Building a small cold frame greenhouse from reclaimed wood is a enjoyable and sustainable weekend…
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Today’s inspiration is a quote from naturalist Ellen Meloy. In her book, Eating Stone: Imagination…
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Why does it feel like the world has made so much progress on addressing global warming, but also none at all?
In H Is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z, Elizabeth Kolbert, a longtime environmental journalist, considers hard questions like this one. Using simple language, she explains that governments are passing climate-friendly laws, clean energy is expanding, companies are creating green technologies, and yet fossil fuel emissions are still, after all these years, rising.
Kolbert’s latest book, a primer brightened by Wesley Allsbrook’s colorful illustrations, is a quick, entertaining read. A is for Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist who wanted to figure out what caused ice ages, landed on the idea of carbon dioxide, and built the world’s first climate model in 1894. Arrhenius imagined that a warmer world would be a happier one for humanity. B is for “blah, blah, blah,” the climate activist Greta Thunberg’s mocking summary of what three decades of global climate conferences have accomplished. C is for capitalism, one convincing explanation for why those conferences didn’t accomplish much.
Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has written several books, most notably The Sixth Extinction, a Pulitzer-Prize winning account of Homo sapiens’ asteroid-level power to wipe out other species. In H Is for Hope, she grounds the abstract problem of climate change in concrete experiences. Kolbert ends up riding an exercise bike in a humid, 106-degree-Fahrenheit vault, monitored for an experiment. (“What is the future we’re creating actually going to feel like?”) She stares up at the blades of a 600-foot wind turbine off the coast of Rhode Island, and, after visiting a “green concrete” company in Montreal, takes a cinder block of the substance home as a souvenir.
In an interview with Grist, Kolbert explained why she thinks climate change resists traditional narratives around hope and progress and how she attempted to tell a more complex, down-to-earth story in her new book. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q. I want to start by talking about hope, which is usually how people end interviews. I’ve heard climate scientists and activists say they’re tired of being asked what gives them hope, I think because it can feel naive. How can we talk about hope in a way that’s more realistic and useful?
A. Well, many people, as you say, have pointed out that that’s not really the opposition that we should be focusing on, hope versus not hope. I think we should be focusing on action versus non-action. How we feel about it — it really doesn’t make much difference to the climate. What we do is what makes a difference. Now, that being said, having written this book called H Is for Hope, I am very interested in how we think about hope, and that’s one of the motivating ideas behind the book.
Q. How did you end up choosing that title? I think there’s something kind of delightful about a title that emphasizes optimism but also plays off Sue Grafton detective novels — you know, her book was H Is for Homicide.
A. Right. There’s also a really wonderful book by Helen Macdonald called H Is for Hawk. So I knew I wanted to name the book after one of the letters; that’s the whole point, it’s an abecedarian. And that one just popped out as the obvious candidate.
Q. I thought that approach was interesting. What inspired you to write an alphabetic primer on climate change?
A. I was trying to sort of re-animate this story, which can be very overwhelming and has so many different aspects. It’s really everything, everywhere, all at once, and on one level, I was trying to break it down for people so that it was understandable and comprehensible in all its complexity. On the other hand, I was also trying to suggest that any simple narrative probably was not complete.
Q. You started off the book by saying that climate change resists narrative. What did you mean by that?
A. It’s not personified. It doesn’t have a fate. You know, we’re all participating in causing it. We’re all participating in suffering from it. Obviously, some are participating in causing it much more than others, and some are suffering from it much more than others. It’s this creeping, perpetual problem that will be with us forever now. And when it’s acute, when there’s a crisis, a wildfire or a hurricane that was made worse by climate change, it still wasn’t exactly caused by climate change. You have that agency problem, and stories demand agency.
Q. One of the themes in the book is the difficulty of reckoning with climate change on a deeper level, the sense that we’re watching things fall apart, but we don’t really internalize that, or that we’re waiting for someone or some miracle technology to rescue us. Why do you think people have that response?
A. On the one hand, it’s a global problem. It’s been described as the ultimate “tragedy of the commons” problem. It has to be addressed on a global scale. So it is very easy to feel overwhelmed. “What does it matter what I do?” On the other hand, I do think that what we are seeing, in the U.S. in particular — you know, I include myself in this — is that we’re very stuck in our ways, and they’re very carbon-intensive ways. So I think we would like every solution that keeps being proposed to be something that allows us to continue to do exactly what we’re doing, just differently. And that’s what we want to hear.
Q. That’s true. It’s really hard to picture how we would live different lives, or what exactly those lives would look like. And I feel like that is part of the problem.
A. Yes, and our whole economy is based on doing things a certain way. You know, there’s a big argument in climate circles, which is one of the points in the book: Can you have what’s called “green growth?” Can you just keep growing, but do that in a, quote unquote, “green” way, or can you not? That is an unanswered question.
Q. How do you think we need to change the narratives that get told about climate change?
A. Well, this book is my attempt to do that. I can’t give you the poster child for climate change that’s going to change everyone’s perceptions of it, or the story that’s going to finally cut through all the BS. Many approaches have been taken, some are more successful than others, but we still seem stuck. And I was really trying in this book to get around that problem, or fool around with that problem, that the traditional narratives don’t seem to work.
Q. Was there anything else that you wanted to say about the book?
A. I think what’s important about climate change coverage is that it has some element of pleasure, which seems odd to say for such a grim subject. But I think that what we — and I include the artist, Wesley Allsbrook, whose amazing illustrations are a big part of the book — tried to do was make it both a pleasurable reading experience and a super visual experience. I do think the unrelenting grimness does get to people, and this book, while it definitely has a very serious message, is trying to offer something up in a way that is kind of fun, I hope.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Elizabeth Kolbert wants us to rethink the stories we tell about climate change on Mar 28, 2024.
Americans throw out approximately 416,000 mobile phones each day, according to 2014 figures from the…
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More heat waves and unpredictable rainfall could destroy vineyards from California to Greece by 2100, according to a new study, while at the same time creating ideal conditions for wine growing in the United Kingdom and other unexpected regions.
“Climate change is affecting grape yield, composition and wine quality. As a result, the geography of wine production is changing,” the study said. “About 90% of traditional wine regions in coastal and lowland regions of Spain, Italy, Greece and southern California could be at risk of disappearing by the end of the century because of excessive drought and more frequent heatwaves with climate change.”
The researchers looked at the effects of drought, increasing temperatures and changes in diseases and pests on wine regions across the world, reported AFP. They found that there was a “substantial” risk of 49 to 70 percent of wine-producing regions losing their economic viability, depending on the level of global heating.
“Climate change is changing the geography of wine,” said lead author of the study Cornelis van Leeuwen, a viticulture professor with the Institut des Sciences de la Vigne et du Vin at Bordeaux University and Bordeaux Sciences Agro, as AFP reported. “There will be winners and losers.”
The study, “Climate change impacts and adaptations of wine production,” was published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.
“You can still make wine almost anywhere (even in tropical climates)… but here we looked at quality wine at economically viable yields,” said van Leeuwen, as reported by AFP.
Up to a quarter of vineyards could experience improved wine production, with totally new winegrowing regions emerging at higher altitudes and latitudes, according to the study.
“Warmer temperatures might increase suitability for other regions (Washington State, Oregon, Tasmania, northern France) and are driving the emergence of new wine regions, like the southern United Kingdom,” the study said.
It will all depend on how much global temperatures rise. If global heating stays within the two degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average set by the Paris Agreement, wine regions will have to adjust — most will survive.
“Existing producers can adapt to a certain level of warming by changing plant material (varieties and rootstocks), training systems and vineyard management. However, these adaptations might not be enough to maintain economically viable wine production in all areas,” the study explained.
In the face of more extreme warming, “most Mediterranean regions might become climatically unsuitable for wine production,” the study said, according to AFP.
The study added that, in the lowland and coastal areas of Greece, Italy and Spain, roughly 90 percent of wine regions “could be at risk of disappearing by the end of the century.”
And Southern California could watch as many as half of its famous wineries dry up.
Meanwhile, northern parts of the United States — like Washington State, the Great Lakes and New England — could become premium wine producing regions.
Van Leeuwen said France may need to turn to more resilient varieties of grapes such as Chenin for whites and Grenache for reds.
The viticulturist discouraged the use of irrigation to make up the difference in a warmer world.
“Irrigated vines are more vulnerable to drought if there is a lack of water,” Van Leeuwen said, adding that using such a scarce resource to irrigate hardy crops would be “madness,” as AFP reported.
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French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva met this week in Belém — host of the 2025 United Nations COP30 climate talks. The leaders agreed to launch a $1.1 billion green investment plan for the Amazon rainforest.
The four-year plan would be financed by public and private funds.
“Gathered in Belém, in the heart of the Amazon, we, Brazil and France, Amazonian countries, have decided to join forces to promote an international roadmap for protection of tropical forests,” the countries said in a joint statement, as Reuters reported. “The presidents expressed their commitment to the conservation, restoration and sustainable management of the world’s tropical forests and agreed to work on an ambitious agenda, including… developing innovative financial instruments, market mechanisms and payments for environmental services.”
During the three-day visit, Lula and Macron met with Indigenous leaders and Macron honored the Kayapo People and environmental activist Raoni Metuktire — who has fought to protect Indigenous rights and the Amazon rainforest — with France’s National Order of the Legion of Honor.
Raoni requested that Lula not approve the building of a 620-mile planned railroad because of the impact it will have on the Indigenous People, who Raoni said were not consulted.
The announcement of the investment agreement said it included support for “indigenous people and local Amazon communities, which have an essential role in protecting biodiversity through their traditional knowledge and forest management practices,” reported Le Monde.
As president of the Group of 20 nations, Brazil is an advocate for emerging economies that Paris is looking to build relationships with.
“We are living in a Franco-Brazilian moment,” said the Élysée Palace of the French president, which highlighted “many points of convergence” with Brazil on “major global issues,” as France 24 reported.
“France is an essential, unavoidable actor for Brazilian foreign policy,” said Maria Luisa Escorel de Moraes, the head of Europe’s Brazilian diplomacy.
Announcement of the investment plan includes the proposal of a “carbon market” intended to reward investments by nations in natural carbon sinks like the Amazon rainforest.
Last year, Brazilian Amazon deforestation was cut in half following environmental law enforcement implemented by Lula’s government.
After a low point in Brazil-France relations concerning the environment in 2019, things have improved.
“After a four-year eclipse and a virtual freeze in political relations between our two countries during Bolsonaro’s presidency, we are in the process of relaunching the bilateral relationship and the strategic partnership with Brazil,” an adviser to the French president said, as reported by Reuters.
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The UN’s latest Food Waste Index Report, compiled in collaboration with the charity WRAP, reveals that food waste has skyrocketed, with over 1 billion meals wasted per day and over $1 trillion worth of food waste generated per year around the world.
The report found that 783 million people lived with hunger in 2022, and about one-third of the global population faced food insecurity.
“Food waste is a global tragedy. Millions will go hungry today as food is wasted across the world,” Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP, said in a press release. “Not only is this a major development issue, but the impacts of such unnecessary waste are causing substantial costs to the climate and nature.”
In total, about 1.05 billion metric tons of food waste, both edible and inedible parts, were generated in 2022, according to the report. This makes up nearly 20% of available food. Further, the report found that food waste reached 132 kilograms per capita, with most food waste (60%) happening in households, followed by 28% of food waste happening in food services and 12% in the retail sector.
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 aims to cut food waste in half by 2030, as this waste contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. According to the UN, food waste makes up about 8% to 10% of global emissions. This is even higher than the aviation industry, which contributed about 2% of global carbon emissions in 2022, as reported by the International Energy Agency.
The report noted that the EU, Australia, Japan, UK and the U.S. are the only G20 countries with adequate food waste estimates for tracking progress to the 2030 goal of cutting food waste by 50%. The report authors said they hope other countries will utilize the report to improve food waste tracking in order to work toward reducing the numbers.
Some countries are already making meaningful progress on food waste reduction targets, with Japan reducing food waste by 31% and the UK by 18%.
“The good news is we know if countries prioritise this issue, they can significantly reverse food loss and waste, reduce climate impacts and economic losses, and accelerate progress on global goals,” Andersen said.
The authors of the report recommended a collaborative approach to address food waste and food insecurity, including through public-private partnerships, which have already helped reduce food waste per capita in Australia, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and the UK.
“With the huge cost to the environment, society, and global economies caused by food waste, we need greater coordinated action across continents and supply chains. We support UNEP in calling for more G20 countries to measure food waste and work towards SDG12.3,” said Harriet Lamb, CEO of WRAP. “This is critical to ensuring food feeds people, not landfills. Public-Private Partnerships are one key tool delivering results today, but they require support: whether philanthropic, business, or governmental, actors must rally behind programmes addressing the enormous impact wasting food has on food security, our climate, and our wallets.”
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There are more museums in the U.S. than there are Starbucks and McDonald’s combined. Within walking distance of the Grist office in downtown Seattle, there’s a pinball museum, an NFT museum, a Jimi Hendrix-inspired museum of pop culture, and Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, just to name a few. From tiny mom-and-pop museums dedicated to niche topics to massive institutions like The Met and The Smithsonian, museums are widely viewed as some of the most trustworthy sources of information, and also as trusted stewards of cultural artifacts.
But, in part because of the treasured objects they house, museums often have outsize carbon footprints — and they are also uniquely vulnerable to climate impacts.
“It’s because we have these really strict regulations on keeping temperature and relative humidity at certain levels in the name of preserving the collections,” said Caitlin Southwick, a former art conservator who now runs an organization called Ki Culture that helps museums transition to more sustainable practices.
As purveyors of a public good, museums, galleries, and other cultural entities have often been excused from the climate conversation, she said, and in some cases even from regulation. But, she added, museums can actually be some of the most carbon-intensive buildings in cities.
The field of cultural preservation has other environmental issues as well, like the use of toxic chemicals to clean or restore artworks. But climate control represents a particularly bedeviling problem, since more energy use contributes to climate change, which in turn causes greater temperature extremes that necessitate even more energy use to maintain a controlled indoor environment (sometimes known as the “doom loop” of AC).
As climate change increasingly leaves no city untouched, museums are confronting the reality that rising temperatures and volatile weather threaten their conservation efforts — and they’re turning to new technologies, and, in some cases, challenging conventional conservation wisdom, to stay ahead and minimize their impact.
A view of the outside of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan. Charles H. Wright Museum
When Leslie Tom first came to The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, nearly a decade ago, there was relatively little funding for sustainability efforts. She became the museum’s chief sustainability officer in 2015, as a Detroit Revitalization Fellow through Wayne State University. And, with her background in architecture and design, one of the first things she noticed was that the museum didn’t have blueprints. “The architect’s office had a fire,” Tom said, and a few other record-keeping issues meant that “there was just no accurate documentation.”
In 2019, the museum’s leaders secured funding to begin a project of digitally mapping the 125,000 square-foot space, to answer the question of documentation with modern tools. They wanted to make The Wright a “smart museum” — and Tom saw an opportunity to help lead this effort and bring sustainability goals into it.
They began with 3D laser scans of the building, which fed into a digital building information model. Then, about a year ago, using software called Tandem from the company Autodesk, The Wright created what’s known as a digital twin — a detailed replica of the building that draws on near real-time data from sensors installed around the facility.
“Being in a museum, for me, it’s like a small city,” Tom said. “And so now, to have a representation of that, it really helps us to design the visitor experience, vendor experience, volunteer experience, as we start to all work together to think about how we can layer environmental sustainability into all of our processes.”
The Wright used laser scanners to create a detailed map of the facility, shown here in the museum’s central rotunda. Autodesk
Although the team is just at the start of this digitization journey, Tom is excited about what the data can do for energy efficiency — for instance, gradually pre-heating and cooling spaces, based on models of how many people will be in the space at a given time. And while digital infrastructure does create additional energy needs for things like running servers, for Tom and the rest of the team at The Wright, the need for comprehensive data about their building, and the appeal of doing it digitally, outweighed the energy cost of the technology.
Some museums, including the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, have reduced energy use by simply broadening the range of temperature and humidity fluctuations they’ll allow in their buildings. “They just made a decision,” Southwick said. “They said, ‘We’re gonna go from plus or minus 2 [degrees Celsius] to plus or minus 5.’ They saved 20,000 euro a month on their energy bill.” Now, the museum is recalibrating its systems to allow plus or minus 10 degree C swings, and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine has done the same, Southwick said.
It’s a somewhat radical challenge to the orthodoxy around conservation, and in the case of the Guggenheim, the changes have made at least one institution hesitant to lend its work for special exhibits — although other lenders have been supportive of the shift, one of the museum’s deputy directors told The New York Times. “The changes might result in a lengthier conversation [about lending], but the more people do it, the more widely accepted the practice is,” Southwick said. “In my opinion, It will be the standard within the next year.”
She also sees an opportunity for museums to begin acclimatizing artifacts to shifting temperatures. While some truly sensitive objects do need to be kept under very precise conditions, other materials can actually adapt, Southwick said. She offers wood as an example — when it’s kept in warm, humid environments, it expands, and then if it gets dry, it will crack. “But if you gradually increase or decrease the relative humidity over a certain amount of time, then the material has time to react to it without damaging it,” she said. This approach is already used in the course of museum loans between institutions in different climates.
The same strategy “may also be a way that we can preemptively and controllably prepare our objects for the effects of climate change,” Southwick said. While it’s difficult to predict the climate conditions of the future with absolute certainty, she sees this as an important area of exploration for conservation science. “I think that it’s really important for us to make sure we never get into a situation where we regress and we’re increasing our HVACs, or we’re increasing our climate-control programs, because that’s not going to do anybody any good.”
At The Wright, the new sensors are gathering data on temperature and humidity, and monitoring things like potential leaks, which will help the team be more responsive to environmental shifts that could pose a risk to the 35,000 artifacts The Wright has in its care.
“For any museum or cultural institution, the objects are the most sacred,” Tom said.
Although Michigan is something of a climate refuge, The Wright has already had to contend with extreme weather impacts, like the intense storms that caused flooding throughout the Midwest in the summer of 2021. “Those floods hampered and did damage to every cultural institution in this district,” said Jeffrey J. Anderson, the museum’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. He made a decision to move The Wright’s entire collection off-site — and it was only last week that the last few items were returned.
Other cultural institutions are facing similar challenges, and figuring out how best to confront them. “Over a third of museums in the U.S. are cited within a hundred kilometers [62 miles] of the coast,” said Elizabeth Merritt, the “in-house futurist” at the American Alliance of Museums and the founding director of the organization’s Center for the Future of Museums. “And a quarter are in zones that are highly vulnerable to sea level rise and severe storms,” she added.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. is building flood gates and stormwater systems even as it evacuates the basement collection of its American History museum. In a more extreme example, the island nation of Tuvalu announced plans to create a digital replica in the metaverse to ensure its culture lives on if the physical country is subsumed by rising seas.
The Wright currently has no plans to use its digital twin as a backup for the museum itself. But it is reckoning in other ways with the role of a museum during the climate crisis — driven in part by the understanding that Black Americans and other communities of color are disproportionately impacted by climate change and targeted by environmental racism. “From our perspective, we look at this as an opportunity for us to be a leader in racial justice, sustainability, climate justice,” particularly for the Detroit community, Anderson said.
In 2020, The Wright’s board of directors officially adopted sustainability into the institution’s strategic goals. And, building on existing climate-themed exhibitions and programs, Tom said, she’s eager to explore how data from the digital twin system can be used to communicate with the public about the museum’s sustainability efforts and goals.
“Museums are among the most trusted sources of information in the U.S.,” Merritt said. Among the general public, they rank second, only behind friends and family. “So they can use that power to help communicate to the public what’s going on and what the public can do about it.” She argues that steps like revisiting policies on air conditioning are just one piece of how museums should think about a multifaceted commitment to their communities, which could also include climate-themed exhibits and even serving as public cooling centers.
Southwick agrees. Through her organization’s work, she’s seen firsthand a growing interest in sustainability, but some hesitation to project that interest outward. “Can you imagine the impact if every museum had an exhibition about climate?” she said. “It’s just extraordinary, what the power of the museum sector is.”
— Claire Elise Thompson
The Climate Museum in New York City is the first museum in the U.S. dedicated to the climate crisis. The organization first launched in 2014; it currently has a pop-up space in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, while the team continues to look for a permanent home. In this photo, director Miranda Massie stands in front of an installation called “Someday, all this,” by artist David Opdyke — a collage of vintage postcards with a somewhat apocalyptic message.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As climate change threatens cultural treasures, museums get creative to conserve both energy and artifacts on Mar 27, 2024.
