Another spring (I guess) in the era of chaotic climate

my Edmonton yard, April 23

Another spring.  I guess.  In the era of chaotic climate.  My last blog post was April 16 of last year, with a comment two weeks later on the McMurray fire.  I talked about dandelions, and wild blue violets, then about my concerns for a dry summer. This year....I'm looking at a sodden blanket of very wet spring snow.  For the third time in April, a couple of warm days and the snow finally off....followed by grey, drizzle, rain and sleet and finally a new blanket of wet snow covering everything.  In February the weather was lovely- +12 or so, the snow melting fast, sunny.  Then March brought a return to snow/thaw cycles.  Oscillations of temperature and precipitation.  The manitoba maples are poised to open their flowers...but keep getting snowed on.  The aspens tassled already several weeks ago, and the hazel flowers, tiny crimson fringed stars, were already opening.  Now LONG grey and white days.  It is nearly May Day, but no green is to be seen around the fresh blanket of white. The past few years have seemed to feature rapid temperature oscillations throughout the entire year.  Literally, if you don't like the weather, wait a minute.  Core-less winters and summers both.  What seems evident in lived experience is the utter lack of predictability.  This winter, and last, cross-country skiing was poor, sporadically available.  New snow followed by a melt and thaw, then cold temperatures with no snow.  You can't ski on ice.  In February it literally felt like spring this winter and last.  February, traditionally the heart of winter in this northern prairie climate.  This year we had snow on Thanksgiving (early October in Canada) but then barely had snow for Christmas.
The lack of predictability, of melts and hard freezes, has ramifications.  In the North, caribou (and reindeer) have trouble feeding when a midwinter followed by a hard freeze created a layer of ice they can't paw through to find lichens.  River ice, crucial for winter transport in the Canadian north, freezes late and has to be artificially thickened to enable motorized transportation across rivers, as crossing the Dempster Highway at Tsiigehtchic.  Warmer climate can cause heavier snowfalls in some places as well, as warmer air holds more moisture than cold.  Plants can flower too soon, fooled by anomalously warm weather, and then young fruit can freeze in later cold.  Chronic stress can cause trees and shrubs to be more susceptible to fungi and to insect attack.  Pathogenic fungi, and insect pests may increase their range, no longer being killed off by prolonged winter cold snaps.  This is the mountain pine beetle story, pushing widespread change in forest composition across British Columbia and elsewhere in the mountain west. 
It's never as simple as "climatic warming". We experience shifts in weather, and in frequency of different weather events.  On a recent trip to the US, I noted that weather reports featured maps showing occurance of "extreme weather".  This was new for me....but not really surprising, as the "atmospheric rivers" are bringing massive amounts of rain, and flooding, to definitively end California's multi-year severe drought. Rainfall and flooding have reached records in some areas not surpassed in the period of recordkeeping
But climate warming, the aggregate of all of the intensified fluctuations, does drive larger changes, melting of permafrost, increasing aridity, changes in range distributions of everything from algae to trees, and of animals species as well. Pacific salmon are appearing in the Arctic, running up the Mackenzie system at the same time as sockeye numbers are diminishing in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.  Probably small rises in mid Ocean temperatures, and in the temperature of the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean are responsible.
Yesterday was Earth Day. Blessings to our planet and may it continue to sustain (and tolerate ??) us.  Yesterday thousands of scientists and concerned citizens marched for the defense of science, which has been under attack by the climate-denying regime in Washington.  I never imagined I would read of thousands and thousands of scientists and supporters marching [having to march] to underscore the value of science to humanity, to bring the necessity of good science to the public....in part because key segments of the US do not want the inconvenience of having to make significant changes to limit the impacts of our species, and [try to] retain the state of the planet in a pattern that can sustain our own well-being. They would prefer to deny that human action, that business-as-usual, could be causing serious, and likely irreversible, changes to global climate. 
The short-sightedness of the President's pro-coal efforts, at the point when coal use is already declining world-wide, is a small piece of evidence of the self-defeating and unwise courses of action prompted by short-term economic perspectives in reaction to the challenges of actually dealing with ameliorating climate change.  I have deep sympathy for the dislocation of traditional ways of life and can understand the frustration of those from coal mining regions. But a more pro-active response through economic diversification would be a better response than to promote a short lived extension of coal economy, with the inevitable impacts of these last paroxysms of mining on these already much altered landscapes.
We are in uncharted waters.  Our numbers, and our impacts on our home planet are unprecedented.  People argue that our influence on Earth processes is so great that we are actually in a new geologic epoch, the Anthroposcene. (My ex-husband, in a moment of disparagement some twenty two years agocalled it the Obscene some twenty years ago). Climate change and other forms environmental change proceed at global scales. The chemistry of both oceans and atmosphere are changing in response to our activities. We also live in an age of unprecedented communication and interconnection.  People form virtual communities of continental, or even global reach. New modes of communication offer hope as well as threat as we can find those of like mind all over the world, and can promote our diverse messages far beyond the reach of our individual communities.  Chillingly, they can also create echo chambers so we hear only the voices of those with whom we agree, thus polarizing our very senses of reality.  Alt facts are lies.... but depending on where you stand, which is the "alt"? Does truth even exist in a "post-truth century"?  I would argue yes it does. Events like the Oroville Dam flood in California a few weeks ago did happen, even while their causes might be argued.  The March for Science speaks to the necessity of knowing as much as we can, in a dispassionate way, to try to make good decisions for our collective future.

Raining

Raining.  The whole day cool and grey, welcome blessed rain soaking the parched ground.  After the heat and dry, cool and wet.  Made channa curry tonight....made me think back to days long ago, living in a little bush cabin, cooking our dried garbanzos with spices and our home-canned tomatoes, gathering 'wild ginger' root (Asarum caudatum) to use in place of the store-bought ginger we didn't have.  Washed down with home-made green tomato chutney.  Nice to be home, quiet, in the house.  A moment's solitude.  Tonight I used store-bought ginger from my local natural food store, and a garam masala that I bought rather than mixed myself.  And I made a wonderful eggplant curry with little Indian eggplants I bought down in "Little India" in Millwoods, the Indo-Canadian community at the southeast corner of Edmonton.  I was trying to replicate something I've recently had at an Indian restaurant buffet....first time I've seen these little egg-shaped eggplants for sale....so I had to try some.  I had to interpolate between my friend Sigrid Shepard's recipe, one I found on the web, and my memory of the dish I'd eaten; none of the recipes did quite what I wanted.  However I worked it out, the result was delicious, and will serve for tomorrow's lunch as well.
Glad as I am the rains have come, this unnaturally early year still speaks strongly to global climate change.  Apparently this year is on the way to being the warmest on record.  I've read that in fact this is the 11th month in a row that is a record warm year planet wide.  No surprise that the boreal forest around Fort McMurray has burned- more than 450,000hectares to date.  Yesterday, before it began to rain, the wind shifted and the smoke was so thick it was as nearly as bad as I experienced 10 m from a major forest fire near Tsiigehtchic in August of 1999.  And that fire was 12 km from where I was.  This- hundreds.  Air quality went from three to 7 to 10 (top of the scale) in a few hours here in Edmonton.  Then the forcast rain began to fall.  We've had no rain of consequence til now in more than a month.  The soil surface yesterday was dry as powder walking in the ravine.  Dust bowl days come again.
Tipping points.  My ex used to call the current time period the Ob-scene (coming after the Holocene, completely recent, the time after the ice left in the Pleistocene).  It is now fashionable to call this the Anthropocene.  I dragged my feet a bit on the new term....but the more I think about accelerating species extinctions, ocean acidification, being poised to loose the whole suite of Arctic fauna, an entire ecosystem, with the probable complete loss of permanent sea ice.....much more than the iconic Polar bear....3/4 of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia suffering substantial coral bleaching.....and I think, hmm.  Yes this kind of faunal overturn, changes in ocean chemistry, temperature shifts....yes they do seem to rival big dramatic changes in Earth History, in the paleaontological record.
And I've read that this year is already 1.5 °C above the long term mean of the 20th century....Paris sets us to try to limit change to that level over the next 65 years.....a strong El Niño, yes.  But something beyond.  Anthropogenic, yes.  So the Anthropocene is here. And we are all complicit, caught in a way of life that requires gulping energy to subsidize everything about our current globally connected urbanized lives.  Whether we drive a hybrid or put solar panels on our roof, or poo-poo the whole thing and use our wealth to maintain our current comforts,  we are all complicit.  And having caught this iconic tiger by the toe....how then do we, can we, let go?  Where do we fit all of our other values against this one BIG problem?  Future discounting is so characteristic of our species, and so tempting....putting off the problem for the grandchildren to cope with, or at least until tomorrow, or next year, or....
I live in what passes for a heritage house in Edmonton, 95 years old, made of beautiful clear timber from BC's lower mainland.  I honour my house, and the lives of the trees it took to make it.  I honour its history.  But where then do I fit energy efficiency?  Because of the cold weather today, I have the (gas powered) heat on, in late May....the walls are insulated with sawdust; there are some voids at the top of the walls, as the sawdust has settled with time.  Should I be ripping up my walls to insulate more heavily?  I work at home, so the commute doesn't consume energy (I walk across the hall), but I do travel for work, conferences, research....and put 5 to 10,000 km per year on vehicles for that purpose, and several lengthy air flights.  I also do not ride my bike for errands all through the winter, but use my car....so we are all complicit.
As the day slowly darkens into night, I wonder what will happen with the Alberta economy in the wake of both an oil price down-turn and the destruction of infrastructure and homes in the vicinity of Fort McMurray?  Sobering choices.  At least the rain may the fires and check their explosive growth.  For now. And there were several other large fires in Northern Alberta, and elsewhere, this unnaturally early spring which have sparked (so to speak) more evacuations. 

Spring Tonic

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Spring tonic

Working in the garden…it’s early, really early this year.  Pruning last year’s raspberry canes.  Digging the quack grass that snuck into the berry patch when we replaced the fence last fall….and I notice that I’ve uprooted some prime dandelions….so I toss them aside while I remove the quack grass and creeping campanula from the turned earth.  After a while I think….oh, I’d better take care of the dandelions before they dry out.  And I dig some more to round out the batch.  I rinse the dirt off once outside, and scrub the roots twice inside the house, removing all of the tops that have not wilted yet.  I cut the root into small relatively uniform chunks and set them outside to dry for dandelion “coffee”.  (Some of the depsides, flavour compounds in roasted chicory root, and I presume dandelion root as well, are the same as the compounds that flavour roasted coffee.  Naturally caffeine free.)

Then I turn my attention to the tops, selecting relatively undamaged crowns, pulling off older damaged leaves.  And then I think of my spring tonic on the Skeena years ago….so I check the herb bed to see if the chives are up….and they are! So I pull a handful of new chive tops in lieu of the nodding onion I used to add to my stir-fry.  I chop a half jalapeño and some ginger root (definitely not locally sourced) and heat oil in my wok (a mixture of grape seed and sesame), toss in the greens and accompaniment, and stir-fry til they are bright green and wilted.  I add slices of hard-boiled egg (those are local, from the Farmer’s market), stir a bit longer, and eat my spring tonic.  Thank you dandelions and chives.  Spring blessing.

 

As I harvest, process, and eat, I think about multi-species ethnography, research through practice, and "attending." I am reading the dissertation of a young colleague who is writing about the stories of plants and people.  I’ve also been listening to other colleagues at the recent ethnobiology conference in Tucson talking about multi-species ethnography.  So.  Definitely “located knowledge” as the dandelions are from my urban back yard.  Definitely I have been attending to the dandelions, and the ground where they grow, for the 15 plus years I have lived on this 10 by 40 metre plot of urban landscape.  The raspberries are leafing out.  Already.  At least three weeks before “normal”, whatever that is in this time of progressive and stochastic change.  The chives agree that spring is here.  The maples have opened their flowers and the honeysuckles and cotoneaster are also opening their leaves.  The ground in the raspberry patch is graced by clumps of glorious blooming purple violets. 

They are spreading rapidly, apparently undamaged by the fencing activities of the fall.  In fact, they began to bloom two weeks ago, at the beginning of April.  First blossoms of spring.  All of this in Edmonton, at latitude 53 North, in the Canadian prairies….

We read last night that this is the 11^th warmest month on record in a row, itself a record series. And this is global temperatures, not an Alberta anomaly.  Climate change really is here, and all bets are off.

Enjoying spring.  And crossing my fingers for the summer to come.

Conjunctions: Historical Ecology, Climate Change and Hatred

Gitwangak, 1899 PN 12106, RBC Museum

I've just returned from a lovely and visionary gathering of young scholars and others interested in understanding how past human ecological relationships and practices may inform the present and help evaluate future options.  The group is called "Niche" (a play on words obviously for adaptive or ecological niches) an acronym for "New International Community for Historical Ecology" and the meeting at Simon Fraser University was its second.  My talk centred on three themes in my on-going research on Gitxsan and Witsuwit'en ethnoecology: possible anthropogenic distributions of two food plants, Pacific crabapple and riceroot lily;

Pacific crabapple in Miinskinisht; tree about 150 years old

the historic role of fire in black huckleberry patch maintenance, and potential contemporary management through mechanical brushing or small scale controlled burning, and finally, the challenges and dilemmas of maintaining populations of pacific salmon species, given global and localized environmental changes.

pair of sockeye salmon on spawning ground, Hanna Creek, Nass drainage

While we were there learning about the diverse and interesting research on human/environmental pasts, presents and possible futures from established and younger scholars, we got news of the terrible events of November 13 in Paris, where sectarian inspired real terrorism burst on French society, killing more than a hundred and twenty innocent citizens engaged in listening to music, eating Cambodian food with friends or family, or attending a high level soccer match between France and Germany.  As I returned home a third piece of the chance assemblage of times, places and topics hit me: Paris, site of this horrific hate event, is also the site of the next global climate talks in a mere two weeks. The juxtaposition of these events provoked deep thought: how can humans attains some level of accommodation with the planet to avoid the most catastrophic effects of our choices and actions when inter-group conflict (aka war) keeps shifting priorities and causing societies to engage in terrible acts of social and environmental violence, devastating human and ecological communities alike?  Talking at the conference earlier with my colleague Eugene Anderson (Gene, or "krazykioti" to those who know him), he commented that we have to solve hatred, or we cannot meaningfully and effectively address problems of humans and the environment, perhaps better phrased as mending the relationships between people and the rest of the ecological family to which we belong.  This topic is taken up in Gene's 2014 book Caning for Place, Ecology, Ideology and Emotion in Traditional Landscape Management (Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek California).  In a sense, the interrelationships between social and environmental sustainability, and human actions posed by armed conflict and its effects is a special case of "if we do not hang together, we shall all hang separately".  If societies and social actors cannot moderate their actions to avoid catastrophic conflict, with all the short and long term consequences this entails, it bodes poorly for the planet-wide collective action needed to avert serious consequences of anthropogenic climate change on all life.  Anthropogenic climate change is a reality; what is at question is can we moderate its severity through our focussed attention across the globe, in the face of many forces pushing in the opposite direction.  As long as war and armed conflict are the elephant in the room, accords reached in peace time may have little power to direct the actual course of events.  I hope world leaders will have the courage to meet in Paris despite the risks posed by extremists, and I hope they will find the resolve to move forward in strong and meaningful ways to mitigate climate change through concerted international action.
Meanwhile, as private citizens, we must do what we can to mitigate our consumption of energy and material, to live more simply and equitably, and to be tolerant of difference, rather than provoke and nourish conflict and resentment through demonizing people of good will who have made different choices than those our society or own ethnic or religions groups have made. We need to recognize the commonalities of our human lives.  We must seek to understand and to come together in a good way to nurture our planet and humankind both.
The following website was shared on  Facebook today in the wake of the events in Paris.  I think it is extremely important to remember that the vast majority of people do not wish harm to others, and simply wish to live their lives as we strive to heal violence and work toward peace:
http://mashable.com/2014/09/22/notinmyname-muslims-anti-isis-social-media-campaign/?utm_campaign=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=dlvr.it#mLifH32fGiqX

A matter of temperature

Minus 25C- gray and starting to snow. Minus 28C yesterday, bright, sunny and cold. Walking in the ravine, with the the scintillating ice crystals on the snow surface and the sharp clear cold was wonderful. They say it will be plus two by the weekend. The temperature oscillations this winter are beyond my experience….drastic changes over 24 hours, or within two or three days. It makes me wonder how plants, animals, people, can adapt. This face of climate change is emerging as a key pattern… unpredictability of weather, and drastic shifts, spatial heterogeneity in the pattern of temperature and precipitation. Such shifts are stressors: winter thaws followed by hard freezes make it hard for caribou to paw through the snow to uncover the “reindeer moss” lichens they eat below. Moose find it difficult to walk through snowpacks with several crusts buried within them. Warm days in fall followed by sudden hard freezes can interfere with dormancy mechanisms in plants….similarly in the spring, where if plants break dormancy too soon and open their leaves, they may then be hit by frost, or a late season fall of wet snow can break limbs and inflict serious damage on trees. Organisms that can tolerate unpredictable change, that have wide amplitude in their habitat parameters, will survive. Anything that requires exactness and predictability in timing of change will be hard hit. Resilience is key… A Gwich’in friend once said, “Our Elders tell us never to plan. Because you never know what’s going to happen.” She then went on to comment ruefully that it was difficult with jobs to be flexible, and take advantage of opportunities… something I feel myself in a small way when it’s a perfect day to ski, but I have a meeting on the calendar that keeps me inside in a windowless room staring at projected powerpoints glaring on the screen. For travelling on the land, responding to the right combination of snow conditions and temperature is more important. As our structures become ever more bureaucratized and removed from the natural world, I worry about our ability to perceive and respond to change. Inertia is strong. The weather may change quickly, but our institutions change slowly, and are not well coupled to changes outside the socio-economic system.

Changing contexts for Ethnobiology

Permafrost slumps such at this one in the Richardson Mountains will be come more frequent with climate change.
Contexts for traditional and local knowledges are changing rapidly at the present time. Ethnobiology looks at “traditional” “cultural,” “knowledge”’ of the living world and of the human environment. What any of those terms might mean seems to be a moving target. Global changes in environment, society, economy and the political map are all moving at a dizzying rate. Global appetites for commodities create dramatic shifts in the relationships of Indigenous peoples to their homelands, as their territories suddenly are converted into “empty land” which their enclosing states give away for a variety of resource concessions to multinationals (see the opening chapters of Anna Tsing’s 2005 book Friction, an Ethnography of Global Connection for a graphic description of the impact of timber concessions and oil palm plantations in Kalimantan).
Climate change is an obvious change in the world external to ourselves that calls into question the usefulness of the rich detailed knowledge of rhythms of life in locale. In rapidly and drastically changing conditions, the insights gathered from observations of past patterns of timing and relationship may no longer provide guidance for the future. As a case in point, Joe Linklater, Chief of the Vuntut Gwitchin Nation of Old Crow in the northern Yukon commented on the impacts of climate change for his people and their environment at the Northern Truths Symposium held in Edmonton in January of 2008. ‘The Vuntut Gwitchin are ‘people of the lakes’, he said. ‘There are 2000 lakes in Old Crow Flats and lakes are now draining. Land is being degraded increasingly rapidly. There is uncertainty around the traditional way of life,’ he went on. ‘So what good is traditional knowledge if people are uncertain about future? Technology is changing, and adaptation creates stress in the community. How do we adapt and use our traditional knowledge?’ he queried. Theorists such as Fikret Berkes, Lance Gunderson and CS Holling explore “resilience”, the capacity to productively and effectively respond to change, in their consideration of sustainable life ways and increasingly highlight “adaptation.” (see Navigating Social-Ecological Systems, Building Resilience for Complexity and Change F. Berkes, J Colding and C Folke, eds, 2003, and Panarchy, Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, L. H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling, eds., 2002). The wave of the future....
A new and quite different change in the context for ethnobiological knowledge entered my awareness this past week: synthetic biology. Synthetic biology is a marriage of genetics and engineering to create life forms from basic DNA building blocks that will be little factories to churn out compounds that interest us. Generally this is accomplished by taking a generic bacterium, say an “E. coli”, and then putting the genes one wants into the bacterial genome, and culturing the resultant tailored strain. Some experiments, according to the New Yorker article in the September 28 issue that introduced me to the term (New Yorker, Annals of Science “A Life of its Own- Where will synthetic biology lead us?" http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/28/090928fa_fact_specter), hope to create wholly synthetic organisms—the stuff of brave new worlds, and of nightmarish sci-fi scenarios. As we read on, my attention was suddenly caught by the word “artemisinin”. Artemisinin is the latest best hope in the arsenal of antimalarial drugs, acting by a wholly different mechanism than quinine and its synthetic derivatives, so still effective against those virulent strains that have become resistant to quinine type compounds. Artemisinin is a component of the common weedy wormwood Artemesia annua and was the basis of activity of Chinese traditional herbal medicines made from A. annua. It has recently been gaining prominence in efforts to combat malaria worldwide, and cultivation of Artemesia annua on a large scale has been initiated in Asia to provide a supply of raw material for drug production. By chance, it seems, one of the early proponents of synthetic biology, Jay Keasling of the University of California at Berkeley, decided to focus on a potentially useful class of organic compounds called isoprenoids for his initial efforts in demonstrating biosynthesis in enngineered organisms. These compounds apparently are present in many economic plants and produce both flavour essences in ginger and cinnamon, and the pigments in sunflowers and tomatos. One day a graduate student called Keasling’s attention to a compound in this class called amorphadiene –which happens to be the precursor to artemisinin. Keasling initially was completely unfamiliar with artemisinin, but quickly saw the potential to create industrial level synthesis of the precursor for drug production through his bacterial process. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a world leader in the fight against malaria, provided backing. A consortium is now anticipating having their synthetically produced artemisinin drug on the marked by 2012. Other medicinal compounds are likely to follow.
The ethical and philosophical implications of this development are enormous. The New Yorker article byline says “If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us.” This is a far cry from the holistic community of beings of many indigenous cosmologies, where social relations and reciprocity characterize relations between hunter and prey, where other beings have agency and rights inherent in their being. Hubris, too, to imagine that humans can get the balancing act right. Unsurprisingly, bioethicists are also concerned by the implications of such perspectives. The August 2009 issue of The American Scholar (page 14), contains a short piece entitled “Synthetic Biology’s New Bugs” by Professor Arthur Kaplan of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics. Among the questions he poses are several that bear on relations of humans with the living world. He queries: “What is the risk that new life forms created by synthetic biologists will escape into the general environment and cause havoc with natural microbes or other living beings?” and “Is it ethical to patent a new life form? The law seems to permit it, but is this in the best interest of science in the long term? Should all forms of life be outside the realm of patents?” . He also questions “Is life reducible to genetic messages? If a scientists creates a new life form, even a microbe, does that challenge religious views that say only God can create life?” Indigenous peoples, as well as devout members of many of the world’s religions may have perspectives on the inherently sacred nature of life and the rightness of the natural order, and that it is inappropriate, even an act of hubris, to attempt to create living beings. Another question that Kaplan raises deals with global equity: “If synthetic biology brings significant benefits to humankind, how can it be assured that the rich and poor benefit equally?”
We might query, what are the implications of such a fundamental shift in relations of humans to other living beings and the living world brought about by creating novel organisms, however good [or ill] the intent? Do we truly know enough to be sure that no harm can come from these organisms entering the environment, or perhaps causing human illness? Will we respect the miracle of life and the inherent rights of other organisms if we can make life the way we make a chair or an mp3 player? Can we be sure that, if we have the means, we will not choose to make terrible novel biological weapons, or modify multicellular animals nearer to ourselves, or even humans? How shall we value the possibility of an affordable and plentiful antimalarial therapy, or perhaps a fuel source not dependent on fossil fuels against these other possibilities?

implications for ethnobiology of the Global Climate Change report from Copenhagen

Greetings- I've decided I want to start a blog to give me a forum to be able to comment on current events and connections in ethnobiology. On Friday a colleague forwarded the link to the Synthesis Report, Global Climate Change, Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions from an international conference held in Copenhagen in April 2009
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/news/press-releases/files/synthesis-report-web.pdf


Reading over the report, I couldn't help but think of the many implications of the scenarios described for the nature and relevance of local knowledge, traditional strategies for food security, gathering and cultivation, ability to remain in homelands, and growing conflicts between groups over increasingly scarce resources. We have to remember that the world is changing rapidly technologically, politically, demographically and environmentally, and that these changing contexts form the background to people's present and future practices and livelihoods, and even perhaps their survival. If any of you read this report, I invite you to share your thoughts on the implications of the report for local communities and for your own lives. What are some of the social justice implications of needing to limit greenhouse gas emissions to 0? What might it mean to transition to a non-carbon economy?