Beyhond carbon emissiom cuts: Obama's action plan as a Climate New Deal?

"I don't want to fool you, this is going to be hard. No single action, no single country will change the warming of the planet", President Obama realistically declared. But media all over the world pointed their attention on the cut of carbon emissions, especialy, but not only, from carbon power plants. This aspect, definitely, is important, and it's being debated not only in the US; but, in my opinion, the presidential plan represents a radical different approach in coping with climate change issues. Not only it is the first time that in a political document is admitted the reality and urgence of this problem, but also the plan designs a complete strategy in an effort to mitigate the effects of global warming, in the present and in future. 

In this perspective, the most important part of the document is that titled "Preparing for the impacts of climate change". Arguing that it was almost too late, President Obama took in account that the priority is avoiding other natural disasters or mitigating the effects of  possible catastrophes. The to-do list is long, from providing tools for climate resilience to creating sustainable and resilient hospitals, from reducing risks to assesing the impact of climate change; neverthless, at the center of the strategy, are a (not yet specified in detail) plan of investiments at national level, a financial and coordinated effort to adapt US to the effects of global warming.

Will it be a Climate New Deal? It's too early to say, thought presidential elections are approaching too; morever, a such plan would be an important incentive to the US economy, both in creating jobs and in avoiding damages and emergences; and reducing the risk means also a decline in costs of reconstruction in case of natural disasters. And, at last, it would drive to an improvement in research & development.

from Current challenges in the impacts and adaptation to climate change: Introduction to IPCC WG2 and IPCC WG3 (BC3 Summer School _July 2015)

But the question for us living in the opposite side of the Atlantic ocean is: will Europe follow the US in implementing a strategy to cope with climate change? Surely, it is a matter of political decision and, before it, of taking in account that the problem is important and the action must be now.

It's a match is worth to be played, for the present and for the future generations; but it's also a change of perspective in view of a new sustainale development at world scale.             

  

"Ik... et nunc" - Subsistence and Culture - Strangers in (our) land

If "we are the way we get what we eat", what happens when people move from an area to another? How behaviors, beliefs and, in general, all the aspects of "immaterial" cultural heritage are affected and modified in migrants? How the impact on another environment, sometimes completely different than the country of origin, influenced the life of these people?

Digiting on Google "migration food", over 140 million results appear: most of them are concerning famine as one of the causes of migrations; the others are about the eating habits migrants carry on with themselves. Therefore, a recent lecture at University of Birmingham was just about the contribution of migrants to the culinary tradiitions of hosts countries. Since that, the matter can be focused both as an humanitarian issue (on the regions of origin) and a supply problem. This last point, morever, has been fixed by modern trade that can transport fruits, vegetables, meat and fish all over the world. 

Thought, the problem is not a problem. But going around the cues of British supermarkets, in the last weeks, I felt a sensation of passivity: not only what you choose to eat often comes form abroad, but also you don't understand, in this way, the relationship between food and environment around you. This alienation is not only a distintive character of migrants, but it's a common feeling in the modern societies: you buy food, but you don't mind where and how it comes from, it's there, catch it up! 

But what would be the impact of a such trend on the environment? Dividing subsistence and landscape carries to a dual consequence. In fact, if in a cultural perspective this gap prevent people to know the space around them, it is also represent a problem about environmental management. Countryside abandonment is only one of the components; more serious is a merely conservative attitude (forgetting the utilitaristic-transformative value of a landscape) or a disruptive behaviour in the name of  an uncontrolled progress. 

It is being losing the so called Indigenous Knowlodge (I.K.) as ensamble of traditions and techniques which had been stratified in centuries. This process are making us strangers in our land, and it is more and more difficult for us to cope with the environmental issues. We live in a place, but we don't know how this place works! 

Epochal transformation, in the past and in the present times as well, are often characterised by mass migrations and people displacements. A new perspective in the study of these issues can be useful for two main reasons: in first place, it helps to change the common view of migrants often considered, in all epochs, as invaders and land usurprers; in the other, can be the key to understand and sistematically cope with environmental problems, in a time of great and global changes, in a sustainable way.