Example 1
Wake Forest Stands Out Relative To America In Climate Changing Understanding
Congratulations Wake Forest, you understand it. But your parents might not, and they might
not even want to.
For a campus which is conservative relative to most other colleges and universities in the
United States, there is still a clear consensus at Wake Forest: climate change is real and it’s
happening.
“I’ve been here for 10 years,” said Chief Sustainability Officer at Wake Forest University Deedee
Johnston with a smile telling of years of progress, “and in those years not a single student has
ever told me they don’t believe that our climate is changing.”
(nut graf) While young, educated students and faculty on college campuses have proven to be some the strongest acknowledgers of the presence and severity of climate change, the United States still lags behind the rest of the world in coming to terms with the reality of climate change. A Yale study on “Climate Change and the American Mind” revealed that 14% of Americans don’t believe in climate change and one in four don’t believe that human actions are having drastic effects.
Climate change denialism clearly still pervades factions of American political thought. Whether
or not the intensely fortified roots of this belief can be quashed will be a determining factor in
the world’s success in fighting off the damage humans have already caused.
“Your politics are what predicts your accepting of science, which of course shouldn’t make any
sense, but perfectly makes sense when you look at the psychology of it,” remarked Dr. Adrian
Bardon of the Wake Forest Philosophy Department laughing at the paradox. “If people know
that their group, where they’re from, their community, or their political party needs to insist
that its not true, they’re going to go along with it.”
The tribalism of climate change denial that Bardon explored may not be felt on Wake Forest’s
campus but is a reality in many of the communities which its students come from.
Particularly in communities whose livelihoods depend on the use of the land, water, and their
resources, the acknowledgement of climate change and the subsequent actions taken to
address it would mean a temporary collapse of their way of life.
“The last time I was in church back home the preacher said that climate change was an aspect
of the liberal agenda to get people to pay more tax dollars,” said sophomore Reece Adams. “I
grew up in a small town in North Carolina where a lot of people work for oil companies, and
they don’t want to believe in climate change because of what it means for their jobs.”
However, students who have grown up with an environmentally conscious education claim that
even in their young lives there have been palpable changes which motivate them to take action.
“I grew up in the suburbs of Boston, which is a pretty clean city,” said sophomore Amanda
Mosher, “but in the past 10 years you can sense the worsening of the air quality, especially
when you go from the city to the suburbs. And in the news, climate change is everywhere if you
look for it. How could seeing rainforests on fire and icecaps shrinking not make you want to
take a stand.”
Evolutionary psychologists suggest that one of the largest contributors to denialism is humans’
innate fear of mortality. As humans gain an increasing understanding of the world around
them, the reality of their own demise leads them to cling to ideas that insist that everything will
be okay.
“One of the biggest conclusions of the research into climate change denialism is that it’s not a
literacy problem,” added Bardon. “With regard to climate science as a conservative, the higher
level of your literacy, the more likely you are to be engaging in denial. There comes a point
when the amount of education someone has stops making a difference.”
Bardon, frustrated by a sense of impending doom, mentioned that it’s nearly impossible to re-
educate people on an issue they feel they understand. There are then really only two options:
make environmental concerns a main focus of youth education throughout America, or wait
until the crisis forces people to feel the immediate effects first hand.
Unfortunately for the environment, the severity of the crisis coupled with the psychological
need for drastic effects to be seen before action is taken could mean that the world’s climate
will reach the point-of-no-return with regards to what has been deemed normal throughout its
existence.
“The problem isn’t that humans don’t understand the science, it’s that they don’t want to,”
concluded Bardon.
Reporting Index
Background Research:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/07/us-hotbed-climate-change-
denial-international-poll
https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10305
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climate-change-in-the-american-
mind-december-2018/2/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/11/two-thirds-of-us-students-
are-taught-climate-change-badly-study-finds
Interviews:
Dr. Adrian Bardon, Wake Forest Department of Philosophy
Deedee Johnston, Office of Sustainability
Anna Lummus, sophomore
Sara Vigiano, sophomore
Sofia Braunstein, sophomore
Dexter Peters, sophomore
Ethan Lewis, sophomore
Alec Warring, sophomore
Ashwin Singh, sophomore
Matt Desoutter, junior
Amanda Mosher, sophomore
Sample 2
Drone Technology and Environmental Conservation of the Future
What comes to mind when you hear the term ‘environmental conservation’? Recycling? Shorter showers? Even planting trees?
In the broader conversation about how best to combat detrimental human behavior with regard to the environment, academics and scientists alike have acknowledged that technologically savvy and forward thinking solutions need to play a larger role.
(nut graf) One such solution, particularly with regards to imaging and remote sensing, are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), otherwise known as drones. Because of its ability to nimbly navigate shorter spaces and thus take higher quality photos than those of satellites, many conservationists are turning towards this technology to enhance their ability to gather and analyze information.
Using drones originally developed on campus, the Wake Forest backed Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation (CINCIA) has detected threats such as illegal gold mining across the Peruvian Amazon since 2016. According to Alicia Roberts of Wake Forest News, these drones produce “high-resolution satellite imagery that helps scientists and policymakers determine the extent of the damage caused by mining – and devise sustainable solutions to address it.”
For Max Messinger, Director of the Unmanned Systems Lab at Wake Forest, the advent of drones in environmental conservation has been revolutionary. His company, Linn Aerospace LLC, builds and sells unmanned aircrafts.
While the technology is not yet fully developed yet, Messinger is excited to see how improved Artificial Intelligence (AI) in conjunction with drones will improve environmental research.
“This has a lot of potential to revolutionize and get a lot more information out of the environmental data that we have,” he says, “It’s like going from a kite to a 747.”
Additionally, several members of Wake Forest’s Department of Computer Science have also become involved in research surrounding drones, particularly related to the positive environmental impact that they can make.
Dr. Paúl Pauca has spent time analyzing images taken from the air by drones and says that its images have been invaluable, particularly when compared to lower resolution satellite photos.
“There are a bunch of problems we’ve worked with, such as making images clear, or more recently, finding things in those images,” he said. “Depending on what you want to find, the different modality of imaging and objects can give you more information than another.”
“Drones can be used for just about everything,” said Professor Sarra Alqatani, who, in her first year at Wake Forest, has continued her previous academic research on drone usage in combating deforestation and illegal mining.
Currently, she is focused on using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to allow drones to learn from and adapt its previous behavior offline, with the end goal of creating a “smart” drone that needs little to no direction from a human operator.
According to Dr. Pauca, the difficult aspect of working with drones is often figuring out how best to tailor its finding towards what humans want.
“When you try to extract information, you’re also trying to extract human intent, and what the human wants out of these images,” he said. “It’s much harder for a computer to be circling around that idea of how to use contextual information and be better understood by humans.”
Despite the significant role that new technology, specifically drones, can play with regards to conservationism, the fact of the matter is that they only represent a small part of what is needed.
“The part that is missing from [conservationism] or from climate change is the action in response to goals and information…That’s always been the sticking point,” said Messinger. “Information is rarely the limiting factor in conservation. That’s definitely a big obstacle that needs to be overcome.”
Pauca largely agreed with Messinger’s characterizations.
“What we can do is more efficiently extract and capture knowledge, and make that knowledge more visible to government and local agencies so they can take action,“ Pauca said, noting that this process is already occurring.”
Messinger also noted that most drones, at least for now, only have a core skillset with which it operates, rendering them sometimes one dimensional when it comes to environmental conservation.
“There are more things that they [drone technology] are bad at than they are good at. It’s nothing more than a tool, and you don’t try to put screws in with a hammer,” he said.
Reporting Index:
Paúl Pauca, Interview
Maxwell Messinger, Interview
Sarra Alqahtani, Interview
https://www.wfu.edu/stories/2018/the-new-gold-rush/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749116307163