Climate Issues

- - Feb 12, 2020 Global Study, Egypt, Part 2: Traveling More Sustainably, a Beginner’s Guide
    XMNR alum Jessi Savioli reflects on sustainability of travel and offers tips and ideas for the conscientious traveler. "There is nothing I enjoy more in this world than travel," she says. "Whether it is exploring the far-reaching wild spaces in my own country or getting lost in a foreign culture on another continent, I feel positively alive. But how do we, as sustainability professionals, do this in a way that doesn’t effectively 'cancel out' all of our efforts and hard work? How can we travel in a way that is as ethical and responsible? And how can we consider ourselves to be 'global citizens' when travel can cause so much damage?"
- - Feb 04, 2020 Global Study, Egypt, Part 1: Climate Change, Water, and Agriculture
    Nguyen Le works for the Chesapeake Bay Trust, a nonprofit grant-making organization focusing on the protection and restoration of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. In the fall of 2019, she visited Egypt as part of her XMNR cohort's Global Study, a standard module in all our graduate programs where students have an opportunity to apply academic knowledge to real-world global sustainability challenges. In this post, Nguyen reflects on her experiences in Egypt and the leadership capabilities and confidence she gained in the XMNR program.
- - Dec 17, 2019 Global Study Series, Part 3: The Old System Must Die! (Or Not): Drawing on the Past to Ensure a Future
    The idea that a new political philosophy, a new governing regime, or even just a new leader need undermine and delegitimize its predecessor is not a particularly new one. Walking through ancient Egyptian ruins, we can witness everywhere vandalism from thousands of years ago intended to erase the past.
- - Dec 10, 2019 Global Study Series, Part 2: Climate Makes and Breaks Civilizations: Lessons Learned on the Nile
    XMNR faculty Dr. Bruce Hull reflects on the civilization-defining impacts of climate change, as he travels through Egypt on a Global Study trip with a group of Virginia Tech’s graduate students.
- - Dec 10, 2019 Global Study Series, Part 1: Egyptian Environmental Security: Old Wine in a New Bottle
    CLiGS faculty Bruce Hull and Michael Mortimer have recently spent three weeks in Egypt exploring Cairo and traveling upstream along the Nile River to the Aswan High Dam. Sharing experiences and reflections on the past and future of a country astride some of the most pressing environmental challenges of the 21st Century. This series of posts distills some of their thoughts on those challenges.
- - Dec 06, 2019 Know Your Climate Bias
    Regardless of what you think about climate change, you can’t deny that the topic is of growing importance in local, national, and international discussions. In this post, Dr. Bruce Hull describes six climate biases, illustrates policies, assumptions, and examples of each, and offers practical strategies for how to recognize and address common climate biases in yourself and others.
- - Nov 11, 2019 Sustainable Cities Series, Omaha, Nebraska, Part 2: Climate Change
    Cities take up less than three percent of land surface, but they are responsible for producing between sixty to eighty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Online MNR student Ned Bagniewski examines the effects of climate change on the city of Omaha, Nebraska.
- - Oct 23, 2019 ‘Cause I’m Leavin’ on a Jet Plane: Offsetting the Environmental Cost of Air Travel
    Fall semester 2019, the Virginia Tech Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability (CLiGS) will begin mitigating the carbon emissions from the air travel of both its students and faculty. Working with the company Terrapass, CLiGS will contribute to a portfolio that invests in renewable energy and methane recapture. CLiGS is the first group within Virginia Tech to launch this kind of climate action initiative.
- - Aug 09, 2019 Climate change: a new twist on a very old story
    More than 80 percent of adults in the United States now believe that climate change (i.e, global warming) is happening. However, only slightly more than 50 percent believe that humans are responsible (Pew 2018). Despite the established scientific consensus that our current climate crisis is the result of human activity, nearly half of the adult U.S. population still don’t believe it! And yet, there is more to this story; much more. I suspect that only a very small percentage of people know that humans have been contributing to climate change in significant (and positive) ways for thousands of years.