faulker083

An increasing number of US cities have adopted a Climate Action Plan (CAP). Just to name a few: Portland , Oregon; Chicago , Illinois; Boston , Massachusetts; and Minneapolis , Minnesota have adopted rigorous plans that define the threats Climate Change poses to their cities and how they plan to approach these issues. Although Climate Change is going to warm our planet’s entire atmosphere, it’s going to affect each community differently. Increasingly, cities will experience some combination of water shortages, more flooding, more public health issues due to their particular geography, finances, populations, and infrastructures.  So every community should have their own CAP.   A CAP isn’t just a sustainability plan that includes Climate Change; it’s a climate action plan that defines how sustainability must be viewed through the lens of Climate Change. For example, existing infrastructures—highways, water pipes—must not only be maintained, they must be made more resilient for t...

Something extraordinary is happening in Rochester, NY. As group of folks tried to get some media attention about sending two busloads of Rochesterians to the September 21, 2014 People’s Climate March in New York City, a rapidly growing umbrella organization formed to address Climate Change.  “ The Rochester People’s Climate Coalition (RPCC) was formed in September 2014 to mobilize our community to attend the People’s Climate March in New York City.  Within a few weeks, 30+ member organizations joined the coalition, including businesses, churches, political offices, environmental groups, and other nonprofits.  The RPCC continues to grow, collaborate, and build political power.  For a full list of member organizations and information on how to join the coalition, see  here .” A year later, RPCC has grown to over 60 coalition organizations with a proud list of accomplishments: ·          Candidate Forum 2015 : While muc...

In order to prevent confusion between past climate changes and this Climate Change, I humbly suggest that we capitalize this one. There’s something special about today’s Climate Change. It’s not like the other major climate changes, which have occurred throughout our planet’s history. So, for clarification, we should capitalize this manmade, unprecedented climate change event that has warmed the planet since about the mid 1800’s and continues to jeopardize our future. We often capitalize events that stand out as extraordinary—The Great Depression, the Middle Ages, the McCarthy Era, etc.—where we differentiate the specific from the common, so this wouldn’t really violate grammatical protocol or precedence. Of course we shouldn’t arbitrarily capitalize words willy-nilly according to our predilections or the whole idea of capitalization will lose its meaning. Reading old texts before the 1800’s can seem like a minefield of Attention-Getting words that no longer have the Impact they had on...

You’ve been traveling around in space for a while and during that time you’ve noticed that the coating on the spaceship’s exterior has been peeling off. Not much. A little here and a little there. On occasions, when your crew wasn’t busy with its mission and keeping the spaceship in working order, someone went outside the ship and touched up the coating. Business as usual. Then, a meteor shoots through your air system and you need to get back to Earth quickly. When you go outside to assess the damage from the meteor you realize that not only has the space fragment torn a hole in the ship but there are a lot of places missing the outside coating that you and your crew haven’t kept up with. At the same time you realize the spaceship will burn up upon reentry if the protective layer isn’t fixed immediately. Now, patching the coating takes top priority, even though there are a lot of other preparations just as critical that need to be made for a safe landing. One of the great big problems ...