https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTvPDjgCGMI
https://fabiandablander.com/
intentions are very different from the costs and
benefits of taking climate action in the real world (e.g., participating
in protests, becoming vegetarian), such a correlation is unlikely to be
sufficiently large (
7).
This questions the external validity of the results of Sinclair et
al.—the relative ordering of the effects in their intention-based
intervention tournament is unlikely to be the same when targeting actual
behavior.
These two points concern the wider
field. A study of almost 16,000 young people found that 52% said they
would participate in protests (
8),
yet our personal experience at protests points to attendance at least a
thousand times smaller. And whereas about 11% of people in the United
States say they would engage in civil disobedience (
9), the actual numbers are also many orders of magnitudes smaller.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2512457122
Hi Dr. Fabian Dablander: Thanks for your new PNAS
article. When I was an undergraduate at University of Wisconsin-Madison,
I had a plea for my fellow conservation biology students who also were
my housemates: We need to focus on policy activism as there's already
enough science. This was over 30 years ago, in the early 90s. My fellow
students were "working class" and thus had student debt. They focused on
science so they could procure a "career" job that would pay their
student loans and also achieve the "American Dream" as measured by
standards of success. Most young adults are mainly influenced by their
parents' strong encouragement to have a career, etc.
In the
U.S. since the "Reagan Revolution" there has been next to no funding for
conservation biology as a science career. Even though my undergraduate
degree was in the "new" option of "environmental" International
Relations (an even mix of biology, economics and political science) I
realized these disciplines all contradicted each other - the very
precise opposite of sustainability.
So I simply went back into
"policy activism" work after my undergraduate degree. I finished high
school in 1989 and worked full time in environmental policy work. This
meant literally begging door to door for donations and I did an
excellent job! I'm proud of that work. After my undergraduate degree I
worked full-time for Greenpeace, also begging door to door for
donations. Our office was shut-down in 1996 and the office director said
Germany Greenpeace felt strongly that environmental activists should
just be volunteers, not paid organizers. He also told me his main
activist concern was global warming.
So I ended up working for
half a dozen nonprofits from 1989 to 2009. The last one was Clean Water
Action where I scored the lucky job of being a "paper shuffler" (a
part-time job for ten years) - for the phone canvass (that once again
called people up for donations). My job was replaced by a speed dialer -
and that transition also ended up firing most of the "phone canvass" as
being redundant (technology being a means to speed up the work process
as "efficiency.")
I studied conservation biology at the School for Field Studies
in 1992 at Costa Rica. I then started my University of Moinnesota
master's degree in 1997 with my focus on interdisciplinary policy
activism as my self-designed Liberal Studies degree. I did achieve some
success - we got a divestment from Total Oil for slave labor and
deforestation in Burma. The university divested around $1.5 million and
passed a resolution to stay divested. (The University now says no more
divestment policies are allowed). We also got the university to join the
Workers Rights Consortium for the sports apparel to be made in less
than completely heinous conditions. So this was back in 1999! 25 years
ago or more.
I was hired to write an op-ed for the University
newspaper serving 50,000 people and I exposed the corporate control of
science at the University - in line with the military tax funding of
research in the U.S. Some 350 businesses donated 100% tax deductions to
then control science at University of Minnesota. So I protested
Monsanto, Cargill, etc. I got some threats from people freaked out by my
independent research (a professor, the president of the university, the
general counsel, etc.) - even some activists claimed I was just in it
for myself (not part of their Marxist cult or whatever).
So
after the global financial crash of 2008 I then left the city of
Minneapolis for good in 2009. I had been dumpster-diving food and riding
a British 3 speed bicycle for ten years. I finished my master's degree
focused on nonwestern philosophy as meditation. You can find my research
for free on my academia site. I even finally got an actual academic
article published in a journal edited by an environmental philosophy
professor in Australia.
thanks,
drew hempel
p.s.
I did get arrested eight times for civil disobedience (the final time
was based on the accusation that I was homeless since I took a nap in an
unused stall during spring break at the public university). hahaha. I
realized the cops were out of control and this was confirmed with the
murder of George Floyd.
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