Tag: environment

Peat Hub Ireland Report including Peatlands 2050 scenarios

Mechanical Dolphin

“What I liked most about the workshop was getting to experience a framework for discourse between different stakeholders where everyone was approaching challenging ideas with an amount of vulnerability and openness. Things like the icebreaker question and being pushed outside of our cognitive comfort zones led to a kind of shared sense of uncertainty and unease that made it much easier for conversation and creativity to happen.”

Words from a participant at the scenarios workshop I led as part of the Peat Hub Ireland initiative, funded by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency and delivered by UCD colleagues under the leadership of Florence Renou-Wilson, including David Wilson, Kate Flood, and Elena Aitova.

You can see the full report, including an appendix on the scenarios, at the EPA website. Thanks to all the colleagues and to the host of our scenario session at Tyrrellspass, County Westmeath – it’s a rare delight to run a scenario workshop with a ninety minute bog walk in the middle of it…

Right Here, Right Now Global Youth Climate Summit

Mechanical Dolphin

I’m pleased to be delivering two sessions as part of the University of Oxford’s contribution to the Right Here Right Now Global Youth Climate Summit, a 24-hour virtual event presented by UN Human Rights and the Saïd Business School.

The online gathering brings together students and educators from across the world to share ideas about embedding climate action at the heart of education systems.

Find out more at the Saïd Business School website or register for the 24-hour livestream here.

'Dreaming Spires', by Flickr User JJBullock - Copyright JJ Bullock 2010
‘Dreaming Spires’, by Flickr User JJBullock – Copyright JJ Bullock 2010

“The True Source of Hope Is That We Never Know”: Scripturient x Design by Fire, with Brett Milligan

Mechanical Dolphin

The latest edition of Scripturient, my quarterly column for Information Professional magazine, is out now and can be downloaded here.

In it, I interview UC Davis’s Brett Milligan, who together with Emily Schlickman is the author of Design by Fire, a new book exploring our relationship to wildfires.

A transcript from the interview underpinning my column can be read below.

Matt: What was your first ever encounter with fire in nature?

Brett: It would have been the hearth at home, or campfires; my dad took me, sometimes the whole family, camping a lot as a kid and would be very clear about taking care to extinguish it properly. I wasn’t exposed to wildfires until my time in California, decades later, and my first close-up experience with a large wildfire, the smoke, the immediacy of it, came with the LNU (Sonoma-Lake-Napa Unit) complex fires a few years back.

By Dripwoods – Taken of the LNU Hennessey Fire, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93869076
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Climate action and the vantage point of imagined futures: a scenario-based conversation

Mechanical Dolphin

npj Climate Action has today published a new article, “Climate action and the vantage point of imagined futures: a scenario-based conversation“, co-written by Marie Mahon, Malka Older, David Robertson, and myself.

Drawing on the example of the IMAJINE project, the peer-reviewed piece explores how scenarios can provide the basis for discussion across disciplines and offer fresh ways to nourish our thinking about climate action.

It covers topics including: the nature of climate change and our understanding of it in different scenarios; questions of risk and responsibility now and in times to come; the use of scenarios to identify current blind spots and stimulate creative thinking; and the possibility that scenarios might offer fresh perspectives which allow us to reevaluate our notions of the sustainable “good life” and identify vulnerabilities which are overlooked in the present day.

Read the whole piece at npj Climate Action.

Human-Land Podcast: Spatial Justice and Realms of Citizenship

Mechanical Dolphin

I joined the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences’ Human-Land podcast to talk about social justice and foresight in spatial planning, and their links to environmental psychology.

As environmental psychologists explore the relationship between human beings and their environments – including how humans shape those environments and are shaped by them in turn – foresight work allows us to explore how that relationship might change in times to come, and how our ideas of what is fair or just in terms of access to different environments might also evolve.

Host Hannah Arnett and I spoke about the IMAJINE scenarios project and the possiblity of an approach to questions of space and justice that brings together a range of disciplines and perspectives on the common ground of the unwritten future.

You can listen to the episode now on Spotify and Soundcloud.

After Earth Day: New adventures in planetarity

Mechanical Dolphin

This past weekend saw the celebration of Earth Day on 22nd April. Since 1970, the date has provided a moment of focus and celebration for communities and organizations focussed on protecting our environment.

The first Earth Day was shaped by many factors. These included the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill in Southern California, which caused public outrage and helped motivate Republican President Richard Nixon to found the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Earthrise photograph taken by Apollo astronaut Bill Anders in 1968, which has been described as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken”.

Earthrise by Bill Anders

Earth Day serves to draw our attention, energising debate and action around what must be done to protect and sustain our planet’s environment. The events from over fifty years ago, which helped to inspire its creation, remind us of the ongoing need to cultivate fresh perspectives, in order to act effectively in these complex and turbulent times.

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Romancing the Gothic: Climate, Justice, and the Strategic Sublime

Mechanical Dolphin

I’m very pleased to be joining the Romancing the Gothic lecture series for a session on “Climate, Justice, and the Strategic Sublime: Scenarios as Gothic Genre”.

The lecture, which will take place at 10am BST on Sunday 21st May, with a repeat at 7pm BST the same day, forms part of the “EcoHorror, Nature and the Gothic” lecture season.

Register for the 10am BST session on Eventbrite here.

Register for the 7pm BST session on Eventbrite here.

Energy Consumers Australia: Foresighting Forum Quick Watch

Mechanical Dolphin

The team at Energy Consumers Australia have released a short Q&A video covering aspects of my recent keynote on dealing with uncertainty in sociotechnical systems.

You can find more from the recent Energy Consumers Australia 2023 Foresighting Forum here.

Fast, deep, and uncertain: the currents of thought and feeling

Mechanical Dolphin

“Big whorls have little whorls which feed on their velocity,
And little whorls have lesser whorls and so on to viscosity“

Lewis Fry Richardson

These lines appear in Sarah Dry‘s tremendous book Waters of the World, a work of history which explores how scientists, researchers, and passionate amateurs gradually pieced together an understanding of our global climate system. The story spans continents and generations; some of its characters collaborate or compete, while others work alone, unaware of the wider context in which their endeavours might be received. Some don’t even live to see the difference that their research will make to the world. There are false starts and dead ends. Politics, from the sweep of colonialism to the pettiness of institutional squabbles, plays its part; and for all that this is a tale of systematic observation and theorisation, it’s no less deeply human for that. As one of Dry’s scientists, Joanne Simpson, put it:

“I think I am generally perceived as a pretty cool character. Nothing could be farther from the truth. To understand how a woman, or a man, for that matter, creates original work in any field, it is necessary to penetrate the emotional masks, and my masks have intentionally been hard to penetrate.”

Dry’s book, and particularly its chapter on “Fast Water”, exploring the currents of the ocean’s depths, makes me think of the ways that emotions can swirl around us and within us when we address difficult issues, alone or together.

Vailulu’u vents, from the NOAA Photo Library CC BY-2.0
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