This team is intended to be an organizing and networking tool for Portland, Oregon area educators, students, business persons, community members, volunteers and others active in the Focus the Nation (on global warming solutions for America) effort.

See www.focusthenation.org


Over one thousand colleges, universities
and high schools
Businesses, faith and civic organizations
Political leaders

A nation-wide, non-partisan discussion
Critical policy choices for the next decade

A catalyzing event

Focus the Nation
on Solutions to global warming

_________________________________________________

Focus the Nation is a major educational initiative that is coordinating teams of faculty, students and staff at over a thousand colleges, universities and high schools in the United States, to collaboratively engage in a nationwide, interdisciplinary discussion centered around the theme of "Stabilizing the Climate in the 21st Century". The project will culminate January 31, 2008, in the form of one-day, national symposia held simultaneously on campuses across the country.

As the event will occur early in the political primary season, it provides an opportunity to engage political candidates from across the country and at all levels of government in campus-based, non-partisan discussions of climate solutions, creating a national educational dialogue on policy options for the next decade.

Working from a base in educational institutions, Focus the Nation is also incorporating participation by religious, civic, and business organizations. Focus the Nation has the potential to organize thousands of institutions and millions of participants across the country, and focus national attention around a serious discussion of climate stabilization. Focus the Nation will be a catalyzing event, helping turn the national conversation about global warming from fatalism towards constructive engagement with the challenge of our generation. (click here for audio/video about Focus the Nation)

There are two motivations for this project. The first is reflected in the urgent, recent statement (see sidebar) by Dr. James Hansen, the top US government climate scientist. Over the next decade, critical policy decisions will be made with irreversible consequences for the future. For example, Hansen and some other scientists believe that if we do not stabilize greenhouse gas emissions soon, we may set in motion a process leading to collapse of the West Antarctic and Greenland Ice sheets, events that would raise global sea levels by over 35 feet, inundating many of the world’s major cities. This of course is just one of the myriad potential consequences of human-induced warming, with regional and global impacts ranging from hurricanes of greater intensity and duration, global water shortages, altered patterns of rainfall, drought and flood, massive forest die-back, and large-scale species extinction.

Students today face many important social, economic, and security issues. Global warming however, is unique, in that if we are to reduce the risk of large-scale, irreversible, world-wide damages, then ambitious—and potentially costly—policy solutions must be undertaken within a very compressed time frame. At this time, we owe our young people a day of national, focused, non-partisan discussion of the decisions to be made in the next ten years, decisions that will profoundly affect their future, and indeed the future of all human generations to follow.

The second motivation for this project is to explore a new model of collaborative, interdisciplinary education, on a national scale. Focus the Nation will require campus-based teams of faculty and students to draw on campus expertise across the broad range of disciplines: the natural sciences, philosophy, art, economics, history, computer science, communications, government, religion, theater, literature, psychology. Each of these disciplines has already made important contributions to our understanding of human-induced climate change, and its solutions.

Focus the Nation provides an exciting model opportunity to create, for one day, a true national community of scholarship bridging traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Focus the Nation is not a “teach-in”. The project does not call for classes to be cancelled, and faculty will face no mandate to participate. However, we anticipate broad and exciting involvement as teachers across the curriculum bring leading scholarship from their field into the classroom.

This is an opportunity for educators to take a leadership role, and catalyze a process which indeed will “Focus the Nation” around a non-partisan, reasoned, campus-lead discussion about the scientific, economic, political, philosophic, aesthetic and moral dimensions of this essential 21st century issue. As a species, we now understand that for the last 150 years we have been engaged in an unprecedented natural experiment, in which we have been drastically altering the basic nature of the planet’s climate control system. Focus the Nation will engage the country with the question: How far do we want to let that experiment go?