Someone recently mentioned to me that they thought that the intellectual, logical approach to convincing people that there is a climate crisis with facts and figures only goes so far, only reaching those who take in information and make decisions that way. But others are on board and are convinced climate is changing because they see it with their own eyes and senses.

The Windows Around the World is such a powerful way of showing these observations of the daily cycle and over time…and comparing light and darkness in different lattitudes.

We are planning a big grassroots launch to the International Polar Year on March 1st using the theme of ice. It would be terrific to have schools and other communities around the world do their own demos through Windows, perhaps seeing how long it takes a five pound block of ice to melt in different locations/environments around the world. We’d have to work out some protocols, like put the block of ice out at 10 AM and record when it finally melts away. It might not be a great science experiment, but it might help make the point of changing seasons and climate…and how it differs around the world.

Just a wacky thought.

Mark, this sounds like an intriguing idea. You say it might not be a great science experiment, but looking back at my own life, I feel like it was a long string of imagination-provoking exercises like this that fueled the drive and the ability which eventually led to actually great science.

Climate is a part of place. Yi Fu Tuan’s environmental writing conveys Knowledge and love of place with descriptions, maps and itineraries enabling people to appreciate their location as do aborigines or animals. Such thoughts also enlivens the experience of everyday places with new facts and rhetorical devices that can “recalibrate familiar landscapes…to keep alive a sense of the undiscovered country of the nearby”. These notions direct both official and intuitive Knowledge toward “topophilia,” the love of place. I believe place and climate are shared. Perhaps it is best said as Climophila: love of weather???

No question in my mind that these kinds of lived experiences are what change our minds/opinions about our world. I watch my five year old learn about things in a similar hands on way–he picks out a book about warriors (Ah, five year old testosterone!) and then goes to the art room to make a Viking Warrior, his bow, and boat out of clay and cardboard, which he then laborioulsy paints. At the end he has all kinds of ideas about boats and water and sails, and what kind of fighting they could do in the water etc. My point is that these kinds of questions didnt result from reading lists or narratives of fact and history, but instead from spending the time translating those things through observation into form. This same process seems to be what your students are doing Juanita.

also, juanita, if its ever possible to organize, it would be great if you could post some of the kids writings/observations / journal entries, or anything that can show us how the project impacts them. I’m so curious.

Many of us are visual learners. So being able to see the arctic and not just rad about it or see one static image helps tremendously. Certainly the more senses that can be engaged the better the learning experience can be. I’ve dreamed about adding sound tot the program to help people get a better sense of what these environments are like.

somebody other than me should do a post on the definition of climate–it would be really wonderful to have a full sense of the scientific and cultural notions of this word as it is so rapidly accruing like iron filings to a magnet radically new associations–Safire should think about it for the Sunday Times. I always thought climate was not weather, but rather the statistical analysis of weather–thinking about weather in a place using data over time–a view of weather that is purely empirical data and that emphasizes time periods, eras, generations.