Explore the Unknown!
For October 27, 2021
Hi WN@TL Fans,
A Bomb Cyclone roared ashore the West Coast on Sunday, washing out the California Ironman in Sacramento, drenching Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, and dumping 16 inches of rain on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. Inland, the level of the Lake Oroville reservoir, which during this summer’s record fires reached near-record lows driven by the current drought, has surged 27 feet since Saturday.
Across the continent, today the East Coast got pummeled with a Nor’easter that shed more than three inches of rain on parts of Long Island and led to widespread flooding. While bad enough, it’s a relatively mild reminder of the deaths brought and the destruction wrought by the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy that landed on October 29 nine years ago.
It’s gotta be a bitter loss of time and cash to have trained for a year or more for a triathlon only to stand helpless as the event is cancelled a few hours before the starting gun. It’s gotta be miserable to sit in the stands in a driving rain while the Niners and the Colts slosh and slog through four quarters of football. It’s gotta be (and I can attest from personal experience) a sickening experience to walk down the basement stairs, flashlight in hand, to confirm one of a home-owner’s worst fears: you’ve become the owner of an indoor pool.
Yet, rich people in rich countries have reserves of wealth and means of production to replace the lost cash. We may briefly stand helpless but we are not hopeless. Our homes may be drenched but our homelands are not drowned. And when it comes to the moral wreckening of human-made climate change, we have few others to blame but ourselves.
In contrast, not-so-rich people in not-so-rich regions face far more dire risks. The poor face existential dangers.
This week we get to hear about resilience and responsibility, about justice and justifications, about remediations and remedies.
On October 27 Sumudu Atapattu of the Law School speaks on “Climate Change, Environmental Justice and Human Rights.”
Description: From severe weather events to sea level rise, climate change is causing massive disruption around the world. While no nation or community will be spared these adverse consequences, not all nations and communities will experience these adverse consequences equally.
Historically marginalized communities, poor people and poor countries will experience these consequences disproportionately, even when their contribution to climate change is relatively small, raising justice concerns. In the meantime, greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, raising doubts about meeting the global commitment of limiting temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In light of the need to take unprecedented, drastic and urgent action, Indigenous leaders recently called upon President Biden to declare a climate emergency.
Bio: Sumudu Anopama Atapattu is the Director of Research Centers and Senior Lecturer at UW Law School. She teaches in the area of International Environmental law and climate change and human rights . She holds an LL.M. (Public International Law) and a Ph.D. (International Environmental Law) from the University of Cambridge, U.K., and is an Attorney-at-Law of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka.
Her books include: “Human Rights Approaches to Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities” (2015, Routledge, U.K); “International Environmental Law and the Global South” (2015, Cambridge University Press) (co-editor); and “Emerging Principles of International Environmental Law” (2006, Transnational Publishers, New York).
She is affiliated with UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, Global Health Institute, the Center for South Asia, and the 4W Initiative and was a visiting professor at Doshisha University Law School, Japan, in summer 2014 and Giessen University, Germany in summer 2016. She is also the Executive Director of the Human Rights Program at UW-Madison.
Explore More: https://gnhre.org/profiles/a-f/atapattu-sumudu/
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We launch into November on the 3rd with a remarkable presentation that braids together three fields on a topic that’s new to me. Taylor Seale, who recently completed her MPH, will speak on “Positive Youth Development at the Intersection of Arts and Public Health.”
Description: Taylor Seale identifies youth as key stakeholders for healthy community design efforts. For her Master of Public Health thesis, Taylor worked with the newly developed Madison Youth Arts Center (MYARTS) and developed a toolkit called “Arts Access Toolkit: Building Resiliency Through Youth-Centered Creative Placemaking.” Join Taylor as she discusses evidence-based research, resiliency frameworks, and youth-centered design solutions of how organizations like MYARTS can best support youth health and well-being.
Bio: Taylor (Nefcy) Seale is a recent graduate of the Master of Public Health program at UW-Madison, and simultaneously received an Arts in Public Health certificate from the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida. In addition, she has a BA in Theatre and Business Administration from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
She is passionate about how the arts intersect public health initiatives, particularly how the arts can be used as evidence-based methods for healthy community design and building resiliency in youth. For her MPH thesis, she worked with the newly developed Madison Youth Arts Center (MYArts) and developed a toolkit called Arts Access Toolkit: Building Resiliency Through Youth-Centered Creative Placemaking. She provided evidence-based research, resiliency frameworks, and youth-centered solutions and recommendations of how MYArts can best support youth health and well-being through the arts.
Before becoming a Community Youth Development Educator at UW’s Division of Extension, Taylor worked with various community organizations such as Achieving Collaborative Treatment, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, and the Children’s Theatre of Madison. Most recently, she served as a research associate for the Center for Arts in Medicine where supported a CDC senior advisor in creating field guides for how to utilize arts and culture for COVID-19 vaccine confidence and health communication strategies. She is excited to join the Extension team, and looks forward to building community collaborations that align youth advocacy, the arts, and public health.
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On November 10 we have lucked out, because this year International Cosmic Day falls on a Wednesday. I know—you’re thinking like I think: hey, every Wednesday is Cosmic!
On this happy occasion I’m delighted to welcome to WN@TL my friend from Firenze (the one in Italy), Paolo Desiati, who will share his insights into the outa sight ways of The Cosmic Rays.
Title: Celebrating Cosmic Rays on the 10th International Cosmic Day
Description: The talk will bring the audience through the gripping journey that started in 1911 with the unexpected discovery of the invisible but ubiquitous cosmic rays and continues today with searches for their sources in the universe. The journey will bring us through exciting discoveries that unveiled a complex and diverse invisible universe and technological advances that made it possible to see what our eyes cannot. Cosmic rays, once objects of study to reveal their very nature, became a useful tool for unveiling other mysteries—from looking through volcanoes or the Great Pyramid of Giza to peeking inside a nuclear reactor or hunting for smuggled weapons. Cosmic rays, consisting of the nuclei of almost all elements in the periodic table, travel through space at almost the speed of light. Humans have evolved in Earth’s protected environment and are directly exposed to the harmful effects of cosmic rays when traveling through interplanetary space. So we’ll explore how astronauts, at the dawn of a new space era, can be sheltered from such a source of radiation. Finally, as technology advances toward high levels of sophistication, we’ll look into potential future development limitations imposed by cosmic rays reaching Earth from space and how we can mitigate these effects.
Bio: Paolo Desiati is a senior scientist at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC), a research center of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He studied physics at the University of Florence and got his PhD at the University of Rome La Sapienza in Italy. He spent two years as a postdoc at DESY-Zeuthen, in Berlin, Germany, working with the AMANDA neutrino telescope, a prototype of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. He then joined UW–Madison in 2001 and became staff in 2003. With IceCube, he has worked on point-source neutrino searches but mostly on cosmic ray scientific analyses. Paolo is also involved in the coordination between IceCube operations and the science working groups to support the science reach of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.
Links:
Note: To commemorate the auspicious Day of the Ray, after the Q&A we will adjourn either to Union South or to The Libraray (speaker’s choice) for Libations and Absolutions.