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Acting at the Roots
by Elizabeth R. Sawin
— 10 July, 2007 —
One lesson I take from climate change is the admonition to search out and act at the root causes of complex problems.
Here’s an example:
In the political maneuvering leading up to the release of the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the Bush administration was lobbying for the report to include an [...]
What Can One Person Do?
by Elizabeth R. Sawin
— June 13, 2007 —
Climate change, fisheries crashes, toxic pollution, endangered species. Sometimes it’s enough to make you throw up your hands in despair. “I’m just one person, what difference can I make? What could I do?”
Well, actually one person – one ordinary person – can do quite a lot if she sets her mind to it. [...]
Practical Visionaries
by Elizabeth R. Sawin
— May 25, 2007 —
This year my nine-year-old daughter has been studying inventions and inventors, and I’ve been learning about them through her. She particularly likes the stories about accidental inventors who were trying to do one thing, made a mistake, and recognized, sometimes years later, the usefulness of what they had done. She finds something very [...]
The First Step Toward Addressing Climate Change Is Facing Its Reality
by Elizabeth R. Sawin
— May 2, 2007 —
In a past column I have written about a narrow window of opportunity, a period of perhaps as few as ten years within which humanity must make dramatic reductions in worldwide CO2 emissions or run the risk of unleashing dangerous cascades of “runaway” warming. In this scenario, warming would begin to feed upon [...]
Climate Change: A Window of Opportunity
by Elizabeth R. Sawin
— April 3, 2007 —
On the surface, our lives run on as usual, with ordinary obligations and ordinary successes – mortgage payments, leaking faucets, overdue library books, deadlines met, milestones marked and moved beyond.
And yet while all this ordinary life has been going on we’ve also been adding to levels of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere. And [...]
