Pure Math in the Post Doom University: Adrian (#20)
My obsession (and, fortunately, my work) is to consider and prepare for climate change impacts, not just in a resilience or disaster preparedness framework (although I work with those planners) but from a curricular perspective. The proximal project of our Regional Center for Sustainability Across the Curriculum is to integrate climate education into existing courses, developing the existing expertise of the university’s greatest asset, its faculty. The mid term project is to develop or align programs, certificates, and degrees to a “greener” workforce. (I like to say that all jobs are green jobs.) But the long term project, the one I don’t talk about much, is : what happens, after?
Or as my friend Paul Morgan of West Chester University of Pennsylvania puts it, in my favorite conference presentation ever: Envisioning Higher Ed for Sustainability after the Sh*t Hits the Fan
What knowledge, skills, and attitudes would students need following a near to mid-term collapse of civilization as we know it? How will the assets of the university be repurposed? What programs of study will remain relevant, and for how long? What learning outcomes will be meaningful to young people as they adapt, for better and for worse? What should we be thinking about now?
This cartoon captured a frequent thought that I experience.
As Fall 2020 gets underway, everybody in higher ed is on the shore in this image, talking about plexiglass and social distancing; enrollment; remote learning; and, to our credit, an increased focus on student wellbeing including food security, internet access, and mental health support. These things all matter a lot right now, but they are not the big wave.
I looked up the artist, Graeme Mackay, and found an interesting story, about the original cartoon which was posted in March with just the first two waves, and then the cartoon got “hacked” in May with the third wave, “Climate Change” being added — so Mackay updated the image and released an authorized version. Then it got hacked again with the addition of “Biodiversity Collapse”. Mackay was good-spirited about it and even retweeted it. I find it a wonderful example of iterative sensemaking. And the image has been reproduced 1604 times. (Now, 1605).
I also came across this Four Waves banner used in a climate demonstration by the Green Spirits, in England.
You know how Life Coaches will ask, “if you had only a year to live, would you keep doing the work you are doing?” Well, would we?
I used to joke that I was a very unpopular person, a few years back when I had a bit of Cassandra Syndrome. But as I’ve been doing these interviews for the Teaching Climate Change study, I find that faculty actually want to talk about climate crisis. They are informed, thoughtful, positive, and… relieved?
I’ve been reading a lot of collapseology (you can start here with the video Collapse 101) and I can tell you that the intellectuals who inhabit this space are neither preppers, nor econihilists. They are what Michael Dowd calls Post Doom. They, or we, are what I would call the post-doom intelligentsia. Post Doom is where you are when you get past denial and through the anxiety and grief and you ask, what now? My wonderings are about higher education and the Post Doom University: where and how do we practice acceptance (which is not the same as giving up) and begin to shift our attention to that fourth wave?
It was this train of thought which brought me across this article from Vice, which announces:
Theoretical Physicists Say 90% Chance of Societal Collapse Within Several Decades
The Vice essay is a good layperson’s translation of a recent peer reviewed article from the scientifically revered journal, Nature, which is titled:
Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis
According to the Nature website, since May 6, 2020, this article has been accessed 76,000 times, and cited once. (Now, twice.) Does this citation statistic mean that a lot of academics are thinking about this, but not talking about it? I’m going to focus on the article, by Bologna and Aquino, so you might take a moment and pass your eyeballs over it, now. The abstract says:
Based on the current resource consumption rates and best estimate of technological rate growth our study shows that we have very low probability, less than 10% in most optimistic estimate, to survive without facing a catastrophic collapse
The article uses words like stochastic and some math that looks like this:
I was in over my head, so I called my colleague Adrian (a pseudonym), who has a Ph.D. in Pure Math. In a university curriculum, there are typically three branches of math: Pure Math, Applied Math, and Statistics. Adrian has taught ten different math courses at Community College of the Pacific (a pseudonym) , and he earned his Ph.D. from University of the Pacific (also a pseudonym), where he says 90% of the math faculty specialize in Pure Math.
So…what does Pure Math do, and what does it mean in relationship to climate change, civilization collapse, and the Post Doom University?
Well, there’s the Keeling Curve, and exponential growth, a math concept that is really “trending” due to Covid 19. Adrian said that aspects of exponential math come from Pure Math, and that Covid is providing that connection to climate crisis. He said, “The greenhouse gases have been growing exponentially, and human population has been growing exponentially. And a lot of factors in climate change are based on this unfettered exponential growth that cannot…That is not sustainable, right?”
So…Pure Math says our civilization is not sustainable.
“The curve is going to have to change,” said Adrian. “And that’s something that I can teach in Calculus, in talking about the slope and stuff. The other thing with math is just statistics. And that’s what I do a lot of in MATH 75X.”
75X is a pre-college math course that uses Statistics. How would this be for a word problem?
“Between 2000 and 2012, 2.3 million Km2 of forests around the world were cut down.”
This is how many Km2 per year? _________________
At this rate, all forests will disappear in approximately how many years? ____
(See, again, Bologna & Aquino, 2020, for the answers)
Adrian reminded me that Pure Math “means you’re not really worried about reality, you’re not trying to do differential equations. You’re doing something that is very, very abstract, but still one day probably relevant to science.”
Interestingly, this same article proposes a theoretical solution to the climate crisis called a Dyson’s Sphere, which according to Wikipedia “is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output.” The thing about this Sphere is that we don’t actually know how to make one, and problem has something to do with math.
So even if we think we don’t need Pure Math, we do! Then again, Pure Math (and theoretical physics) contributed to the atomic bomb, and look where that got us. This points to General Education and the reasoning for teaching concepts and skills in the context of a survivable planet. If a young Oppenheimer had taken Ecology or an eco-centered Composition course, along with his math, might the outcome have been different? (Many of the scientists who worked on the bomb felt manipulated and later deeply depressed by the applications of their work. How can we teach math and physics in a way that prevents that possibility?)
Adrian says his students have some misperceptions about the science of climate change, but that they generally understand that it is happening, that it is real, and that it is largely human-caused. They study the math of the Keeling Curve and he says “a lot of them are a little too cynical like, “Oh, yeah, we’re just all going to die.”
Econihilism is rampant on college campuses.
So he tells them, “Well, that’s not necessarily what’s going to happen. But yeah, the limit of this…the limit of this type of growth is that the atmosphere will be uninhabitable.”
How do you teach that? To a nineteen year old? In a remedial math class?
I got a little fixated on Pure Math, and to accurately represent the 19 page transcript of my interview with Adrian correctly, I should mention that we also talked a lot about Ethnomathematics, and how the shaka is a measurement, and your fingertip to elbow is how far apart you plant taro; these are lessons that Adrian’s students learn visiting the Hawaiian garden on campus.
That is some seriously relevant Post Doom math, as is the trigonometry of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, and plotting stars with linear algebra. Adrian has also taught math at a Hawaiian immersion charter school, and “The stars were how the Hawaiian navigators of old did everything. And it was amazing what they could do.”
But in addition to the Hawaiian Renaissance, we talked about the role of math in that other Renaissance, the one that evolved humanity out of the Middle Ages. “Calculus is this mind blowing mathematics that the Greeks couldn’t really figure out. Well, nobody before the renaissance really figured it out. So it was an achievement. And it’s just a really interesting topic. Although, I think in the future, it’s going to be less relevant than it was 100 years ago.”
I can’t help thinking about the 1959 post-apocalyptic novel Canticle for Leibovitz, in which a small lineage of monks who survive nuclear holocaust dedicate their lives to preserving the gathered knowledge of civilization. Thousands of years and generations of monks pass, and….wait, I shouldn’t tell the ending! I’ll just say that either a) the preserved cumulative knowledge of Western civilization saves the surviving generations, or b) the knowledge takes the survivors down the same path, leading to the same apocalypse, like a giant civilizational Groundhog’s Day.
At the end of our conversation, Adrian recommended several other math people I could talk with, and some resources that he uses in his classes to engage students with the climate crisis. One of these, What We Know, is a project of Mario Molina who won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for contributions leading to healing the Ozone layer. The website has interviews with many scientists and smart people. I especially liked this 1 minute video, Brake 4 Climate, which shows a vigorous man riding a mountain bike down a hill.
The voiceover says:
Today’s reality is like we are speeding down a bumpy mountain trail. We need to prepare for changes, and slow down our emissions. Because we’re heading for a blind curve, and the faster we’re going, the greater the risk. But we can adapt and steer around the roughest impacts. And slowing Co2 emissions will lower the risk. The sooner we put the brakes on climate change, the better off we’ll be.
