COM455—Science and Communication in a Century of Limits
Offered as COM410.0001 Spring, 2010
Dr. Patrick Logan
Department of Communication Studies, URI, Kingston RI 02881
Phone: 401-874-2970; Fax: 401-874-4722
Email: mayfly@uri.edu

grading | reading list

Note: The department and college have approved this course for eventual offering as COM455. COM410.0001 is proposed as a temporary offering for spring, 2010, and COM455 is proposed as a permanent course thereafter.

COURSE GOAL

There is abundant evidence for an unprecedented 21st Century struggle caused by limits to the planet's ability to both meet human resource demands and to absorb residuals of human society. Attention is directed to communications about global climate change, peak oil, soil and water depletion, over-harvesting of forests and fisheries, exhaustion of critical industrial ores and minerals, and pollution of the air and water on an unprecedented planetary scale. We will study how scientists reason about observations and uncertainties in contemplating what we must do to avoid possible global catastrophe during the Century of Limits and how scientific reasoning and awareness is either effectively communicated or systematically distorted, interfering with development of critical planetary social movements and public actions.

PREREQUISITES

As a capstone of the URI Sustainability minor, this course is for students with varied backgrounds in sustainability and communications. Background readings will address possible knowledge or philosophical gaps and lectures will address the fundamentals of scientific understandings of the specific weekly topics, allowing us to then focus on how science is being conveyed, effectively or not, from the science discourse communities to the public. Note that students should be prepared for substantial reading and reflective writing.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Students will be better able to identify critical issues of 21st Century global limits and to articulate the nature of challenges humanity faces from planetary climate change, peak oil, water shortages, etc. Students will be cognizant of difficulties posed by the inability or unwillingness of the scientific community to effectively engage the public for informed development of appropriate public policy, alterations in private enterprise, or changes in individual consumerism. Students will be better prepared to assess the use and abuse of scientific approaches—the normal limits understood by scientists to apply to scientific reasoning, the nature and mechanisms of scientific skepticism, the rhetorical conventions of scientific discourse communities, and the unreasoning abuses associated with pseudo-scientific contrarianism or self-serving systematic distortion of scientific perspectives and approaches. The instructor will also devote significant attention to improving student ability to write concisely and correctly about matters of scientific importance as they are conveyed to the public.

TEXTS

The primary texts include 12 online lectures, synopsized below, which will be written and posted online. Additional contemporary or classical readings from Science, the New York Times, etc., will be posted online. Supplementary reading material to augment background knowledge for non science majors will also be posted online. (See Readings)

FORMAT & GRADING

We will have two weekly classes, one for lecture and one for discussion. We will focus on analysis of assigned reading materials. This course is reading and writing intensive; there will be 4 short essays and a final paper. Grades are based on these plus degree and quality of participation (including but not limited to simple attendance). (See Grading).

ATTENDANCE

Students should be prepared to think long, hard, and deeply in this course, and to reflect the seriousness of the subject matter with their attendance, diligent preparation, and activity in class.

SCHEDULE (Spring, 2010)

Class: TTh 3:30PM - 4:45PM, room TBA
Office hours: see Dr. Logan's Teaching and Office Schedule.

COURSE OUTLINE

Week 1 (Jan. 25-29)

The Systems Approach

Course mechanics: Course syllabus, readings, written assignments and evaluations, interactions with the instructor.

Lecture:
Title: "The Language and Presentational Style of Systems Science Applied to Complex Ecologic and Economic Systems."
Synopsis: For the public to comprehend unprecedented planetary threats of population growth, resource exhaustion, and biosphere destruction, wider adoption of a more sophisticated world view is essential. Conceptual understanding may come from assimilation of a technical perspective derived from the engineering field of systems science. Critical concepts include notions of human responses to global limits, expressed in terms of global carrying capacities, exponential growth, overshoot. Fundamental understanding of a broad class of systems dynamics problems—including climate change, peak oil, and the threat of economic collapse—may be derived from systems dynamics, made practical through development of discrete computer simulations employing a rich conceptual vocabulary employing terms including feedback loops, linear and non-linear quantitative behaviors, etc., captured through isolation and quantification of individual systems components, viewed as freebody models. Exposure to systems dynamic thinking prepares the student to view complex systems in all of their richness and numerical sophistication with a vocabulary that is broadly applicable.

Readings and References:

Week 2 (Feb. 1-5)

Human Population

Lecture:
Title: "Conveying Limits on the Numbers of People and the Effect of High Densities on Quality of Future Life."
Synopsis: Exponential growth of human populations conflicts regionally—and, increasingly, globally—with limits imposed by natural resources and the capacities of ecological sinks (the atmosphere, land and soils, fresh waters, and the ocean) to absorb the residuals of human settlements, agriculture, and industry. Writers on this conflict—Malthus, Ehrlich, and the Paddock brothers—have sounded alarms, yet the American public is largely inured to the conflict. Public awareness requires understanding of basic demographic concepts, including exponential and logistic growth, skewed and stable age distributions, and per capita resource consumption.

Readings and References:

Week 3 (Feb. 8-12)

Feeding and Watering a Hungry Planet

Lecture:
Title: "Arguing with Numbers—Who will feed China? Who will feed Rhode Island?"
Synopsis: For most of the 130,000 years since Homo sapiens appeared, humans were hunter-gatherers, existing in small bands that lived off the land, eating what plants it could find and animals it could kill. Agriculture appeared some time after the last ice age (i.e., within the last 15,000 years. Slow but nearly exponential growth was facilitated by gradual clearing of land for crops and pastures, with relatively recent improvements in fertilization and irrigation permitting all but a small percentage of people to escape the primary occupation of producing food. But we have cleared much of the landscape, and tapped most of the rivers, causing World Watch Institute's Lester Brown to ask (1995) Who Will Feed China? This lecture asks, and attempts to answer, what does it take to feed the human population today, is there adequate land and water to meet short and long term needs, and for how much longer? Concepts include harvest rates for sustainable fisheries, forests, and farms; sources and sustainability of fertilizers for the Green Revolution; the agricultural potential for biotechnology; and sources of fresh water for food production.

Readings and References:

Week 4 (February 15-19)

Climate Change, Part 1: The Science Behind Global Climate Change

Lecture:
Title: "What do we Know about Global Climate Change and How Are we Getting the Word Out?"
Synopsis: If human beings must live within the constraints of global limits to resources and sinks, the global climate change phenomena represent the broadest manifestation of limits to a sink; that is, what are the boundary conditions whereby the atmosphere can absorb the residual gases from human settlements, industries, agriculture, and transportation without changing in ways that are harmful to the planet? This week we will survey some of the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 Reports, attempting to understand a few of the basic measures of change. Concepts include radiative forcing functions, greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor), the ozone layer, major components of climate (air temperature, moisture content, circulation patterns, precipitation, ocean temperatures, hurricane intensity and duration in response to warming oceans, melting of the polar, Greenland, and glacial ice masses, etc.).

Readings and References:

Week 5 (February 22-26)

Climate Change, Part 2: The Communications Behind Global Climate Change Denial

Lecture:
Title: "How can we Best Convey the Meaning of Climate Change, Urge People to do About it, and Out-debate Deniers and Contrarians?"
Synopsis: Implications of global climate change include the effects of rising sea levels, spreading desertification in southern North America, northern Africa, southern Europe, and central Asia, with other climate changes. Responses include awareness of impacts and vulnerability and altering of human economic activities to lower emissions as much as possible as fast as possible. Economic costs of avoiding anthropogenic global warming range from 1-5% of GDP, but estimated costs of doing nothing may exceed 20% of GDP, according to the Stern Review. Critical considerations include alterations in global capacity to grow food, alterations of natural ecosystems and extinction of species, and the possibility of permanent shifts in planetary climate. There are, however, several vocal critics and deniers of the science, and these have largely impaired action on a scale that may be necessary. We'll look at the debate within the climate and hurricane forecasting community, within the economic community, and within politics and ask "Is Failure to Communicate Behind American Failure to Lead Societal Change to Respond to Critical Global Limits?" "What are the messages of climate change and how and why are they being delivered?" "How can scientists and their publicists (e.g., Mr. Gore) do better?" "Are personal greed and academic timidity preventing scientists from delivering critical messages?" "How and why are government messages being delivered, to what effect, and can politicians do better?" and "Is supercapitalism and transnational corporate greed systematically distorting communications between the scientific community and the public?"

Readings and References:

Week 6 (March 1-5)

Peak Oil, Part 1: The Science and Engineering of Oil and Energy Alternatives

Lecture:
Title: "Seeing the Liquid Fossil Fuel Era as A Blip on the Scale of Time: Motivating Massive Public Change."
Synopsis: Is the party really over? The science behind estimating reserves and depletion rates suggests that we are now on the down side of the oil age; oil production peaked in 2005 and is likely to decline for the rest of the century. If so (we'll examine contrarian arguments), this implies an end to the automotive age, and an eventual end to suburbia as we have known it for more than a half century. Implications for transportation, industry, domestic settlements, and agriculture are immense and unprecedented in human history. But what about alternative energy sources? Understanding of future potentials requires understanding of concepts of energy gain for each alternative; in the end, nothing will be as easy to obtain, as abundant, or as profitable in energy gain as oil. Burning coal has to take into account huge consequences for global climate change. Uranium and the fission option is limited. Fusion is as yet an unproven possibility. What will be the most likely progression into the post-oil era? Understanding the future is more than an exercise in science fiction. But why is there so little awareness and so little concern at the beginning of the century? What should be the messages, and how should they be delivered to the public?

Readings and References:

Week 7 (March 8-12)

Peak Oil, Part 2: Critical 21st Century Adjustments to Urban and Suburban Infrastructure

Lecture:
Title: "Language and Narrative for Sustainable and Transitional Communities."
Synopsis: Urban and suburban infrastructure, largely built since the 1950s, is being challenged by peak oil and global climate change. This lecture will pose a series of questions for students to ponder about the fate of this infrastructure and the preanalytic vision (Schumpeter) that causes us to view it as normal and desirable (or not?): How likely is it that we will want to or be able to maintain today's suburban, non agricultural life style? Is Sustainability a useful concept in community design, and are sustainable practices such as recycling, green commercialism, and bio fuels appropriate responses or delusional distractions? Is there a viable grassroots alternative movement, the transitional communities of Rob Hopkins, and how could this transform local and regional society? Are any of these issues adequate to awaken a moribund public, or sufficient to generate massive social transformation on the scale necessary to address needs as the century progresses? This lecture will address some of the ways these issues are being formulated and the appearance of early stages of critical local, national, and planetary debates underlying human response to global climate change and planetary limits to growth.

Readings and References:

Week 8 (March 15-19)

Communicating the Future, Part 1

(March 10 is mid-semester.)

Lecture:
Title: "Pessimism—Communicating a Culture of Calamity and a Rhetoric of Catastrophe"
Synopsis: History abounds with stories of the collapse of earlier civilizations that succumbed to famine, disease, or warfare, but modern civilization imagines itself to be beyond the grips of history. Still, Rozario and others suggest that a certain fascination and titillation associated with historical disasters—The San Francisco Earthquake, the Chicago Fire, or World Wars—and amplified in modern mega-disaster films—The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, The Day After Tomorrow—create a culture in which calamity may be anticipated with a degree of desire. The actual processes of collapse may be more subtle and gradual than the public can understand, as history suggests. Is Lovelock's projection of climate disaster and population crash (to a half billion by 2100 for a global population) something we have been trained to anticipate with a sense of excitement and pending thrill? Is McCarthy's post-apocalyptic Road our road in the future? What tools are at hand that serve to stimulate useful thinking about future challenges, should the world enter a period of severe struggles due to global climate change and loss of liquid fossil fuels?

Readings and References:

Week 9 (March 29-April 2)

Communicating the Future, Part 2

March 22-28 is Spring Break!

Lecture:
Title: "The Case for Optimism and Realism—Framing a Strategic Withdrawal or a Transition."
Synopsis: While some may argue that large scale technology will afford a long-term continuation of contemporary (consumption-oriented, high energy, high emissions) culture, others suggest varying degrees of smooth or rough transitions for at least the rest of the century. We can use fiction to imagine what a few (more optimistic) futures might look like. Cotter's Roberta's Woods suggests a subtle shift, brought home by the local setting of western Rhode Island in 2013. Kunstler imagines a gentle landing in a post-grid-collapse World Made by Hand. Limits to Growth posits a small set of model projections suggesting likely courses for global population, resources, and quality of life indicators through 2100 (few of which end well). Both fictional and predictive means of communication have thus far failed to create a social attachment or ownership of the future, but rather are too easily dismissed as daydreams about future states over which humankind have neither individual nor collective control. This leaves us ill prepared to consider the critical question of creating an aware public capable of deciding future states for itself, within planetary resource and sink constraints.

Readings and References:

Week 10 (April 5-9)

Communicating the Future, Part 3

Lecture:
Title: "Living Within the Limits: Communications to Create Social Movements for Change Based on Scientific Assessment of Alternative Futures."
Synopsis: If change is necessary and the natural sciences are increasingly aware of global limits and the need for substantive, broad social change, why don't human regulatory sciences cause us to act appropriately? How do personal biases, desires, entitlements, and greed shape our collective ability to communicate scientific information about the near and long-term future? How does scientific thinking—logic following the scientific method, open reasoning, skepticism, and development of consensus among experts—work, and why isn't science doing a better job of communicating with the public through the political process? How do computer simulations work, how can they be used to guide policy decisions, and what do we to with the critical difference between scientific reasoning, demands for proof, and anti-scientific contrarianism? What special obligations fall on the science discourse communities to act in the face of public apathy or political systematic distortions of critical information about the future? Can scientists accelerate stages of change that begin with public mourning (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) for the loss of mythical (high energy and high consumption, pastoral utopian) futures?

Readings and References:

Week 11 (April 12-16)

The Special Role of Higher Education in Shaping the Future

Lecture:
Title: "The Rhetorical University in the Century of Limits: Getting Higher Education Engaged as a Critical Agent of Societal Change."
Synopsis: In confronting the future, students need avenues allowing them to bypass a nearly overwhelming sense of "I can't do anything about it," to a more productive notion of "We must do something," a critical development in a social movement from H. sapiens individualis to H. sapiens socialis. In this lecture, we assess the prospects for rapid global change in human outlook and behavior, and the relative roles of government, the private enterprise system, and higher education. In particular, we examine the possibility for a further evolution of the Land Grant philosophy, going beyond practical education, discovery, and outreach for the benefit of the national economy, reaching for a new level of social engagement for broad changes necessary for a transitional and ultimately constrained human society. Of special interest is the role of higher education is challenging society to reach for higher purposes, and the contemporary university as a stimulant and regulator for paced social change. The lecture features the instructor's own data gathering on the current status of transitional curricula in higher education.

Readings and References:

Week 12 (April 19-23)

Religion and Environmentalism

Lecture:
Title: "Religion as an Agent of Change in the Century of Limits."
Synopsis: The emergence of green evangelical religious movements contrasts with widespread notions of a devil-take-all (except us!) Rapture. Convolution of religious right with trans-national corporations, Chicago School economics, and right wing just-say-no politics provides a high level of political energy, without adequate useful direction. What will be the role of human values in determining human responses to the challenges of the future? Are individual reproductive freedoms in conflict with a need to restrain population growth? Is faith in technology a possible new form of religion? Is an unquestioning faith that supernatural forces will provide for future needs at odds with the need for individual or collective societal constraints on consumption? Are biblical ideas of stewardship useful in creating future ecological social movements, or are Calvinistic concepts of wealth entitlement for virtuous living more likely to prevail? Will religious sectarianism pervert development of national and international social unity, or will similar national chauvinism create an us-versus-them barrier to collaboration?

Readings and References:

Week 13 (April 26-30)

Meditations

Lecture:
Title: "Reflections on Personal Choices in an Age of Social Crisis."
Synopsis: Ultimately, acting alone will not suffice for human beings to address the challenges of the century of limits. The survivalist hoarder of gasoline and shotgun shells has less chance of success than those who can develop resilient communities and regions by banding together. But at what cost does the individual sacrifice self for public good, and how does one weigh practical alternatives between working for social change and working for self-preservation in the years ahead? More importantly, what are the qualities of life that make it worth surviving, and what does reflection on this tell us of the balance between sciences, technologies, and humanities that characterize an enlightened society? In the end, selfishness may well end up serving us poorly, and altruism may hold the key for human survival; but what does tell us about how we must live today?

Student Critique of the Course: Reflections on the course, and comments and suggestions for future improvements.

Readings and References:

(Monday, May 3, is the last day of classes; we do not meet on week 15.)