The Past, Present, and Future of Environmental Justice

A celebration

This year marks a milestone for Environmental Justice in the U.S. It's been 20 years since the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ). The OEJ has been celebrating this anniversary with a series of 20th Anniversary Videos featuring stories and interviews with Environmental Justice leaders from communities, non-governmental organizations, and public institutions. Locally, we've also been celebrating the 20th anniversary of a Boston-based Environmental Justice organization - Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE). Since 1993, ACE has been both a local and a national leader for Environmental Justice, defending and promoting disadvantaged communities through a mix of legal and technical support, policy advocacy, and community organizing. Last week, ACE held a celebratory event entitled "An Evening for ACE" at the SEIU Local 615 headquarters in downtown Boston. The event brought together a panel of ACE's leaders: the original founders of ACE, Charlie Lord and Bill Shutkin, as well as the current Executive Director Kalila Barnett, former ED Penn Loh, and REEP alumnus and ACE board member Carlos Moreno. The event was moderated by Julian Agyeman. The event was well attended by longtime friends and supporters, as well as new friends and allies. A 20th anniversary is a good time to reminisce, take stock, and look to the future.

What EJ has wrought

The fundamental insight that the Environmental Justice movement has brought to environmental debates is simply this: not everyone is affected by environmental issues in the same way. This is the case for at least two reasons. Environmental burdens (and amenities) are almost never equally distributed. Since the late 1980s, a voluminous body of research has repeatedly shown that waste sites, noxious industry, and various other forms of environmentally degrading activity are often located in lower income communities and communities of color. The converse is often true too, such that the distribution of "good" things, like parks and trees, are often not in these same communities. Second, even when it appears that some environmental issues are equally distributed (at least geographically), there can still be inequity. We're all exposed to climate change, but we're not all equally vulnerable, and we're not all equally responsible.

A second big idea that EJ has drawn attention to (a public health perspective) is that "the environment" is "where we live, work and play." The environment is not just wilderness or the oceans or scenic landscapes. It is the day-to-day places occupied and used and built by people, and for most of humanity, this means urban environments. The result of this insight is "the environment" includes the environmental quality of homes, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods - and the infrastructure that makes human-environments function and liveable. And as the EJ movement has shown repeatedly, the environmental quality of "where we live, work and play" can vary enormously from community to community, whether we're talking about air pollution, solid waste management, access to quality schools or access to transportation. When we bring these two EJ insights together, what we have is a fundamentally social perspective on the environment - one that sees environmental quality as a reflection and a consequence of the relationships between people. Degraded environments and marginalized communities go hand in hand. Improving the environment does not just mean fixing environmental problems; it means changing the relationships between people. Improved public participation, more transparency by government and the private sector, fair and realistic opportunities for well being and economic security, and honest dialogues about social challenges, goals and needs - and of course, quality science.

Where we're going and what we need

At the ACE event, Professor Agyeman asked the panelists to talk about where they saw the EJ movement heading. What kinds of topics are drawing the EJ movement's interest now and into the foreseeable future? The panelists identified a number of topics and campaigns of growing interest: food justice, transportation justice, just sustainability, green justice, and economic justice. What's striking to me is how much more attention the EJ movement has placed on solutions-based or productive initiatives - programs to develop and promote positive or constructive change in marginalized communities and for the society at large. This is a significant change from the early EJ movement which was so focused (necessarily) on identifying problems and reacting to threats. But ACE's current ED, Kalila Barnett, struck a note of caution. She acknowledged the importance of the topics identified by the others, but she reminded us that the battles of the past are still with us. ACE and other EJ activists are still dealing with problems of localized air pollution, siting of noxious industry, waste siting, and discriminatory treatment. And while the Environmental Justice movement celebrates the anniversary of the founding of important institutions and organizations, its campaigns are still woefully under-funded. Environmental Justice has changed this country's environmental conversation, but it remains marginalized in support and funding in comparison to "mainstream" and environmental causes and organizations.

There is a lot to celebrate in the Environmental Justice movement, and there is a lot yet to be done. Leaders in the movement, like those highlighted by the EPA and by ACE, deserve our thanks and praise. For the movement to make positive change, we still need more people and organizations to step up. Thanks to those who have supported this cause and to those yet to do so. This is how we improve our environment and strengthen a movement and our society.

The 'G' in STEM

Geography is a STEM subject.

STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, and STEM is the focus of an enormous amount of educational effort, across the U.S. and abroad. The basic idea is that STEM education is vital to the success of individual students and the technological and economic progress of our society. STEM encompasses a broad array of subjects, although this point bears repeating. The STEM Education Coalition calls for "An inclusive definition and use of the term “STEM education” by federal and state programs that is not limited to only math and science, but also embraces engineering and technology, and broadly encompasses related STEM fields and their unique needs."

I had an opportunity recently to highlight Geography's STEM credentials at the "Get Energized! Powering the Future with Green STEM Education" event hosted by the Boston Youth Environmental Network (BYEN) at the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology in Boston. The purpose of this event was to draw attention to teaching about sustainability, renewable energy, and clean technology concepts and careers. I was invited to set up an interactive demonstration for the exhibition session, and also to participate as a panelist in a session on Pathways into Green STEM Careers.

It isn't hard to demonstrate how Geography is both a STEM subject and a promising ('Green') career pathway, especially when it involves geospatial technology (e.g. digital maps, GPS, satellite imagery). I demonstrated the use of ArcGIS, a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) program, for the siting of wind turbines in Massachusetts. I adapted this from an exercise I've used for both my undergraduate and graduate GIS students. You can see screenshots of the process in the slideshow, although we did it interactively at the event. MassGIS has an online Wind Energy Site Screening Tool that lets you interactively explore a similar process. My goal was to highlight how a spatial approach and perspective - combining geospatial technology and an understanding of human-environment interactions (core aspects of Geography) - supports sustainable, green development. It can be lucrative too. A recent article in Science Careers entitled "The New Cartographers" highlighted the nation's need for a ready supply of graduates in GIS and related fields. This echoes analyses by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Geospatial analysis is a sub-discipline of Geography, and Geography, and the STEM aspects of Geography, are more than geospatial technology. Geography has many definitions, but a common aspect is its spatial perspective - across social and physical phenomena - and interest in "big picture" relationships, especially human-environment relationships. Geography has long been recognized as a core discipline, but that recognition hasn't always been robust. Of nine areas listed as core academic subjects in the No Child Left Behind Act, geography is the only one that has no dedicated federal funding program. In Massachusetts, Geography education has gotten short shrift. However, the Massachusetts Geographic Alliance has been spearheading an effort to establish a state-sanctioned Commission on Geography Education to study the status of geography education in Massachusetts and make recommendations to the legislature. Ideally, this effort will result in reinstatement of Geography education in K-12 education throughout the Commonwealth. National Geographic has been leading a parallel effort at the national level in its campaign for "geo-literacy."

Given the national interest in STEM education, and Geography's solid STEM identity, it seems strange to have to plead Geography's case. But the work must be done.

Learning "To Do" Geography

I recently returned from the annual Association of American Geographers conference, which took place this year in Los Angeles, California. This is a big event (over 8,000 people from around the planet), with hundreds of sessions, panels, workshops, and field trips to choose from. In addition to presenting my own, latest research, catching up with old friends, networking, and trying to make it to all of the "sponsored socials" that involved a free drink, the big challenge was choosing which sessions to attend. This year I focused on sessions that dealt with pedagogy and career preparation (for my students).

Here are some highlights that I picked up:

Field experience is crucial in the teaching of Geography - even for introductory or service courses.

Students (and teachers) need to constantly practice the art of seeing the real world landscape through a geographical perspective. Professor Herschel Stern of Miracosta College argued that "seeing landscape" means going out and learning how to describe and categorize features (understanding the concept of categories), identifying based on shared characteristics, and practicing how to describe location, orientation, neighborhood boundaries, etc. - basic skills for any Geographer. Professor William Selby of Santa Monica College argued that both cultural and physical Geographers need to practice taking field notes and recording their observations; basic skills for all researchers and another aspect of "seeing landscape."

Organized field experiences do not necessarily mean supervised, group trips in which the entire class has to be transported to some location at the same time (with all of the attendant expenses and logistical and liability headaches). Consider non-guided, independent fieldwork lessons. Professor Mark Hafen from the University of South Florida described how he manages to send students from his Wetland Environment class on a minimum of 4 field trips each semester. The key is that they go out independently or in small groups - on their own time. Before sending them out, he does in-class demonstrations of how to use equipment and record observations. In order to work well, field trips have to be very focused with specific objectives. For Hafen, data collection is qualitative to demonstrate understanding of concepts. Students graph the data they collect and then read their data to look for patterns and understand what they saw in the field and how the graph helps. Herschel and Selby asked us to consider sending students to museums, visitor centers, and self-guided nature walks, which many students have probably never seen.

"Spatial Thinking" is important across the college curriculum, but it still needs clarification.

With the publication of the National Research Council report Learning to Think Spatially, and the funding of a Spatial Intelligence Learning Center, there is growing interest in how to teach spatial thinking. There is now convincing evidence that spatial abilities are related to both success and participation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) disciplines. More generally, there is an increasing recognition of the importance of spatial thinking as a unifier of academic disciplines, including physical science, social sciences, arts and humanities. However, it is also widely acknowledged that spatial thinking is not fostered in our educational system. Professor Mary Hegarty of the University of California Santa Barbara gave a summary report from a specialist meeting convened in Santa Barbara in December 2012 which brought together geographers, cognitive scientists, and experts in a range of other disciplines (including architecture, astronomy, chemistry, geosciences, neuroscience, history and political science) to examine how to best educate spatial thinking at the college level. Hegarty asserted (quite provocatively) that "current attempts to teach spatial thinking are faith based." There is little objective evidence that attempts to teach spatial thinking are effective. She argued that we need to understand and articulate what we mean by "spatial thinking." What are the core concepts and skills? What are the varieties of spatial thinking? She explained that the only really well developed assessments of spatial skills come from cognitive psychology, and these have focused only on "mental rotation". We still need to know more ways to define and assess spatial thinking.

Not everyone is at a loss for a definition of spatial thinking. Diana Stinton from the University of Redlands offered her definition of spatial thinking as "the ability to visualize and interpret location, position, distance, direction, pattern, relationships, movement, and change through space (and time)." She made a point, however, of distinguishing between common understandings of "spatial skills" and "geography-based skills." Spatial skills, she explained, are those more typically associated with engineering skills (e.g. "mental rotation") and 3D visualization. By contrast, geography-based skills are those associated with maps and geospatial technology, and aimed at Geography students and educators. Regardless of origin, she argued that we should promote spatial literacy across all disciplines. Spatial literacy is the "confident and competent use of maps, mapping, and spatial thinking to address ideas, situations and problems in the real world." Stinton is a leader in this realm. I had the pleasure of seeing her speak before at the GIS conference at Bucknell. She recently launched a web resource for GIS educators - teachgis.org

Geoscience jobs are/will be booming, but Geography remains poorly understood by employers AND students

Heather Houlton from the American Geosciences Institute (AGI) and colleagues from the AAG discussed current trends in the geosciences job market and the challenges of aligning learning outcomes to workforce competencies. Houlton reported on a number of promising job trends for Geographers:

• There are over 260,000 geoscience jobs in the U.S. today
• Based on demographics, we can expect 130,000 of current geoscientists to retire in the next few years, opening up those positions to new people
• By 2021, up to 72,000 completely new geoscience jobs are expected to be created
• By 2021, the U.S. will see between 15,000 and 45,000 new graduates from the geosciences, leaving a big gap between job supply and demand (better for those demanding)

The less encouraging news is that Geography is "under-recognized" or poorly understood by employers, while Geography graduates continue to have a narrow conception of their career prospects. These observations are based on recent surveys by the AGI. As most job-seekers learn, there are VERY few jobs with the title "Geographer", but there A LOT of jobs that need geographic skills and perspectives. While Geography advocates need to work on educating employers and labor agencies, it is up to educational institutions and faculty to do a better job of educating students about the vast variety of career possibilities that a Geography education provides.

Why Online Courses are not just for students

The MOOC spectre

There has been a lot of hand wringing and excitement about the push toward online learning, and especially MOOCs - Massive Open Online Courses. With apologies to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I want to say that I've been to the MOOC, and I don't mind.

MOOCs offer free college courses online. There are a number of organizations offering these MOOCs, all with variations on a basic approach (e.g. Coursera, edX, Udacity). In general, the courses are conducted entirely via the Internet, the instruction happens asynchronously (i.e. not in "real time"), and literally tens of thousands of "students" can be enrolled in any one course. Oh, and they're free.

There are lots of reasons to be excited and scared (depending on your position) about the possibilities and implications of MOOCs. Imagine the possibility of packaging the best instruction by the best professors from the world's best colleges and universities and giving it away for free to anyone with time and an internet connection. A lot of people see MOOCs, and online learning in general, as the coming "disruptive technology" for higher education. Like mp3s and Napster to the music industry, or Orbitz and Travelocity to the travel industry.

While MOOCs are indeed new, online teaching is not. The reality for most colleges and universities is that online instruction is already here. It's not just available through Phoenix or Coursera; it has penetrated the bricks and mortar of nearly every institution in the country. My institution has been offering online and hybrid courses for a number of years now. This coming fall, over 200 of our courses will be offered either fully online or as hybrid courses (mostly online but meeting in person periodically). I'll be teaching my first online courses this fall as well. Online instruction at my institution is entirely voluntary for faculty (at the moment), but there is real professional and social pressure to engage with online tools and to figure out how to adapt them (or adapt to them) for teaching.

MOOCs as Faculty Opportunity

There are lots of questions about how online instruction compares to face-to-face instruction, and what it means for students, but for the moment, I want to draw your attention to the opportunities that MOOCs offer to other instructors. In a nutshell, MOOCs give college instructors an opportunity to see how other college instructors teach online (and maybe to learn something too). This is invaluable. It's an open (and dirty) secret that college faculty are not really taught how to teach. We've been trained to do research (especially those with PhDs), and then we're hired as faculty and someone says, "By the way, you've got to teach these classes too." The pressures on faculty to do online learning have only compounded the depth of this pedagogical ignorance. What an opportunity to be able to see how another professor does the deed.

While on sabbatical, I took the opportunity to try out some MOOCs, initially out of sheer curiosity, but also in a sort of blind assumption that these online courses would offer me an easy and convenient way to brush up on my technical skills for both research and teaching. Between October 2012 and March 2013, I took three courses through Coursera:

• Computing for Data Analysis, taught by Dr. Roger Peng from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. This course was focused on learning how to use R for data analysis. R is a statistical and graphical programming language and software package, and it is probably the hottest thing for researchers around the world who do statistical analysis (and it's free!).
• An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python, co-taught by Drs. Joe Warren, Scott Rixner, John Greiner, and Stephen Wong from Rice University. This course was focused on learning how to use Python to build simple, interactive applications. Python is a "high level" programming language (some would say a 'scripting' language) that is used by a wide variety of organizations - from Google and Yahoo to NASA - for an incredible variety of computer applications, especially online. Python is also the primary programming language for interacting with ArcGIS, an industry-standard Geographic Information System (GIS) that I teach and use for research.
• Data Analysis, taught by Dr. Jeff Leek from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. This course was focused on learning how to apply statistics for data analysis using R. When I enrolled, I did not realize that Professors Peng and Leek were from the same institution, but as it turned out, they structured their courses to be complementary. In fact, it was recommended that students enrolling in Dr. Leek's course either have experience with R or else take Dr. Peng's class first.

Summarizing the Coursera experience

The courses all followed a common organizational scheme, which apparently reflects Coursera's pedagogical philosophy. Each course lasted from 4 to 8 weeks.

Lecture

Each week, the instructors posted roughly two hours worth of video lectures, broken up in to 15 to 20 minute segments. These videos were viewable through the course website, on YouTube, or could be downloaded to a personal computer and played offline. Videos were closed captioned, and transcripts of these videos, along with PowerPoint slides and other learning aids, were made available for download.

Testing

Each week, there was a quiz. Quizzes were multiple choice and graded automatically with immediate feedback on the score achieved, as well as what questions I got right and wrong. In most cases, I could retake the quiz up to three times in order improve my score. Maybe "quiz" is the wrong word. Although they were generally 5 to 10 questions at most, and multiple choice, these were not the kinds of quizzes you could just bang through. Each quiz, regardless of the class, took me a minimum of two hours to complete. Seriously.

Assignments and evaluation

There were open-ended exercises or projects too. These ranged from writing small programs that performed some specific task, to doing statistical analyses and writing up reports. These non-quiz assignments required evaluation by a living person. This is where the technology and technique of MOOCs really becomes apparent. Each of these courses had 30,000 to 100,000 people enrolled. I kid you not. Open-ended evaluation of assignments is done through peer evaluation. After submitting a given assignment (before the deadline had passed), my next task was to evaluate from 4 to 5 assignments submitted by my classmates using a rubric form. I was given the chance to look each one over first, and then I went through one by one to rate how well they met each of the rubric items, and in some cases, to provide written feedback on why I thought they had done something imperfectly or really well. After reviewing the assignments submitted by my peers, I then evaluated my own submission. In order to receive a grade for an assignment, I had to evaluate my peers - before the evaluation deadline (usually a week after the submission deadline). Apparently, research on peer assessment and crowd sourcing have shown that these methods can provide accurate feedback and assessment, as well as being a meaningful learning experience. I don't know if the instructors (or their TAs) checked to see if the peer assessments were accurate, but I'm hoping so.

Classroom interaction

Personal interaction and discussion throughout the class were conducted through forums or message boards where participants posted questions and observations and responded to those posts. The forums are a core part of these online courses and crucial to a successful class experience. Forums are the places where you meet your classmates, (potentially) have an opportunity to have a personal interaction with the instructor, and where you raise your hand (metaphorically speaking) to ask a question or offer an opinion or answer a question. Because it is unlikely, if not impossible, for the instructor to answer individual questions, it really falls to the participants in these fora to support each other. I can say with complete honesty that I would not have passed a couple of these courses without the help of my fellow classmates through these fora.

Results may vary

While all the courses followed a common format, the quality of the experiences was not the same. This shouldn't be surprising; online courses can vary in quality just as much as face-to-face courses. I recently read an ironic (if not sadly funny) story about an online course to teach participants how to run online courses that went seriously awry. As the author of that story pointed out, it was only one instance and did not prove anything. However, it does seem to undermine the idea that online courses will simply steamroll over traditional education by way of simple standardization or a universal solution to teaching. Online courses can suck just as much as in-class courses. So there. Of course, I have never heard of an in-class course at my university being canceled in midstream in order to make adjustments. Usually someone has to be physically incapacitated or die (usually the instructor). But I digress.

Lessons learned

Here are some of the lessons I learned from my experience with Coursera and about online teaching:

• Online courses are no easier than in-class courses. Sure, you can 'attend' class while in your pajamas at home, but that's about the only easier part.
• Online classes require real time self-discipline from students (and instructors). Because online courses are asynchronous, you don't need to sit in a classroom at a specified time during the week, but you do need to figure out how to set aside adequate time for reviewing videos, reading literature, taking quizzes or tests, completing homework, accomplishing final projects, etc. Without time discipline, you will suffer and perform poorly and you might not learn much. Everyone must understand this before beginning an online course. I spent on average 15 - 20 hours a week on each course - maybe I'm just slow.
• "Mastery learning" works. Give students immediate and meaningful feedback immediately AND give them the opportunity to re-attempt homework or quizzes. This is most easily accomplished with the automatically graded quizzes, but it still requires forethought on the part of the instructors to provide useful feedback for incorrect answers as well as devising multiple opportunities to try again. Kudos to the crew from Rice University and Dr. Peng on this one.
• Peer assessment can be a real time saver for grading and it can be a meaningful experience IF the evaluation rubric is set up well. The idea of a grading rubric is simple enough, but it has to be written clearly enough so that anyone (not just the person who wrote it) can understand how to apply it. It helps to provide examples of what constitutes a "superb" versus a "good" analysis (although even those descriptors are so vague as to be useless). A better approach is to clearly identify what qualifies as a minimum level of quality for a given rating (e.g. "The methodology contains these three elements ..."). Also, peers must be able to submit written comments in addition to standardized ratings in order to explain their ratings. It's extremely frustrating to be downgraded for something and not know why or how to improve it. Again, kudos to Rice University and Dr. Peng.
• Narrated PowerPoint presentation lectures are still just PowerPoint presentations - only less exciting. Most of the video lectures in all three courses were essentially narrated PowerPoint presentations. However, the crew at Rice University did things which relieved some of the lecture tedium and, in some cases, actually made lectures fun. They varied the video lectures between still shots of PowerPoint slides, action shots of their computer screen as they worked through problems, action video of them talking and interacting with each other, and even regular gag skits. The variety in content and approach, and the regular movement on the screen really made a difference in helping to hold my attention. I especially liked the way they were able to integrate these little inset videos showing them talking while the larger image displayed either a slide or the speaker's screen. Good use of the technology and excellent co-teaching. Online instructors, are you listening?
• Interaction between students is crucial. I found out the hard way that you MUST read through the fora regularly to see what other people are talking about. Lectures and reading material cannot (and should not) make all of the intellectual connections or provide all of the answers. Participating in interactive fora is like participating in critical group activity - you end up feeling smarter and accomplishing more than you would on your lonesome. I was also really impressed by the degree of support that students were willing to give one another (without giving away the answers!). And it is amazing how helpful it can be when students simply share an "aha!" moment. However, the value of these fora, and how to properly engage in them, may not be apparent to everyone. Students must be told how to effectively get help and help themselves in this brave, new online world. Dr. Peng did an excellent job of explaining how to get help and ask questions in an online environment and it's definitely worth watching this lecture.

Although it ate up six months of my life, I am really glad that I took the time to experience how MOOCs work. I have brushed up on some technical skills. These experiences have also helped me, as a college professor, to think about my approach to online teaching and to teaching in general. Whatever else they may prove to be, MOOCs are an opportunity for faculty to learn from other faculty.

Making Decisions in a Climate of Doubt

A billboard by the Heartland Institute outside of Chicago, May 2012.

What's going on with climate change? How are we doing?

As of this writing, the concentration of CO₂ (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere, as recorded atop Mauna Loa mountain in Hawaii, is a little over 394 ppm (parts per million) and rising at an accelerating rate.    Carbon dioxide, as we all should now know, is the primary greenhouse gas that is driving anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) global climate change.  The higher the concentration, the greater the change.

For some time, climate scientists have warned that atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ above 350 ppm would take the planet into a realm that is outside of historic human experience.  Indeed, "350" has become the mantra of a global grassroots movement seeking political and social solutions to this imminent threat.  Atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ have exceeded 350 ppm since the late 1980s.  Given the current trajectory, some scientists and policy makers have proposed a new target.  In order to keep the change in global average temperature over the next century to less than 2 degrees Celsius (a small number with massive implications), we need to keep the concentration below 450 ppm.  At a recent open lecture at Northeastern University, Henry Jacoby, Professor of Applied Economics at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at MIT, warned, "We are about to blow through that level."  Massive change is going to happen.  He suggested, somewhat resignedly, that we will likely need to move the goal post back to something like 650 ppm - a concentration that projects a global average temperature rise somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 - 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.  This is a global temperature difference not seen since dinosaurs walked the earth.  No polar ice caps.  Sea levels from 30 to 120 meters higher than they are today.

There are lots of bright spots. Since about 2008, emissions of greenhouse gases from the wealthier, industrialized nations of the world have actually flattened, or even decreased.  This is good, although it appears to have had more to do with the economic recession and the rapid replacement of coal with suddenly cheaper natural gas (from fracking) than with with any deliberate effort.  Unfortunately, these decreases have been more than offset by rapid growth in emissions from industrializing nations, especially China and Brazil.

There is significant global action on climate change, but it is widely distributed or dispersed.  This action has been happening almost entirely at the local or regional level: by the European Union, by many states or provinces, by cities, and by a variety of non-governmental organizations, from businesses to non-profits.  Coordinated global action by the world's governments, however, is notably absent.  This absence of global leadership is striking.  The science around climate change has only improved.  The signals of rapid global change are not only clearer, but appear to be moving faster than even the worst case scenarios had predicted.  And for the last twenty years, it's been popularly assumed that a single, global treaty is the only viable way for the world to avert disruptive climate change. What happened to global leadership?  There is no simple answer to this question, but one issue that must be confronted is the role of the social and political movement against action on climate change.

The Kyoto Protocol was the first, and up to this point, last, serious international attempt at a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gases. The Kyoto Protocol was drafted in December 1997 by hundreds of delegates from around the world under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  It called for binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions, starting with the developed nations most responsible for the bulk of emissions to date.  At that time, the climate change policy debate was informed by more than three decades of accumulating scientific analysis from around the globe.  That's right, three decades.  Negotiations over this global treaty were intense and plagued by uncertainty, but advocates at the time had more than just decades of science on their side.  There was precedent for coordinated, global action on environmental threats.  Only a decade before, the U.S. led the charge on the Montreal Protocol.  This successful, global treaty banned the production of CFCs, a ubiquitous class of chemicals eating away at the ozone layer - a thin layer of gas in the atmosphere that protects life on Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. A variety of other international environmental efforts, from the control of transboundary air pollution to whaling, seemed to show that there could be coordinated, global action.

Proponents of the Kyoto Protocol argued that the science around climate change was well supported, the problem was urgent, action today would reduce the necessity of more costly and disruptive responses in the future, etc.  To a contemporary reader, what is probably most striking is how much these arguments haven't changed, and how they have only been reinforced by accumulating evidence and improved scientific understanding.  However, advocates of the Kyoto Protocol faced a new breed of political opposition.  New conservative organizations, many of which only emerged in the late 1980s, launched a well-funded and strategic campaign to cast doubt on scientific predictions about climate change and to thwart any policies aimed at controlling greenhouse gas emissions. In the early 1990s, these efforts were strengthened by a dramatic political shift in the U.S. that enabled conservative Republicans to take control of Congress, giving skeptical, conservative voices a powerful platform to amplify their message and to steer the U.S. away from making binding commitments. It was a critical moment in the incipient effort to tackle climate change, and we are still grappling with the implications of those decisions.

Today, it's hard to imagine a time when the issue of climate change wasn't polarized or partisan.  But there was a time, mostly before the late 1980s.  The political division over climate change that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s was profound, and it caught a lot of people off guard.  Some of the arguments against the Kyoto Protocol are still familiar and not particularly radical: concerns about impacts to the U.S. economy, concerns about imposing limits on the U.S. while allowing countries like China and India to continue unrestricted, concerns about the technical ability of the U.S. to even achieve the desired reductions.  There were, of course, more exotic arguments: the argument that more carbon dioxide will be good for plants and make the world greener, the argument that a warmer world will actually be more comfortable, etc.  But the most disruptive arguments have been the distortions and aspersions leveled at the science and scientists themselves.  Attacking the science seems to have sown confusion and left very little space for common ground.

During that last climate change lecture, Professor Jacoby asserted that the "Argument [against action on climate change] is not really about the science; it's about the role of government in your life."  Possibly.  It has often seemed that the debates have been at cross purposes; one side talking past the other.  For the scientifically-literate and the environmentally sensitive, the debate over whether to take action, or whether there even is a problem, has simply been baffling and frustrating.

It seems to me that the drama of climate change is not the increasingly dire message of impending catastrophe.  Rather, the drama is the political debate.  Climate change may be the biggest environmental threat ever faced by humanity, but it is the politics that poses the greatest challenge.

The story of the Kyoto Protocol is an excerpt from the chapter "Should the U.S. have signed the Kyoto Protocol?" in my book The Environment since 1945 (New York: Facts On File, 2012).