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Issue 6 | December 2016
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Already in the Anthropocene, and entering into the Trumpocene on planet Earth, we find it more important than ever to work to meet people where they are and ‘re-tell climate change stories’ from a range of perspectives, thereby providing opportunities to make sense of 21st century changes in the climate. Moreover, we are more determined than ever to help students build confidence and competence in order to deepen our understanding of how to effectively address issues associated with climate change.
The chosen name of our project – Inside the Greenhouse – acknowledges that, to varying degrees, we are all implicated in, part of, and responsible for greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. So in our efforts we treat this ‘greenhouse’ as a living laboratory, an intentional place for growing new ideas and evaluating possibilities to confront climate change through a range of creative communication approaches.
This Fall has been a wonderfully productive time Inside the Greenhouse. Read below for some samplings of our activities and ongoing commitments. Also, your support is critical as we collectively more forward. Please visit our donation page to provide a tax-deductible gift. Any amount helps.
Up with hope,
Beth Osnes, Max Boykoff Rebecca Safran
(Inside the Greenhouse co-directors)
Course Spotlight
Our Film and Climate Change class: an update from the end of the eighth term
by Rebecca Safran
It is hard to believe we’re nearing the end of the eighth semester of the class on Film and Climate Change! As this newsletter goes out, the students are busily preparing their final film project which will be showcased at our annual Climate Change and Film Festival (Friday, December 9th, 5 – 8 pm, in Atlas 100 on the CU Boulder campus, open to all!). We have had a busy term and the students have been great from start to finish.
I have had the great fortune to work alongside Ben Crawford and Barbara MacFerrin this term, two star students from the 2015 Film and Climate Change class. We ask a lot of our students; their first film project – a self-reflection piece modeled after the StoryCorps project – is due two weeks into the term. This gets their feet wet with filming and editing and most importantly the art of storytelling. Read more …
Collaboration Highlight
For the past three semesters, Inside the Greenhouse has collaborated with the innovative More Than Scientists (MTS) project, primarily through our class activities and composition works. The MTS project features climate scientists in their own words, capturing on they think and feel about climate change. MTS works to show that scientists aren’t just studying the world, by they are also living in it.
Groups of students in our courses have taken advantage of the high concentration of climate scientists in our local area, and have interviewed researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Renewable Energy Laboratories, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and various other units at CU-Boulder (e.g. Atmospheric Sciences Department, Environmental Studies Program, Geography Department, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department) to depict a human and personal motivations behind their work in short-form videos. Read more …
Alum Spotlight
Meridith Richter is a senior Technology, Arts, and Media major and Computer Science minor who was an Inside the Greenhouse intern for the summer of 2016. During that summer, she documented the mounting of an original Inside the Greenhouse performance through CU’s Science Discovery camp.
“What are those black clouds with sad faces on them?” Meridith asked an eleven-year-old participant of SHINE: A Musical Performance for Youth Authored Resilience. They were looking down at the massive, hand-painted timeline the kids at the camp had created to illustrate the history of the Earth. It starts 300 million years ago in the Pennsylvanian Period, where the kids have painted trees and vines to portray a lush, vegetation-covered planet. The timeline moves through each subsequent period all the way to the present, where the ominously dark clouds in question hover over towering smokestacks and sputtering cars. Read more …
