The End of the Long Summer
Introductory Course for The Adaptability Project
Wedesday evenings, 6:30 - 8:30 pm
Free overview Wednesday, March 10
Sliding scale fees : $95 - $195
Euglena is proud to offer this 4-week introductory overview of Diane Dumanoski's book, The End of the Long Summer : Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth - outlining Dumanoski's main points that motivate and inform our Adaptability Project.
This starting point is necessary so that all participants in the project have a common vocabulary and base understanding of the foundational ideas and problems. Our assertion is that we must have a common understanding of a problem before we can solve it, and Dumanoski's book provides a brilliant overview and broad-ranging assessment that we find to be an extremely useful starting point.
The course focuses on a discussion of the main points of Dumanoski's book:
- The history of the factors that have led humans to the current crisis, focusing on economic issues and energy
- Lessons that we have learned – and others that we should have learned, but didn't – from the ozone hole.
- A succinct overview of Earth's current climate crisis, focusing on the dangerous public misconception that climate change will be a smooth, gradual process occurring over a century, when in reality, it will very likely be manifest as a sudden, rapid jump characterized by extreme chaos in the climate system.
- Lessons that we can glean and use from the 2 million year history of our species, notably that our species both survived and evolved during the extremely volatile ice ages.
- The dangers of geoengineering – planetary-scale modifications attempting to ameliorate the climate crisis.
- How we can make our culture more shock-proof by reducing globalization, and applying principles that make natural ecosystems more stable.
- The need for a new “cultural map” - shared ideas about ourselves, nature and our relationship to the Earth – replacing the current map based in the outdated notion of nature as a machine with a more realistic worldview based in Gaia as both science and metaphor.
The course also includes a lecture adapted from our basic principles course about concepts relevant to understand the book: feedback (positive and negative), nonlinearity, system states, critical thresholds (tipping points) and geophysiology (Gaia theory). Participants will receive a full set of notes summarizing each chapter.
We will repeat this course bimonthly in 2010. This introductory seminar will be followed by an optional in-depth discussion on that very rich book.