Challenges....

Writing from the tail end of this collaboration with PRI and the Museum of the Earth is much different from initially being unsure of what to expect at the commencement of the project. While researching, writing and completing the final layout for my portion of the design I have learned a number of things that I feel are important for future educational projects regarding the impending global Climate Change.

I think that the most imposing obstacle regarding modern environmental awareness is the challenge of making people realize that rather than some far-off leftist propaganda, climate change is happening today. Whenever I try to encourage awareness I am, overwhelmingly, met with sentiments of frustration and disdain. The “yeah right, not here not now” mentality that is so detrimental to most efforts towards change is completely pervasive in today’s culture. I have to agree that it is an easy issue to discard, especially as we are so isolated in our little collegiate utopia, but as a global policy, this is terrible.

So, in setting out on this project, this was my primary goal. My final layout design included a number of visuals that I hope will be beneficial in spreading the feeling of necessity that will hopefully foster future action. My portion of the project was temperature, so I opted to include the quintessential climate change graph comparing temperature to CO₂ concentration over the last 450,000 years. By superimposing this information with details about the possible effects of temperature increase and the incredible rate of anthropogenic atmospheric CO₂ change, the pamphlet will (I hope) convey some anxiousness, hopefully enough to encourage public action/policy change.

To conclude: I, you, we, everyone, we are the people that have to deal with this. Not because in fifty or one hundred years our children are going to be screwed, but because we’re going to be screwed now and (maybe) permanently into the future if we don’t do something. This is not an issue to be left to others, to be thrown to the side for others, this is an issue that must be dealt with everywhere, by everyone, now.

-Lloyd Ellman, Cornell University Student