Al-Azhar University in Cairo To the graduating class of 2017 from the MA in Sustainability Program at Wake Forest University, Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability. This is a plea to use your education to craft possibilities and to create and maintain connections to address important issues in our world! When you graduate, you…
Botanical Gardens in Singapore: An Amazing Design An earlier blog commented on why design thinking was critical to solving sustainability challenges, this blog tells you more how to engage in design thinking. Designers tend to use a six-stage process to organize their fact finding and decision making: (1) Empathy, (2) Define, (3) Ideate, (4) Prototype,…
Design thinking is critical to creating a sustainable world. Design thinking is a field that uses designer’s sensibilities and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and viable to create innovations. Designers use all sorts of methods to empathize with people, create definitions of problems, craft prototypes, and gain feedback from those…
A review on Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religions (2012) by Eric Panicco, Business Analyst at Birdseye Renewable Energy. This is a powerful read, and while its central aim is not directly connected to sustainability, it provides insights that are valuable to sustainability professionals. Jonathan Haidt sets the scene…
In an earlier blog, I presented the CLIMATE model as a series of actions to mitigate climate change. This model continues to guide our exploration into how to get people to care and act. I also wrote two blogs (Blog 1 and Blog 2) on why people do not care and act. This commentary is about…
This is the second of two blogs about why people don’t care and why they don’t act. My view is that once we understand the “whys,” we can approach the “hows” of influencing people to take action on important environmental challenges. I’ll focus here on incentives, social biases, and information deficits. I believe that we do not…
Climate change label leads to climate science acceptance Study reveals that climate change could dramatically alter fragile mountain habitats Melting polar ice, rising sea levels not only climate change dangers What are we to make of these findings? Is climate change real? Important? Impactful? Turns out that the science of climate change is compelling, yet…
