Dear Beth, Regarding the conferences being "one small aspect" of what we do, I recommend doing a self-audit of carbon emissions. I have students do this. Many of my students here in Hong Kong have annual emissions below 2 tons (lots of public transport here), but those who fly on holiday, even very nearby (such as the common quick hops to Taiwan) see their emissions instantly shoot up to USA levels and beyond. Apart from not having children and becoming vegetarian (choices some of us on the list are implementing), not flying is about the best way to get our own pollution down (for those with cars, that's of course something to deal with).
I guess my point is not coming across with all of this. Is any of this networking stuff really more important than the environment we study? Without being too dramatic, I hope, we have to recognize that making all the good connections face to face at these meetings means that people in the future will suffer and maybe die a little bit (i.e., we are making a contribution to their deaths), not to mention the consequences for other species. Do the conferences and all the good that they do for us outweigh this? We have to answer yes or no. If the answer is no, then we need to make radical changes, to leverage technology to try to do as many of the things we can do in person as possible (even if we can't do all of them). Let's try to put ourselves in the shoes of a future person living on the edge of existence on the poverty-stricken coast of, say, Bangladesh. Is what we do at the ISA meetings worth what the pollution from those meetings will contribute to his or her suffering, and possibly to his or her death (even if that contribution is small -- as Pogge suggests, even a small contribution to a massacre is very wrong)? What is needed, I humbly suggest, is a very, very hard look at this whole business and at ourselves. Maybe I'm wrong or even stupid, but I find that I cannot continue to ignore what I know about climate change. I find it hard to continue pretending that my behaviors are justifiable given the consequences in the future. I find it very hard indeed to go to conferences without feeling really, really bad. All best, Paul -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] on behalf of Beth DeSombre Sent: Fri 3/12/2010 10:59 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [gep-ed] Conference greening and the role of conferences I appreciate Mike's effort to keep the list clear of extraneous traffic and relevant to those who are on it, but I actually think that this discussion is precisely the sort of thing that it's useful to have a collective discussion about rather than individual messages to the people on the "greening" committee. And, heck, if we can't do that in the best electronic forum that currently exists for talking about global environmental politics issues, then the idea of substituting electronic communication for some aspects of conferences is definitely a non-starter! I think it's worth discussing here because I think it's about broader issues than Mike and I are going to be looking at, and in that broadness is relevant to the question of what it is that conferences *do*. And in that sense, if anyone on the list attends, or considers attending, any conferences, it's relevant more broadly than to the ISA conference. I am second to none in my appreciation for and use of electronic communication opportunities, and I think they have indeed enriched our academic community and discourse. But I also think that there is a way in which they operate differently than as opportunities to make your latest research available and to get feedback on it. It's the same reason that I think that teaching a class collectively, with people present at the same time in the same room, is a fundamentally different activity than teaching an online class. When I teach I go in with a plan about the information I want to convey. And the act of presenting it to a room full of people changes what I say -- I make connections I didn't imagine I would make in the act of presenting, and present it differently. And that's even before there is discussion -- and, ideally (and often) that discussion, questions that build off each other in real time, leads the conversation to a place that it would never have otherwise gone, and leads me to think about what I'm saying in completely different ways. It happens because we're in the same place at the same time. That's just the presentation/discussion aspect of a conference. Sure, you could find ways to replicate that -- imperfectly (and I honestly think that it would be imperfect) -- but that's also only part of what is valuable about being physically present together at conferences. Part of the reason I think gep-ed works so well is that some of us know others of us -- there's a core of common experience at its base. And that experience expands outwards. But having the hallway discussions, the dinners out, the fortuitous connections that happen at a conference when you run into someone whose electronic site you wouldn't have thought to go visit if we were just talking about an electronic conference, the grad student you happen to be able to hook up for coffee with the person whose work she should know when you see them both in the book room, is what makes conferences worthwhile for me. I agree that as environmentalists we need to think seriously about how to live more sustainably in our world. And conferences are a part of that, and air travel is problematic. But they're one small aspect of what we do in our daily lives, and if you haven't taken steps that are just as drastic to shift the fundamental way we interact with the world (do you take the kids to visit their grandparents? Wouldn't skype be just as good?) I'm not convinced that doing away with conference travel is necessarily the first place I'd start. Beth (who might now be impeached from the conference greening committee!) Elizabeth R. DeSombre Wellesley College
