Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: sustainability

Can anyone suggest how we can prevent this from happening to us?

Summary: Air pollution and global warming will ascend to the top cause of death in the next three decades, say researchers from the University of Southern California. The scientists add that the polluted air will lead to a rise in lung disease, heart attacks, and strokes. [This article first appeared on the LongevityFacts.com website. Author: Brady Hartman.]

A pair of expert scientists from the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles says that global warming and air pollution will ascend to the top cause of death due to “ischemic heart disease, stroke, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease.”

Citing cite nearly a dozen studies on the effects of air pollution on human health, experts Caleb E. Finch, Ph.D. a molecular biologist and Edward L. Schneider, MD predict that.

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[This article is drawn from Ch. 8: “Pedagogical Love: An Evolutionary Force” in Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures.]

“There is nothing more important in this world than radical love” as Paolo Freire told Joe Kincheloe over dinner.

- Joe Kincheloe. Reading, Writing and Cognition. 2006.

And yet, we live in a world of high-stakes testing, league tables for primary schools as well as universities, funding cuts, teacher shortages, mass shootings in schools, and rising rates of depression and suicide among young people.

The most important value missing from education today is pedagogical love.

In “Pedagogical Love: An Evolutionary Force” (Ch. 8 of Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures) I explain why love should be at centre-stage in education. I introduce contemporary educational approaches that support a caring pedagogy, and some experiences and examples from my own and others’ practice, ending with some personal reflections on the theme.

Why do we want to educate with and for love? We live in a cynical global world with a dominant culture that does not value care and empathy. We live under the blanket of a dominant worldview that promotes values that are clearly damaging to human and environmental wellbeing. In many ways our world, with its dominance of economic values over practically all other concerns, is a world of callous values. And recently we’ve embarked on a flight from truth.

In the search for truth, the only passion that must not be discarded is love. Truth [must] become the object of increasing love and care and devotion.

- Rudolf Steiner. Metamorphoses of the Soul, Vol. I. 1909.

What a contrast Steiner’s early 20th century statement is to the lack of a love for truth that abounds in fake news in our post-Truth world. Canadian holistic educator, John Miller points to the subjugation of words like love in contemporary educational literature in the following quote:

The word ‘love’ is rarely mentioned in educational circles. The word seems out of place in a world of outcomes, accountability, and standardised tests.

- John Miller. Education and the Soul. 2000.

British educational researcher, Maggie MacLure speaks about the obsession with quantitative language in education in the UK: “objectives, outcomes, standards, high-stakes testing, competition, performance and accountability.” She argues that the resistance to the complexity and diversity of qualitative research that is found in the evidence-based agendas of the audit culture is linked to “deep-seated fears and anxieties about language and desire to control it.” In this context it is not hard to imagine that words like love might create what MacLure calls ontological panic among the educational audit-police.

In spite of these challenges several educational theorists and practitioners emphasise the importance of love—and the role of the heart—in educational settings. If young people are to thrive in educational settings, new spaces need to be opened up for softer terms, such as love, nurture, respect, reverence, awe, wonder, wellbeing, vulnerability, care, tenderness, openness, trust.

Awe, wonder, reverence, and epiphany are drawn forth not by a quest for control, domination, or certainty, but by an appreciative and open-ended engagement with the questions.

- Tobin Hart. Teaching for Wisdom. 2001.

Arthur Zajonc has developed an educational and contemplative process that he calls an “epistemology of love.” Mexican holistic education philosopher, Ramon Gallegos Nava, refers to holistic education as a “pedagogy of universal love.” Other important contributions to bringing pedagogical love into education include Nel Noddings extensive writings on “an ethics of care”, Parker Palmer’s “heart of a teacher” and Tobin Hart’s deep empathy.”

The caring teacher strives first to establish and maintain caring relations, and these relations exhibit an integrity that provides a foundation for everything teacher and student do together.

- Nel Noddings. Caring in Education. 2005.

But the dream of the nanofabricator is not yet dead. What is perhaps even more astonishing than the idea of having such a device—something that could create anything you want—is the potential consequences it could have for society. Suddenly, all you need is light and raw materials. Starvation ceases to be a problem. After all, what is food? Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulphur. Nothing that you won’t find with some dirt, some air, and maybe a little biomass thrown in for efficiency’s sake.

Equally, there’s no need to worry about not having medicine as long as you have the recipe and a nanofabricator. After all, the same elements I listed above could just as easily make insulin, paracetamol, and presumably the superior drugs of the future, too.

What the internet did for information—allowing it to be shared, transmitted, and replicated with ease, instantaneously—the nanofabricator would do for physical objects. Energy will be in plentiful supply from the sun; your Santa Clause machine will be able to create new solar panels and batteries to harness and store this energy whenever it needs to.

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Climate Change Research: our team came up with this concept — https://www.behance.net/gallery/59176073/Climate-Change This team tested an instrument that gathers key data about aerosols—small, solid or liquid particles suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere—to better to assess their effects on weather, climate and air quality.

We recently put an instrument to the test that gathers key data about aerosols—small, solid or liquid particles suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere—to better to assess their effects on weather, climate and air quality. See what happened: http://go.nasa.gov/2BfdJdL

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There have been a lot of doubts and confusion around Elon Musk’s claim that the first payload of SpaceX’s new Falcon Heavy will be his own original Tesla Roadster.

But now it looks more real than ever as we get to see the first image of the electric vehicle being turned into a payload.

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“Building a house by hand can be both time-consuming and expensive. Some homebuilders have chosen to automate part of the construction instead.”

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Materials chemists have been trying for years to make a new type of battery that can store solar or other light-sourced energy in chemical bonds rather than electrons, one that will release the energy on demand as heat instead of electricity — addressing the need for long-term, stable, efficient storage of solar power.

Now a group of materials chemists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst led by Dhandapani Venkataraman, with Ph.D. student and first author Seung Pyo Jeong, Ph.D. students Larry Renna, Connor Boyle and others, report that they have solved one of the major hurdles in the field by developing a polymer-based system. It can yield energy storage density — the amount of energy stored — more than two times higher than previous polymer systems. Details appear in the current issue of Scientific Reports.

Venkataraman and Boyle say that previous high energy storage density achieved in a polymeric system was in the range of 200 Joules per gram, while their new system is able to reach an average of 510 Joules per gram, with a maximum of 690. Venkataraman says, “Theory says that we should be able to achieve 800 Joules per gram, but nobody could do it. This paper reports that we’ve reached one of the highest energy densities stored per gram in a polymeric system, and how we did it.”

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Although solar panels might appear bright and shiny, in desert environments, where they are most frequently installed, layers of dust and other particles can quickly coat their surface. These coatings can affect the panels’ ability to absorb sunlight and drastically reduce the conversion of the sun’s rays into energy, making it necessary to periodically wash the panels with water. But often, in areas like Nevada, water resources are scarce.

Consequently, NEXUS scientists have turned their attention toward developing technologies for waterless cleaning. NASA has already been using such techniques to wash panels in the lunar and Mars missions, but their developed methodologies prove too expensive for widespread public application. NEXUS scientist Biswajit Das of UNLV and his team are aiming to develop a water-free cleaning technology that will be cost-effective for large-scale photovoltaic generation, whereby they look to nanotechnology, rather than water, to clean the panels. “Our mission is to develop a waterless, or at least a less-water cleaning technique to address the effect of dust on solar panels,” Das says. “Once developed, this method will significantly reduce water use for the future PV generation.”

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