms have changed over time. In Popular Terms was conceived for the Berkeley Art Museum’s on-line exhibitionRIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA curated by Richard Rinehart. Its parameters are inspired by artist Valéry Grancher’s 24h00 (1999) in the BAM collection. In Popular Terms was made in collaboration with artists Gilbert Guerrero, Christian Nold, and Megan and Rick Prelinger.