Google and Global SchoolNet recently brought together students from around the world to collaborate online in brainstorming strategies for fighting global warming. The have collected a list of the top 50 ideas.

Hi, I’m a biological oceanographer by training and most of my research is focused on zooplankton, the little tiny animals in the ocean. Much of my work is done in the Arctic. Two years ago, I was working in the Beaufort Sea and I had the opportunity to develop an education and outreach program. While I was trying to think of what to develop I thought about my feeling, Knowledge and impressions of the arctic and I thought about what people say when they hear I am traveling there. This ranges from wonder and excitement to pity. While I can tell people about the light in the arctic at midnight in the summer or blue twilight at noon in the winter or the golden glow in the fall, it’s hard to understand unless you see it. I wanted to develop a program that would let people see the arctic and give children a chance to learn about polar regions and how they are similar and different to other regions. In seeing this, the children would begin to see and learn about the connections between regions. With this in mind, my husband Jim Rich and I developed the Windows Around the World program (www.WindowsAroundTheWorld.org ), that lets children, teachers, parents and anyone come and see what it looks like in different areas.

I am an Alaska Native, an Aleut, born and raised in the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea off the west coast of Alaska. My people have lived in intimate connection with the Bering Sea for almost ten thousand years, and we are still here with our connection still strong. Because of our intimate connection, we are able to notice the subtlest changes to the Bering Sea, and the fish and wildlife dependent on it, long before any highly trained scientist. Aleuts of the Pribilof Islands first noted anomalous things about wildlife that indicated that food stress was likely beginning and that this was likely an ecosystem-wide phenomenon. St. Paul Island, my home and home to some 500 Aleuts, was truly a magical, mystical place, hidden from the world by dense blankets of fog throughout the summer months. St. Paul was home to some of the largest cliff nesting seabird colonies in North America, two and a half million strong. And it was also the home of some 1.2 million northern fur seals (the largest fur seal colony in the northern hemisphere), as well as thousands of steller sea lions. In 1977, our people noted adult birds with their breast bones protruding, with chest muscles “caved in”; murre and kittiwake chicks (cliff nesting seabirds) falling off of cliff ledges and dying in larger numbers than normal; fur seal pelts so thin that we could see light through them when the fat was fleshed off; and sea lions chasing after and eating fur seal pups in greater frequency than any other time in living memory. From this, Aleuts knew that there was big trouble, and that it encompassed the entire Bering Sea because near-shore foragers, distance foragers, depth foragers, and surface foragers were all indicating food stress. Indeed, since this time, these animals having been precipitously declining in populations.

I’ve been working on an interdisciplinary collaborative hybrid art/research project for the last year and a half. Its called Arctic Listening Post and includes a series of works that explore our cultural imaginary of the Arctic, particularly focusing on climate change. This networked conversation, Climate Commons, began as I spent a year in a research blog project, Deepnorth, a virtual expedition to the North Pole, in which I gathered from the internet each day an image, a fact, or a story, and slowly accrued a kind of narrative mapping of the representations of the North Pole, from science, history, sports feats, mass media, art, fiction, and politics.

And does it matter if our food chain consumes 20% of our fossil fuel budget?

I am currently “digesting” Michael Pollan’s book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, Joe D’Aleo’s “Alternative view of climate change” slide deck from his presentation at the 7th Southern New England weather Conference on October 28th, 2006, and Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. Talk about a lot of moving parts in many dimensions - with many apparent contradictions, ambiguities and uncertainties.

I have just started to blog on this over on Greater Democracy at [permalink]. Download D’Aleo’s slide decks [here].

D’Aleo presents a range of interesting data that does not appear to fit “conveniently” with the dominant global warming theories. He reports, for example, that Mt. Kilamanjoro is actually getting colder as the snows recede. So why are they receding? D’Aleo suggests it is because there is less snow fall to replace the snow that naturally evaporates. And why less snow? Because of variations in sun energy output and cyclical changes in sea conditions.

After implementing environmental standards, why does green architecture look so bland? Passive cooling, low flush toilets, and harvested lumber do not foreground evocative design. During the last two decades, the prevalent challenge for the sustainable design movement in the United States has been to sluggishly modify the behavior of the developers, architects, and planners responsible for the sizable majority of new projects. From this outlook, it’s not salient ensembles but uniform conventions that ought to stand as the peak objective for green advocates. I’ve considered such standardized aspirations as limiting and myopic. We need more “design” in green design and less limiting conventions.