background preloader

SUSTAINABILITY

Facebook Twitter

Www.laveritesurlescosmetiques.com. Gaia, la Terre mère, est-elle obligée d'aimer ses enfants ? - Idées. Sous-estimé en France, le penseur Bruno Latour est une star à l'étranger, où il développe l'une des théories les plus avant-gardistes sur l'avenir de la terre : celle de Gaia, un système complexe, fini et capable de s'autoréguler. Qui pose la question de la survie non-plus de la planète mais des humains. La scène se passe en février dernier, dans la très vieille et vénérable université d'Edimbourg. Une foule dense d'étudiants, d'enseignants, de curieux venus d'Ecosse et d'ailleurs se presse pour assister à un rendez-vous incontournable du monde intellectuel : les Gifford Lectures, des conférences sur la théologie, la philosophie et leur rapport à la science, données par la crème de la pensée occidentale depuis plus d'un siècle.

Hannah Arendt, John Dewey, George Steiner, Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky, Henri Bergson ou Raymond Aron y ont dispensé leurs lumières. Et ce 18 février 2013, c'est un Français à l'œil pétillant et aux sourcils broussailleux qui ouvre son cours. Gyre Expedition. The World's Most Beautiful Garbage Dump Is Spelled A-L-A-S-K-A. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the remote Aleutian Islands, the string of volcanic islands that hang like a diamond necklace between Alaska and Russia. On one trip, we kayaked for five weeks throughout the frigid waters and even climbed the volcanoes. We saw no one, not a tanker on the horizon, not a plane overhead, not a fishing boat. The only sign of man was the incredible amount of plastic pollution that had washed off ships and shore. Masses of fat rope and fishing nets, plastic beer cases from Japan, every imaginable size of plastic bottle and multicolored plastic broken into tiny bits—all of it driven high up onto island beaches by savage winter storms.

I still have a memento from that trip hanging in my garage, a wooden sign that says “Watch Your Step,” in Japanese. I flashed back to those weeks and that pollution while reading the dispatches from another Alaskan coast this summer, by my friend Carl Safina, prolific writer and president of the Blue Ocean Institute. Is the Internet Good for the Climate? . I gave the opening talk (and song) this morning at ScienceOnline Climate, a two-day meeting exploring the role of Web communication in fostering engagement on climate change research and its implications for society.

You can watch the sessions here and follow the discussion on Twitter via #ScioClimate. Read on for a few reactions to my talk, in which I posed the question “Is the Internet Good for the Climate?” And proposed that the answer, despite huge impediments, is yes. I’ll post a link to the full talk when it’s available. [Insert: On a related front, I just participated in a Google+ Hangout with Chris Hayes, Kate Sheppard, Joe Romm and others exploring the politics of climate, energy and power, the subject of a one-hour MSNBC program hosted by Hayes that airs tomorrow night.] In the introduction to my climate talk today, I describe the shift from the Cronkite model of communication (“That’s the way it is”) to the Instanet: “Uncertainty in science is a form of knowledge. Agreed!