Dickinson to Durban » Summer Reading Responses
World Climate Summit at Dickinson College!
Imagine if the title of this post were actually true! Not only would students, faculty, and other community members flock to our conference event, but international persons and other interested citizens would flock to our campus to have a say in the negotiations room! We, the students in the Africa Mosaic, obviously and luckily, have the privilege of actually participating in the real negotiations in Durban in a few months, but not every student at Dickinson does. To give a larger segment of the campus an opportunity to participate in a similar experience, the Africa Mosaic students and students from a similar-course of study in their first-year seminar acted out a mock-World Climate conference. The first thing I would like to comment on is that the initially feelings and anticipations I had … Read entire article »
Filed under: Summer Reading Responses
Cramped and Crowded
My favorite yoga teacher always jokes that the only way to get world leaders to agree on anything is to force them into doing hot yoga together. With yoga mats arranged only inches apart in a small studio heated to 98 degrees Fahrenheit, each state head would have to peacefully “negotiate” their space, attempting to stay fully conscious of their breathing and the future of the world as each sweats on the other. I could not help by remember this joke during our class simulation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change last week. Each group comprised of ten or so countries divided into negotiating blocs denoted by their economic status: “developed,” “developing,” and “other developing” (i.e. “least developed”). We represented a specific state, simultaneously functioning under a … Read entire article »
Filed under: Climate Change, Key COP17 Issues, Mosaic Action, Summer Reading Responses
Spear of the Nation
The African National Congress (ANC) created Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), also known in English as “Spear of the Nation”, because by 1961, the anti-apartheid movement was not gaining enough support. In order to inspire millions of people to join the political movement to end apartheid in South Africa, drastic action had to be taken. I believe that violence is never acceptable, but at the time in which MK was created, violence was the only option left for the ANC, as they could not oppose apartheid by changing government policy. The ANC had only a choice between the lesser of two evils: 1.) Allowing apartheid (itself violent) to continue or 2.) Ensure the termination of apartheid through the use of “terrorist” actions or guerillia violence by the ANC. The continuation would … Read entire article »
Filed under: Summer Reading Responses
“It’s Climate! What Did You Expect?”
Climate is the pattern of weather that one can expect over a long duration of time, whereas weather is the actual variance of daily sunshine or cloud cover, precipitation, and temperature. In order to reconcile the idea that both weather and climate are highly variable, we must understand that both climate and weather will always be changing. A much as we, as humans, like to assume consistency and predictability, the very complex system that is climate cannot be perfectly calculated and predicted. As humans, we like to observe and record data, as well as presume patterns in phenomena. We also have a tendency to assume that the way the world has functioned in the fifty years or so as we know it, or the hundreds of years of recorded history … Read entire article »
Filed under: Summer Reading Responses
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