[✔️] August 7, 2022 - Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*August 7, 2022*/

/[  Studying the consequences of failing to meet the future  ]/
*MalAdaptation - Lisa Schipper - The Perils of bad climate adaptation*
August, 5, 2022
In this ClimateGenn episode we are discussing the risk of maladaptation 
that can seriously undermine our efforts to tackle the climate 
challenges we know are coming towards us. Dr Lisa Schipper is an 
Environmental Social Science Research Fellow at the Environmental Change 
Institute at the University of Oxford whose work focuses on adaptation 
to climate change in developing countries, looking at factors that 
include gender, religion and culture, to understand what drives 
vulnerability.
As vulnerability and suffering increase, it is critical we are able to 
engage as many people as possible to help shape the solutions that 
benefit us all and avoid critical errors that can have long lasting 
detrimental effects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNcANXl_e7A

- -

/[  Study of maladaptation ]/
*Maladaptation: When Adaptation to Climate Change Goes Very Wrong*
Author  Lisa F.Schipper1
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2020.09.014
Adapting to climate change is necessary to ensure that the impacts will 
not overwhelm societies and ecosystems around the world. But planning 
adaptation is an exercise in uncertainty, and built on imperfect 
information, many adaptation strategies fail. Some go even further, 
creating conditions that actually worsen the situation; this is called 
maladaptation. Aside from wasting time and money, maladaptation is a 
process through which people become even more vulnerable to climate 
change. Poor planning is the primary cause of maladaptation, yet the 
diverse manifestations are complex, and identifying maladaptation in 
advance with certainty is difficult. Nevertheless, there is now 
sufficient experience to give an indication of how maladaptation can 
take place, the contexts that may be more prone to such an outcome, and 
the design flaws in strategies that need to be avoided. Until adaptation 
projects directly address the drivers of vulnerability, however, 
maladaptation will continue to be a risk.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332220304838

/
/

///[ planetary May Day - from George Monbiot ]/
*MONBIOSIS with George Monbiot: Ep2 - Tipping Points*
Dec 14, 2021  George Monbiot tackles key themes in the climate debate, 
setting out the challenges and proposing a radical agenda for how we can 
meet them.
Episode 2 - Tipping Points: As complex systems approach irreversible 
tipping points we see them start to flicker. We see wilder and wilder 
fluctuations. Look at what’s happened in 2021. The heat domes over North 
America, fires across Siberia, huge floods in West Africa, China and 
northern Europe… a great global flickering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAQFWQg67gg



/[ I must save and re-read these 2 essays ]/

/[ first of two from 
//https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-07-25/reclaiming-your-attention-is-key-to-cultivating-resilience-and-avoiding-burnout-part-1/ 
//]/
*Reclaiming Your Attention is Key to Cultivating Resilience and Avoiding 
Burnout: Part 1*
By Anna Ostermeier, originally published by Resilience.org
July 25, 2022
There’s a lot of bad news these days. Checking social media and news 
outlets can feel like being hit with wave after crashing wave of 
demoralizing stories on how our world is falling apart. The more 
involved you are in addressing pollution, biodiversity loss, climate 
change, white supremacy, homophobia, sexism, and other interconnected 
social and environmental issues, the more this constant influx may feel 
it’s pulling you under. This may be especially true if you’re directly 
impacted by them. As we collaboratively address these issues, and 
disrupt the underlying systems that drive them, it’s essential to build 
personal resilience, and by extension, our collective resilience.

I’ve been immersed in environmental issues since my first undergraduate 
year. My courses focused on what’s going wrong, why, and what can be 
done, but never gave me the tools I needed to build my own resilience as 
I faced these issues. By the time I reached my junior year, I felt shell 
shocked, defeated, and on the verge of complete burnout.

After finishing my Bachelor’s degree, I moved to Milwaukee to serve for 
two years as an AmeriCorps member with a non-profit called Milwaukee 
Riverkeeper. In that role, I was a co-creator and lead organizer for the 
Plastic-Free MKE Coalition, a collective of nonprofit organizations, 
government agencies, businesses, and volunteers working to eliminate 
plastic pollution in the Milwaukee area.

As I learned more about the deep and far-reaching harms of the plastic 
industry, fellow organizers and I were simultaneously met with state 
legislation and pandemic-related fear mongering by Big Plastic that 
limited the impact of our work. At the same time, pandemic isolation, 
economic hardships, and police murders of Black people across the 
country and in my own city were taking their toll. I could feel my 
personal resilience breaking down, and could sense it in other activists 
around me.

I’m now in a graduate program at the University of Michigan School for 
Environment and Sustainability, where I study environmental psychology, 
behavior change, education, and communications. Through my coursework 
and research I’ve come to understand the importance and power of 
accessible self-care practices for building personal resilience.

*Self-Care is Collective Care, Self-Care Transforms Systems*
The purpose of self-care is to ensure we’re our best selves so we have 
the capacity to envision a better future, and to collaborate, 
problem-solve, and care for each other as we move towards that vision. 
My faculty advisor, Dr. Raymond De Young, calls this idea the “Oxygen 
Mask Principle”. Anyone who has been on a commercial flight has heard 
the flight attendant say, “Should the cabin lose pressure, oxygen masks 
will drop from the overhead area. Place the mask over your own mouth and 
nose before assisting others.” In other words, caring for ourselves is a 
first, and vital, step to caring for others and the precious ecosystems 
we’re part of.

There is a great deal of power in the internal, hyperlocal, and 
small-scale work of self-care. In her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping 
Change, Changing Worlds, writer and social and environmental movement 
expert adrienne maree brown describes emergent strategy as “how we 
intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just 
and liberated worlds we long for.” A core principle of emergent strategy 
is that what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest 
scale by setting patterns for the whole system. Therefore, in order to 
create a system of collective care, we must practice that care on a 
personal level. Our own health and resilience determines the health and 
resilience of our interconnected social and ecological communities.

The concept of ‘directed attention’ from environmental psychology offers 
an approach to self-care that’s available to anyone. This approach can 
transform how you work and rest by fostering mindfulness and increasing 
your agency over your valuable mental resources.

*What is Directed Attention, Why Does it Matter, & How Does it Get 
Depleted?*
Most of us have our very own distraction machine – it’s probably sitting 
somewhere within ten feet of you right now! Through our phones, 
computers, and other devices, countless forms of digital media compete 
for our attention, using mechanisms intentionally designed to capture 
and hold our attention. While our devices and the internet can also be 
powerful tools for communicating with each other, learning, and 
organizing for the causes we care about, they are new and potent means 
for depleting our attentional capacities. The information available to 
us is abundant, but our attention is not.

Directed attention is the ability to inhibit external distractions and 
internal mental noise in order to concentrate on what we would like to 
be thinking or doing in that moment. Thus, it’s a particularly valuable 
form of attention that requires effort. Directed attention is essential 
for the self-awareness, social awareness, envisioning, planning, and 
goal-oriented actions required to address today’s intersecting social 
and environmental issues. But there’s one major challenge: all people 
have a limited amount of directed attention, and it inevitably depletes 
as we go about our daily activities.

When we experience directed attention fatigue, it can be difficult to 
focus, solve problems, think ahead, be civil to those around us, and be 
aware of our environment. The more our directed attention gets worn 
down, the more difficult it becomes to refocus after we get temporarily 
distracted, which in turn, more severely depletes the smaller amount of 
remaining attentional capacity. Moreover, unlike stress or physical 
tiredness, it can be hard to detect our own directed attention fatigue 
until it gets particularly bad.

There are countless factors that can wear down directed attention – more 
than I could possibly list here! These could fall under the information 
overwhelm umbrella, which includes distracting environments, 
multi-tasking, dealing with abstract information, prolonged uncertainty, 
overuse of directed attention, mental noise, and strong emotions. There 
can also be physical factors, like lack of sleep, physical pain or 
illness, and hearing or vision impairment.

Growing your understanding of directed attention, and what wears it 
down, is a first step to reclaiming control over your attention, and 
channeling it towards the intersecting environmental and social 
movements that are so vital to our collective resilience. Practicing 
this self-care on a personal level has the potential to not only help 
you persist in this work, but also transform the systems that drive many 
of today’s issues.

In the next article of this two part series,  I’ll focus on everyday 
practices for managing and restoring your directed attention.
—
Many thanks to Dr. Ray De Young, Clara Winter, Rob Dietz, and Amy 
Buringrud for your thoughtful input and editing of this article.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-07-25/reclaiming-your-attention-is-key-to-cultivating-resilience-and-avoiding-burnout-part-1/

- -

/[  Second of two from 
//https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-08-01/an-activists-guide-to-reclaiming-restoring-and-redirecting-your-attention-part-2/ 
]/
*An Activist’s Guide to Reclaiming, Restoring, and Redirecting Your 
Attention: Part 2*
By Anna Ostermeier, originally published by Resilience.org
August 1, 2022
As a young intersectional environmentalist I’ve come dangerously close 
to burnout multiple times, and I know I’m not alone. I think any one of 
us who’s aware of, involved in, and impacted by today’s interconnected 
social and environmental crises can feel overwhelmed, overworked, and 
overrun. Environmental psychology offers practices we can build into our 
daily lives that manage and restore a precious mental resource we all 
have: ‘directed attention’.

Directed attention is the ability to inhibit external distractions and 
internal mental noise in order to concentrate on what we would like to 
be thinking or doing in that moment. Though I’ll focus entirely on 
practical tips here, you can learn more about the concept of directed 
attention in part one  of this two part article series. These practices 
aren’t a cure-all or a silver bullet, but they’ve helped me persist in 
this work, even through intensive learning, facing hard truths, and 
plenty of obstacles.
*
**Practices for Managing Directed Attention**
**Choose the Right Environment*
I love working in coffee shops, in theory. However, environments like 
cafes can be pretty distracting between the constant flow of people 
moving in and out, overlapping conversations, and the racket of the 
espresso machine. For work that requires deep focus, it’s worth choosing 
an environment that’s quiet, comfortable, distraction-free, and feels 
safe to you.

*Identify Distractions*
What’s pulling your attention away from your work? In a quiet 
environment, chances are it’s a device like your phone, or perhaps the 
presence of other people. For me, in order to get real work done my 
phone needs to be out of sight, out of reach, and ideally in another 
room because even the presence of a phone can be a distraction.

*Don’t Try to Multitask*
Research shows that true multitasking isn’t possible. What we think of 
as multitasking is actually just rapidly shifting attention between 
multiple tasks rather than doing those tasks simultaneously. We deplete 
directed attention not just while doing each task, but also to manage 
the rapid switching between tasks. This results in doing each of these 
tasks more poorly than if we were to work on and complete one task at a 
time, and it more quickly exhausts our limited store of directed attention.

*Practices for Restoring Directed Attention*
Though the above steps help delay and minimize it, directed attention 
fatigue is a normal and inevitable part of our work, even when that work 
is highly meaningful to us. Based on Stephen and Rachel Kaplan’s 
Attention Restoration Theory (ART), integrating the following 
restorative practices into your day-to-day routines can prevent burnout 
and promote long-term personal resilience.

*Quiet Mental Noise*
Our brains are incredible – they are constantly processing information 
and solving problems in the background. But when emotions, anxieties, 
and to-do’s are tugging at our mental capacities, it’s difficult to 
think clearly and be present. There are many different methods of 
quieting this mental noise. Here are a few possibilities:

Address any leftover thoughts and check off easy to-do list items. For 
example, if I think of something I need to do later in the week, I’ll 
immediately add it to my calendar or jot it down on a sticky note so 
that it’s not lingering in the back of my mind.
Try seeing a therapist for expert support in expressing and addressing 
personal struggles. Though it’s no replacement for professional help, 
talking to a close and trusted friend is another option for working 
through issues that weigh on your mind.
Adopt regular mindfulness practices to clear and calm your mind – here 
are some you can do in just one minute.
Switch Between and Balance Tasks

In order to maintain your directed attention capacity, it’s essential to 
balance times of deep focus with rest – this balance should happen 
across your day, week, month, year, and even at higher timescales. To 
create this balance, you can change tasks relatively often, include 
unstructured time in your schedule, or organize your day according to 
when you tend to have the most mental vitality. This differs person to 
person, but many may find that earlier in the day or after a restorative 
activity are good times to do a task that requires lots of focus. You 
can also try building breaks into your day for micro-restoration – a 
short break could include a meditation session or walk outside.

*Spend Time in Restorative Environments*
There are several characteristics that make certain environments more 
attentionally restorative than others. These include: ability to 
generate ‘soft fascination’, providing a sense of being away, offering 
extent and an opportunity for exploration, and providing compatibility 
with your intentions.

Fascination is an involuntary form of attention; fascinating 
environments capture your attention, without any effort on your part. 
Environments that provide soft fascination lightly hold your attention, 
but do not grip it or monopolize it. This allows for contemplation and 
reflection, which can calm your mental noise and be especially 
restorative. My go-to soft fascination environment is a nearby park 
where the bird song, soft breeze through the trees, and swimming turtles 
create an environment that is just fascinating enough that I’m able to 
stay present, but also think deeply.

The sense of being away is fairly intuitive– you know it when you feel 
it. This can include both being away physically (on vacation or in a new 
place) or in a more conceptual sense (such as seeing a familiar 
environment in a new light).

Relatedly, environments that have extent give you the sense of being in 
another world. This extent must strike a balance by both giving you 
plenty to explore while also providing the safety to so without too much 
restriction, or the need to navigate or problem-solve. Like being away, 
the experience of extent can happen in the physical world or in an 
internal, mental landscape. Greenways along rivers often provide this 
for me– there’s always something new to explore around the next bend of 
the river, while river trails (and the river itself) provide a sense of 
security by keeping me oriented.

Finally, compatibility means that the environment matches your 
intentions, making it easier for you to pursue your purpose for being 
there. In this space, whatever feels natural and comfortable to you will 
also be the appropriate thing to do.

As my examples suggest, nature is a good place to start when seeking 
these four qualities. There is a whole body of research that 
demonstrates how being in nature, and natural elements such as a view of 
a tree from a window, pictures of nature, and even houseplants, can have 
restorative benefits. This isn’t to say that all natural settings are 
restorative, or that an environment must be natural in order to be 
restorative. Moreover, what you do in the environment matters when it 
comes to restoring your directed attention. For example, listening to a 
podcast or talking with a friend while walking through a park have their 
own benefits, but they’re not as restorative to your attention as 
walking in silence.

An important caveat: Deeply entrenched power structures such as white 
supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, and other discriminatory systems mean 
that theoretically restorative environments may still be unsafe and 
harmful to people with marginalized identities. For example, an evening 
walk through a tree-lined neighborhood may be restorative for white, 
cisgender men, but unsafe (and certainly not restorative) for Black men, 
women, and trans people.
*
**In Conclusion…*
  Like any other practices, the above steps require repetition, 
dedication, and personalization in order to reap both short- and 
long-term benefits. If you give them a try, consider recording 
observations as you learn about your unique distractions and restorative 
environments. Doing so will help make good habits stick.

There will always be distractions and those trying to capitalize on our 
limited store of attention, but there are concrete practices available 
to us for regaining some agency. Adrienne Maree Brown says “what we pay 
attention to grows”. I think this sentiment encapsulates the potential 
power of expanding our understanding of directed attention. Perhaps 
these words can be your invitation to hone your attentional management 
and restoration practices, to reclaim and redirect your attention to 
what you believe should grow.
—
Many thanks to Dr. Ray De Young, Clara Winter, Rob Dietz, and Amy 
Buringrud for your thoughtful input and editing of this article.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-08-01/an-activists-guide-to-reclaiming-restoring-and-redirecting-your-attention-part-2/



/[The news archive - looking back at an eloquent speech with a timeless 
message ]/
/*August 7, 2003*/
August 7, 2003: In a speech at New York University, Al Gore condemns the 
Bush administration's dishonesty on climate policy and foreign policy.

http://www.c-span.org/video/?177732-1/former-vice-president-speech


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