Focus the Nation
On January 31st, over a thousand colleges and universities will be participating in the largest teach-in in US history: a national day of climate change action called Focus the Nation (official website).
At NYU, we will use this day to engage faculty, students and staff from disciplines across the curriculum, in contributing to a national conversation about global warming.
This is going to be the biggest event ever on climate change at NYU, and we need you to be there!
Focus the Nation will be a chance to explore the important questions that can be brought to bear on the problem we face: re-imagining and reworking our collective relationship to natural systems and globally shared resources.
If you are a member of NYU's faculty, please read this letter requesting your assistance and participation.
Here at NYU, we are holding a series of events on 1/31 around the theme of "local solutions to the climate crisis".
Events will range from research-focused expert panels, to collaborative breakout sessions linking political responsibility and individual action.
Events Schedule
All the events are held at Kimmel Center (60 Washington Square South)
Panel 1: Airing the Issues: local air quality research, policy and design responses.
11:00 – 1:00
Kimmel room 904
How do we understand air quality issues, how do we measure them, what are the parameters of air quality we can address, which take priority, and what re-mediative actions can be taken? Can locally optimized interventions aggregate to larger effect, and how are these coordinated? In short, what can we do to improve air quality in the megametropolis of New York?
George Thurston- NYU, School of Medicine
Deron Lovaas- NRDC: Transportation; Air & Energy
Natalie Jeremijenko- NYU, Steinhardt School of Culture and Education
- Transportation Alternatives
- Gaia Hypothesis
- Environmental Health
- Participation and Policy
Panel 2: Material Matters in Socio-ecological systems: how to understand and improve the performance of coupled natural and social systems. How can Garbage Recycling work for human and non-humans Nutrient Cycles and Sustainability?
1:30 - 3:30
Kimmel room 904
Robin Nagle – BreakThrough Institute
Tyler Volk – NYU Biology
David Hurd - NYC PlaNYC
Kaid Benfield- smart growth specialist
Sustainability Fair with environmental organizations from campus and around NYC
4:30-6:00
Eisner & Lubin Auditorium (4th floor)
- Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment
- Council on the Environment New York City
- Lower East Side Ecology Center
- New York City Soil and Water Conservation District
- NY Sunworks
- Solar 1
- Black Rock Forest Consortium
- Wallerstein Collaborative for Urban Environmental Education
- Natural Resources Defense Council
Keynote Presentation: Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, the Breakthrough Institiute
6:00-7:00
Eisner & Lubin Auditorium (4th floor)
Q+A/Breakout Sessions
7:00
Eisner & Lubin Auditorium (4th floor)
Roundtable Workshops:
Working Groups:
- The NYU BOTANIC GARDENS (aka the puple and green monster)(including Green Roofs; The Urban Space Station at NYU)
- Human Power at NYU
- Solar Power at NYU
- Washington Square Park: Responding to the Redesign
- Transportation at NYU
- Purchasing at NYU
Participants' Bios
Kaid Benfield is a senior attorney and director of NRDC’s smart growth initiative and Director of the Smart Growth Program, Natural Resources Defence Council, Washington, D.C. He is the author of Solving Sprawl: Models of Smart Growth in Communities Across America. He specializes in smart growth issues because, unlike some causes, it is less a holy war and more an attempt to solve a very complicated puzzle with solutions that work for both people and the environment, making a lot of room for collaboration and creativity.
Martin Hoffert is Professor Emeritus of Physics and former Chair of the Department of Applied Science at New York University. He is a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and was elected fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). His research interests are global environmental change, geophysical fluid dynamics, oceanography, biogeochemical cycles and alternate energy technology.Professor Hoffert has been interviewed on PBS and has published in a wide number of journals including Climatic Change, Nature, Journal of Geophysical Research, Icarus, and Space Power.
David Hurd is Director of the new Office for Recycling Outreach and Education and part of PlaNYC.
Natalie Jeremijenko is an assistant professor of Visual Art and an affiliated faculty of Visual Culture. She directs the xdesign Environmental Health Clinic, which develops and prescribes locally optimized and often playful strategies to effect remediation of environmental systems, producing measurable and mediagenic evidence, and coordinates diverse projects to effect material change. Previously she was on the Visual Arts faculty at UCSD, and Faculty of Engineering at Yale. Her work was included in the 2006 and 1997 Whitney Biennial of American Art and the Cooper Hewit Smithsonian Design Triennial 2006-7, and has been shown at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Museum Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Documenta ‘97 and Ars Electronic prix ‘96. She was a 1999 Rockefeller Fellow, has been named one of the 40 most influential designers by I.D. Magazine and one of the inaugural Top 100 Young Innovators by the MIT Technology Review.
Her experimental design work explores the opportunity new technologies present for non violent social change. Her research centers on structures of participation in the production of knowledge, and information and the political and social possibilities (and limitations) of information and emerging technologies — mostly through public experiments. In this vein, her work spans a range of media from statistical indices (such as the Despondency Index, which linked the Dow Jones to the suicide rate at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge) to biological substrates (such as the installations of paired cloned trees in various urban micro-climates) to robotics (such as the development of feral robotic dog packs to investigate environmental hazards).
Deron Lovaas is vehicles campaign director and deputy director of the smart growth and transportation program. He currently directs NRDC’s oil security issue campaign and serves as chief lobbyist on the federal Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) reauthorization bill.A graduate of the University of Virginia, Deron coordinated Sierra Club’s Challenge to Sprawl campaign and managed Zero Population Growth’s sprawl educational outreach program. He also worked on transportation and air-quality planning at Maryland’s Department of the Environment.
Robin Nagle is an anthropologist and environmental journalist and Director of the Draper Program in Humanities and Social Thought.Dr. Nagle is author of Claiming the Virgin: The Broken Promise of Liberation Theology in Brazil (Routledge), “Pelo Direito de Ser Igreja: the Struggle of the Morro da Conceicao,” in The Progressive Church As a Catalyst for Social Change in Latin America, ed. John Burdick and William Hewitt, (Greenwood Press), and is possibly best known for being in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation.
Ted Nordhaus is Chairperson of the BreakThrough Institute as well as being an author, researcher, and political strategist. He is co-author of Break Through and “The Death of Environmentalism.” Over the last twenty years, Ted has run major campaigns and initiatives for a large assortment of environmental and progressive political causes including the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, and Clean Water Action. He also served as the Campaign Director for Share the Water, a coalition of environmentalists, fishermen, farmers, and urban water agencies advocating reform of federal water policies in California, Executive Director of the Headwaters Sanctuary Project, and as a partner and political strategist with Next Generation and Evans/McDonough strategy and research firms serving political campaigns and environmental organizations. Ted holds a B.A. in history from the University of California.
Michael Shellenberger is the president of the BreakThrough Institute. He works on and writes about everything from energy to technology innovation to changing social values. As president of the Breakthrough Institute, he is a leading national advocate for the U.S. to make a 10-year, $500 billion public-private investment into cutting-edge clean energy technologies to achieve energy independence and restore America’s economic competitiveness. He is co-author of Break Through and “The Death of Environmentalism.” Michael has written for L.A. Times, the American Prospect, Glamour Magazine, and other publications. Michael has worked as a strategist for efforts to win action on global warming, save the world’s last redwoods, and improve working conditions for Nike factory workers in China. He was raised in Greeley, Colorado, received his B.A. from Earlham in Indiana, and received a Masters Degree in cultural anthropology from the University of California.
George Thurston is a professor of Environmental Health Science and Deputy Director of NYU-Health Effects Institute (HEI) Particulate Matter Health Effects Research Center. He is also the Director of the NYU Community Outreach and Education Program (COEP), which works to inform the public regarding the potential environmental health implications of the aftermath of the World Trade Center (WTC) disaster. He has been featured on CBS2 news based on his work regarding South Bronx children and their exposures to air pollution, and is author of “Air Pollution as an Underappreciated Cause of Asthma Symptoms,” with D.M. Bates in the Journal of the American Medical Association (2003), “World Trade Center Cough,” with L.C. Chen, in Lancet (2002), “Climate Change: Hidden health benefits of greenhouse gas mitigation,” with L. Cifuentes, V. Borja-Aburto, N. Gouveia, and D. Davis in Science (2001), and “Summertime haze air pollution and children with asthma,” with M. Lippmann, M. Scott and J. M. Fine. Am. J. in Respitory and Crititcal Care Medicine 1997).
Tyler Volk is a professor in the Earth Systems Group of New York University's Biology Department. Inspired by Gregory Bateson, who suggested that we concentrate on shapes, patterns and relations when studying anything from anthropology to cybernetics, Volk wrote Metapatterns (Columbia Press, 1995), which appeared on bestseller lists across the US. Other publications include Gaias Body: Toward a Physiology of the Earth, (Copernicus Books/Springer-Verlag, 1998), and most recently, a forward to the book Writing the Natural Way by Gabriele Rico, (Tarcher/Putnam, 2000). He has received two NASA Summer Faculty fellowships; one at Ames Research Center and one at Johnson Space Center.