The New York Times “What the Coronavirus Means for Climate Change“ This is a great overview of the promise and perils associated with post-coronavirus climate action. For me, the greatest potential for turning this terrible global health crisis into a catalyst for global climate action is to tie economic recovery efforts to sustainability. The “Green New Deal” concept makes even more sense now because: People need work. There will be support for any effort that creates jobs. We need to put people to work doing something productive. Here’s our chance to tie together remedies for social problem ..read more

I was fortunate to be a collaborator on a STEAMplant team that included Sirovich Family Resident Jeremy Pickard (@jeremy_pickard) and my Pratt colleague, anthropologist Jennifer Telesca. Jeremy’s STEAMplant project focused on the creation of a short “hike-play” which required the audience to take a walk in the woods before seeing the actual performance. This short video, created by Jess Lazar, does a nice job of capturing the essence of the performance that Jeremy designed ..read more

One of the activities that I regularly have my students complete in my Evolution course is called “Future Evolution“. The activity sends students on what most evolutionary biologists consider a fool’s errand: to try to predict the future evolution of some particular trait in some particular species. Making such predictions is really difficult for these basic reasons: So much of evolutionary change relies on random mutations, and predicting where or how new mutations might arise is nearly impossible; All future genetic changes will occur in the context of the existing genetic architecture of e ..read more