Top Ten Future Disruptions in Society, Economy, Environment, Politics, and Health

Fig. 1 from Policy Horizons report 

According to a (dismal) 2024 report, Disruptions on the Horizon by Policy Horizons Canada:

“Predicting the next big upheaval may not be possible, but it is crucial to explore possible disruptions and anticipate potential future scenarios. Even seemingly distant or improbable events and circumstances can suddenly become reality, while overlapping disruptions can lead to compounded societal impacts.”

The impact and likelihood of 35 possible future disruptions, categorized into five domains: society, economy, environment, politics/geopolitics, and health, is shown on the chart above.  Only four appear to have any good aspects:

• The North experiences an economic boom,
• Geo-engineering takes off,
• Biodata is widely monetized, and
• Indigenous peoples govern unceded territory.

I have my doubts about geo-engineering, and was relieved to see it is not among the most likely disruptions listed in the report (see below). In fact, only one of the ‘possibly good’ disruptions, Biodata is widely monetized, is listed among the 10 most likely occurrences. 

Unfortunately, of the remaining nine ‘most likely’ four also make the ‘highest impact' list:

• People cannot tell what is true and what is not
• Biodiversity is lost and ecosystems collapse
• Emergency response is overwhelmed
• Cyberattacks disable critical infrastructure

The chart at the beginning of this report summary also shows the time when the disruption could occur.  This is represented by the shape of the icons and is divided into time segments of 3-5 years (triangle), 6-8 years (square), and 9+ years (hexagon).

As well, the report presents a hypothetical timeline showing when the top ten disruption, (roughly, those in the upper right quadrant of the above chart) will occur. I have not included this timeline as I think it’s misleadingly precise about highly speculative opinion-based numbers.

Drawn and quartered in Seattle

Medieval stretching apparatus
Photoshopped™ photograph
©2024 Charlene Brown

On September 27, I flew to Seattle (23 minutes on Alaska Airlines), cleared U.S.Customs and proceeded to the Departures floor to check in for my flight to Madrid where I was to begin a two-week Art Gallery of Greater Victoria tour of Spain.  Here is what happened instead.

In the middle of the main concourse I turned slightly, but the thick treads on the running shoes I was wearing (because they were too big to pack) grabbed the polished floor and did not turn, even slightly.  And I did a face plant over the suitcase I was rolling. 

An agent from the nearby Delta desk cautioned me against trying to get up, called 911 and, most importantly, stayed with me (answering questions from the many people milling about) until the paramedics arrived.  An ambulance took me to St. Anne Hospital where it was determined by several x-rays and a CAT scan that I didn’t have a concussion but did have a fractured radius in my left arm.  

An ER doctor warned that for their next trick they would be using the Medieval torture apparatus pictured on the left.  Soon I was strung up to five chain mail cylinders which grabbed and held the fingers of my left hand, stretching my suspended (and weighted) arm while the parts of the radius were prodded back in line.  The pain was nowhere near what I was expectng after that grizzly introduction. Apparently their bone-setting expertise includes highly skilled management of expectations.

The next day Alaska Airlines accepted my return ticket to Victoria (dated today, Octoner 16), and put me on the first available flight home.  

 

Canadian Railway Architectural styles

 

Railway Chateau architecture

watercolour and crayon

©2011 Charlene Brown

The Chateau Frontenac, pictured here, was built in 1893 and is probably the most flamboyant of the Canadian railway hotels built in the Railway Chateau style. This evolved as a distinctly Canadian style of architecture, using towers and turrets and other Scottish baronial and French chateau elements.

Railway Pagoda architecture
watercolour, crayon and ink
©2013 Charlene Brown

This view of Banff includes the Banff Park Museum (on the far left) in the famous shot straight up Banff Avenue to Mt. Cascade.

 The museum, a National Historic Site, was designed in the late nineteenth century ‘railway pagoda’ style favoured for the initial cross-country railway station building construction in Canada..

This will be a page (pretty much the last page, actually) in the book I’m putting together called Time Travel with a bag of crayons.

This is not Spain

Nivernais Canal in Auxerre

watercolour sketch

©2024 Charlene Brown

In early September I was preparing watercolour paper for some painting I hoped to do during an Art Gallery of Greater Victoria art tour to Spain, when I received some lovely photos from my daughter who was making her “hilariously slow” way along the Nivernais Canal south-east of Paris.  Her shot of Auxerre seemed especially paintable, and although it wasn’t the same shape (see below) as the paper I had ready for the Spanish trip, I scrunched it into a square and painted it anyway. 

Little did I know, it would end up standing in for the whole series of paintings of the Spanish trip ─ on which I only got as far as Seattle.  More about that next week…

UAPs in Ancient Egypt

Temple of Seti I bas reliefs

Photoshopped™ photograph

©2024 Charlene Brown

 The temple of Seti I at Abydos in Egypt, considered to be one of the most beautifully decorated Egyptian temples, contains many bas relief friezes at ceiling height.  The one shown below, contains the (in)famous “Helicopter Hieroglyphics” (just to the left of the centre of the photo) that is featured in the above computer painting.

The apparent but unintended UAP* content is a palimpsest, resulting from the reuse of the bas relief panel.  This sort of appearance, with the original still partially visible, occurs when a sculpture was started by one pharaoh (in this case Seti I) then plastered over and altered under the direction of another (his son, Ramses II).

*unidentified anomalous phenomena, formerly known as UFOs

Enhancing Creativity VI

Preparing  the  mind for Creativity Enhancement
watercolour and Photoshop™
©2014 Charlene Brown

Evangelia Chrysikou, our Psychology of Creativity instructor, reminded us frequently of Louis Pasteur’s declaration that ‘chance favours the prepared mind,’ and encouraged us to keep this in mind while considering the myriad ways of enhancing creative thinking and creative ways of doing things.

Group brainstorming, for example, is only likely to be productive after participants have done some preparation in the form of individual study and solution-finding.  Similarly, the observation, presented earlier, of benefit being derived from an incubation period only after an initial period of concentration on a problem or project, illustrates the importance of preparedness.

Other ways to ‘prepare the mind’ are: 

·         Challenge yourself.

·         Seek activities outside your field of expertise.

·         Travel to a foreign country. 

·         Take a class. Like Psychology of Creativity.UAPs in Ancient Egypt                                                                

Enhancing Creativity V

Visualization techniques
acrylic
©1993 Charlene Brown

Research has shown that episodic specificity induction – training in recollecting details of past experiences – improves performance on memory and imagination tasks and enhances divergent thinking. The ability to recall detail can be increased by forming a mental image –visualizing – a past or historical event.

This painting is an exercise in historic visualization using Umm al nar tomb carvings  with an overlaying or superimposing technique. Overlaying one image on another adds a new dimension to a painting and produces evocative results, conducive to creative visualiztion.

 

 

 

Enhancing Creativity IV

Psychological distancing in Kyrgyzstan

computer collage

©2010 Charlene Brown

Applying psychological distance means thinking of a problem as being far away geographically and/or in the future… Is this why we produce those high-flying, all-powerful ‘To Do Tomorrow’ lists at the end of the day?

This technique makes people approach a problem or project in more abstract terms and has been shown to facilitate a more creative, less inhibited, approach. Seeing a problem from another person’s perspective may achieve psychological distance. Thinking of a problem situation as if it were unreal and unlikely can yield a ‘hypothetical’ answer. Or a graphic novel. 

 

Enhancing Creativity III

Incubating an idea
watercolour and crayon
©2016 Charlene Brown

Take a break from solving a problem and do something else. It is important that this break takes place after giving the problem some thought, so that the break provides an incubation period for any ideas you may have begun to form.I should mention right now that the ‘break’ pictured here at the top of the Sea-to-Sky Gondola took place during our annual Mothers Day weekend in Squamish.  

I had not given any thought at all to the ‘problem’ of taking an online Psychology of Creativity course which was to begin the day after Mothers Day, and thus had no preparatory ideas to incubate. Anyway, misleading painting title aside, when we returned home Sunday night, I found a lot of preliminary reading and a long interactive lesson module in my email Inbox. Long story short, I got through it in time for the first 10 am live computer session Monday morning – even after the belated discovery that it started at 10 am Eastern time (7 am Pacific) but I digress…

Back to the concept of incubating an idea.  A nap that achieves REM sleep provides the ideal ‘incubation’ period. If the schedule can’t include this, similar benefits can be achieved by doing some mind-numbing (and mind-wandering-inducing) task during the break.

This has been tested in a controlled laboratory setting with boring computer tasks, but most of us are already aware that boring jobs encourage daydreaming. Isn’t it great that scientists have shown this is a good thing!

 

Enhancing Creativity II

Flexibility at the Ribat of Monastir
watercolour
©2006 Charlene Brown

In addition to idea generation, true creativity involves evaluating your options, according to a study printed in NeuroImage in 2011. This theory was tested by students from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver.

To distinguish between the generative and evaluative components of creativity and measure them separately as much as possible, they were asked to design illustrations for book covers on an fMRI-compatible drawing tablet while inside a brain scanner. They were to come up with ideas for their sketches for 30 seconds and then spend 20 seconds evaluating what they had sketched.

Activity in various areas of the brain was measured throughout the exercise. The results supported the hypothesis that the posterior (temporal and occipital) lobes of the brain are more associated with generative thinking and the prefrontal cortex is more associated with evaluative thinking. It also appeared that creativity involves a rapid shifting between these two processes ─ cognitive flexibility. 

Other researchers have developed mental exercises that could stimulate this cognitive flexibility – including performing common tasks in an unconventional manner.  I chose this painting of the Ribat, an Islamic fort, at Monastir, Tunisia to illustrate this point. 

The painting was compiled from two photos I took from the fort in the centre of the picture. The view on the left, above (looking north) was reversed so that the painting appears to be the view from the far distance, behind the Bourghiba Mausoleum looking south toward the fort. The view, on the right, above (looking south) to the Bourghiba residence remains (roughly) as photographed.

I often rearrange the components of a landscape to improve the composition of a painting, but a complete reversal like this is unusual.

 

 

Enhancing Creativity I

Lowering cognitive control

Computer drawing

Research that our Psychology of Creativity instructor, Evangelia G. Chrysikou, had done indicated that techniques for boosting creative potential may involve lowering cognitive control ─ breaking down established ways of viewing the world or invoking unconscious thought processes.

This helps overcome functional fixedness and puts people in a more open state of mind for problem-solving.

At my daughter‘s birthday party about fifty years ago, I tried lowering cognitive control by overcoming functional fixedness – the idea there is ‘one right way’ of doing something – with an elephant drawing competition. 

Without mentioning that they were supposed to be drawing an elephant, I gave the following instructions:

• Draw a circle in the upper left part of the paper.
• Draw eight vertical parallel lines in the lower right part.
• Add two short curved lines and one long curved line to the circle.
• Draw a little circle inside the first circle and a big floppy circle beside it. 
• Draw an oval that touches the first circle and runs along the top of the parallel lines.

My favourite drawing looked like the computer painting above, as I recall (remember that was before we had digital cameras so we didn’t take pictures of everything we saw). It won for ‘best use of colour‘ and did well in the ‘best legs‘ category, but placed well down in the ‘looks like an elephant‘ part of the competition. I remember thinking this drawing would have done well in a 'looks like a moose‘ contest...

The generic parts technique that I used in the elephant-drawing contest above is one way of doing this ─ by describing something in terms of its generic features rather than its actual name or function.

 I will write more blog posts about creativity-enhancing research as well as my take on how the theories involved can be applied by artists.

Historiometrics

Serapeum at Alexandria

Computer painting

(This painting doesn’t actually exist except on my computer.)

©2013 Charlene Brown

A little background ─ after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in the 4th century BCE, a combined Hellenistic-Egyptian god in human form was introduced to reconcile the two belief systems. An impressive temple was built (apparently vaulted in lodestone) that housed a colossal wood and iron statue of Serapis “which was neither supported on a base, nor attached to the wall by any brackets, but remained suspended.”

Later Christians considered this engineering feat diabolical trickery and the temple was ordered destroyed in the 4th century CE.

This miraculously suspended statue of Sirapis may not have actually existed, which would account for its absence in the list of the Seven Wonders of the World…

. . . . . 

Historiometrics is a quantitative method for the study of creativity and its sociocultural context. The technique depends on the scientific analysis of retrospective biographical references and historic data.

It has been used by D.K. Simonton to examine different hypotheses about the creative process:

• Psychometric data about creative individuals (skills and knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, educational achievement, as well as creative precociousness and productivity) is derived from biographical references.
• This is quantified and analyzed, using statistical methods such as factor analysis, multiple regression and hierarchial linear modeling,
• in terms of available information about the individuals’ environments – role model availability, geographical marginality, economic or military/political circumstances during their particular period in history

The next five blog posts will be an updated outline of an online course I completed recently, The Psychology of Creativity, part of the Active Learning program at NYU School of Engineering. The course instructor was Evangelia G. Chrysikou, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, where she taught cognitive neuroscience and creative cognition. 

Behavioral techniques:

·         Lowering cognitive control

·         Cognitive flexibility in generating and evaluating ideas

·         Incubating ideas

·         Psychological distancing

·         Visualization techniques

 

 

 

 

Sketching an Alaska Cruise VIII

Klawock AK

crayon, ink and watercolour

©2024 Charlene Brown

Klawock, with a population of about 800, is situated on Prince of Wales Island. This is their first year in the cruise ship business, and unlike Ketchikan, less than 90 kilometres away, they are working hard to increase the number of ships visiting there.  (Ketchikan, along with Juneau and Skagway, are looking at restricting the number of cruise ships and some residents are even hoping that occasional cruise-free days can be scheduled!)

As we filed onto Klawock’s brand new docking facility from the Regatta (their third cruise ship ever), we were treated to a Tlingit welcoming ceremony with singing and dancing and refreshments followed by a free shuttle to a unique arts and crafts exhibition and totem carving centre.  The beautiful native work we were shown was probably the most authentic that we saw anywhere in Alaska.    

Sketching an Alaska Cruise VII

Cruise ship terminal, Sitka AK

crayon, ink and watercolour

©2024 Charlene Brown

Russian explorers settled Old Sitka in 1799, naming it Fort of Archangel Michael.  In June 1802, Tlingit warriors destroyed the original settlement, killing many of the Russians. The Russians got it back following the Battle of Sitka in October 1804, and established the rebuilt town as New Archangel which they designated the capital of Russian America.

The original Cathedral of Saint Michael the Archangel was built in Sitka in 1848 and became the seat of the Russian Orthodox bishop of Kamchatka, Alaska, and the Kurile and Aleutian Islands. 

Full disclosure: This cathedral (shown in the painting above) is located in the downtown business district of Sitka, nowhere near the cruise ship terminal.

Russia was going through economic and political turmoil after it lost the Crimean War to Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire in 1856, and decided it wanted to sell Alaska before British Canadians tried to conquer the territory. Sitka was the site of the transfer ceremony for the Alaska purchase by the United States on October 18, 1867. The purchase price (at 2 cents per acre) was $7.2 million.

Sketching an Alaska Cruise VI

Icy Strait Point from the Skyglider Gondola

crayon, ink and watercolour

©2024 Charlene Brown

In 2001 the Huna Totem Corporation began development of America’s only private cruise ship destination and in 2004, it welcomed its first ship. Icy Strait Point grew steadily each year except for the pandemic years 2020 and 2021, thriving as a cruise port that preserves the character of the local village and Tlingit culture as much as possible.

The Skyglider Gondola took us from Wilderness Landing to the top of the mountain and offers stunning views north over the water toward Glacier Bay National Park. At the top of the mountain there are nature trails through unique wildlife habitat with spectacular views in all directions.

The painting above includes the two huge cruise ships in port at the time we were there, and our smaller ship, Regatta. from which we needed to tender ashore.  Tendering, in the ship’s lifeboats – which were nowhere near as luxurious as the ship itself ─ was required quite frequently on this cruise because the number of cruise ships plying South-east Alaska often exceeds the docking facilities available. I’ll write more about that in my blog post about Klawock in two weeks.

Map showing the northernmost portion of our cruise

Sketching an Alaska Cruise V

Hubbard Glacier

crayon and watercolour

©2024 Charlene Brown

This was the first of four places I had not seen on previous Alaska cruises in 2001 and 2005.

The Hubbard Glacier is North America's largest tidewater glacier. It flows 120 kilometres from Kluane National Park in the Yukon Territory of Canada through Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska.  It is 11 kilometres wide and over 100 metres above the waterline at its terminal face.

Allegedly, you can see Mt. Logan, the highest mountain in Canada, from our ship’s position in Disenchantment Bay.  However, most of the time we were there it was raining so hard you could barely see the face of the glacier, and the mountains above it were even less visible. 

Sketching an Alaska Cruise IV

A picturesque glimpse into Skagway’s colourful past

crayon, ink and watercolour

©2024 Charlene Brown

When we returned from our drive up the Klondike Highway to Fraser BC, we stopped at the north end of Skagway.  There, a short hike up through the Gold Rush Cemetery brought us to a lovely little waterfall, Lower Reid Falls.

The waterfall is named after Frank H. Reid, the ‘good guy’ (by most accounts), in an historic gunfight in 1898. He shot the other participant, or ‘bad guy,’ a con man named Jefferson Randolf (Soapy) Smith, in “self-defence,” in the back (see what I’m doing here?)  Reid’s grave has an elaborate headstone, but Smith’s (just outside of the perimeter of the cemetery) tersely states his name, date of death and age, not even hinting at his side of the gunfight story.

Many of the graves are surrounded by intricately-carved fencing and sport colourful stories about the occupants’ advertised and actual occupations and circumstances of death.

Sketching an Alaska Cruise III

Captain William Moore Bridge

crayon, ink and watercolour

©2024 Charlene Brown

This asymmetric single-pylon cable-stayed bridge is an impressive example of earthquake engineering. It spans the Moore Creek Gorge which flows along an active seismic fault line on the Klondike Highway about 27 km north of Skagway. To minimize potential bridge damage from earthquake movements along the fault line, the bridge was cantilevered, with anchors only at the south end.

Before the bridge was built in 1976, Whitehorse YT was only accessible from Skagway by the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad. Over the decades, heavy ore truck traffic weakened the bridge, and in 2019 it was replaced. The 1976 cable-stayed bridge was repurposed as a pedestrian viewpoint and historic site.

The view of the bridge shown in the painting above was based on photos taken when we stopped about a kilometre past it to look back at the highway.                                   

2024 Mid-Year Review

Skagway AK

crayon, watercolour and ink

©2019 Charlene Brown

I have been to Skagway twice before and have painted State St. several times, most recently in 2019. It looked much the same, with two cruise ships docked at the end of the main street on this year’s cruise.

I’ll continue ‘Sketching an Alaska Cruise’ this Sunday.  For today, here’s a quick mid-year review (yes, the year is in fact half over!) of how I’m coming along with my plans for 1150 Words, as set out at the beginning of this year. 

Paint Every Mountain: I finished and published this book about hiking and painting in mountains all over the world.

Creative Archaeology:  I have continued to build the series ‘Time Travel with a Bag of Crayons’ equipped with the same plein air painting kit I used for ‘Paint Every Mountain.’  The series, now in chronological order, will include some of the photos and sketches I accumulated in past archaeology-related travel with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and the travel study program at the University of Victoria.

Predictive Analytics This has evolved into a series of essays and illustrations of the increasingly drastic climate effects of the Anthropocene.

Sketching an Alaska Cruise II

Mendenhall Glacier

crayon and watercolour

©2024 Charlene Brown

Our second port of call was Juneau, and a shore excursion to the Mendenhall Glacier. 

I was much more successful in “quickly capturing the essence” of this landscape, thanks to the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center provided by the US Forest Service. 

The sheltered, perfectly located presentation area took in the entire glacier and even included the top of spectacular Nugget Falls to the right of the glacier toe.  (I altered the perspective slightly to reflect the viewing angle from the upper part of the Visitor Center but, unlike my Ketchikan composition, only one viewpoint was required to see all the components of Mendenhall Glacier.)

The presentation area even included a long lectern-like table to hold notepads and sketchbooks!

Sketching an Alaska Cruise

Ketchikan

crayon, ink and watercolour

©2024 Charlene Brown

In my book, ‘Paint Every Mountain’ I include some tips on quickly capturing the essence of a landscape with a few colourful ‘shapes’ using an easily carried painting kit ─ a bag of crayons. 

I don’t always follow these ‘essence’ tips, myself ─ especially when I encounter a landscape with as many intriguing details and peculiarities as we found in Ketchikan AK, the first port of call on our recent cruise. 

Only partly cloudy the day we were there, Ketchikan is normally so wet that its annual rainfall is recorded in feet (about 13 of them)! The main street through town is set on pillars in the sea at the base of the lush mountainside. Side streets are so steep some are not ‘streets’ at all, but wooden staircases snaking up the rain-forested slopes. And Creek Street is in fact a creek, with moss-covered bridges and houses, artists’ studios and shops cantilevered over the torrent. 

Paradigm shift on a greeting card

The Million Dollar View

Watercolour greeting card

©2024 Charlene Brown

For years I have tried to see and paint things differently, shifting away from realism toward abstraction.  Often the painting fights back, and I find myself adding picky details to what should have been the finished product.

I realized that’s what had happened here when I compared previous versions I had painted of roughly the same view.

This much-photographed scene was named ‘The Million Dollar View’ about a hundred years ago by the marketing department of the Canadian Pacific Railway, as it was the view from the (then CPR-owned) Banff Springs Hotel.  Sometimes pictures of the Million Dollar View included the hotel itself, as in the painting below ─ one of the (slightly) more abstract ones I referred to above.  

Banff Springs, 2014
from the ’50 Shades of Orange’ chapter in Paint Every Mountain

Some time soon I am going to try painting pairs of greeting cards, one representational and one more abstract, at the same time.  Using the same colours. Maybe.

This is not a waterfall

Bow Falls

watercolour greeting card

©2024 Charlene Brown

I was surprised when I looked for previous paintings of the (inaccurately named) Bow Falls that I might have written about on this blog, to find that there were none ─ unless you consider the painting below, based on an aerial view of the Bow Valley. It includes the Bow Falls, among many other things.

This particular painting reminded me of the fact that this stretch of the Bow River consists of Class 5 rapids, not falls, stretching back toward the town of Banff almost half a kilometre.

  

 

Bow Valley
Watercolour
©1991 Charlene Brown

Another ‘Street View’ greeting card

Climbing to Victoria Glacier

watercolour greeting card

©2024 Charlene Brown

Here’s another view that didn’t quite fit into the multi-viewpoint painting of the Plain of Six Glaciers  I mentioned last week.  On the extreme left of Climbing to Victoria Glacier, as well as the painting I wrote about last week, the ‘claws’ at the north end of Mt. Lefroy can be seen.

I must admit, even after hiking up to the glaciers a few times and seeing Mt. Lefroy from various angles, I hadn’t noticed this formation until my attention was drawn to it by the $1,667,500. sale of a Lawren Harris sketch that I wrote about in 2014. 

My plan to produce a few more hand painted greeting cards

 Abbott’s Pass

watercolour greeting card

©2024 Charlene Brown

My semi-successful project to paint Christmas cards last year ─ only six turned out, and another was Photoshopped into an acceptable jpeg suitable for getting prints made  ̶   used up my supply of blank watercolour cards.

I decided to buy another six-pack and try painting Other Occasion, Congratulations, Get Well or whatever-came-along cards. Turns out they don’t sell six-packs or even ten-packs anymore.  I had to buy a set of 50!

The painting I used on my April 7 blogpost was the first painted card from this enormous supply, and is actually quite a bit smaller than it appears on the screen.

The greeting card painting above, Abbott’s Pass, shows one of the many individual Google Street Views I painted prior to combining several (not including this one) into a  multi-viewpoint picture of the Plain of Six Glaciers.  I’ll write about another one that didn’t ‘make the cut’ next week.

Climate change and global decarbonization

I follow The Daily Difference Newsletter, where the winners of the Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) Pioneers 2024 Awards were announced on May 3.

BNEF Pioneers is a program that identifies "game-changing innovations with the potential to accelerate global decarbonization and halt climate change.”

In 2024 the program focused on the following three areas, and other projects were allowed to apply in a Wild Card category:

·       Helping the deployment of clean energy

·       Decarbonizing the construction industry

·        Creating alternative fuels

Of the 240 companies from around the world that applied to be considered, 11 were selected to receive awards this year. 

I thought I was keeping up pretty well with climate change mitigation research   ̶  reading online, and in newspapers and magazines    ̶  and have written a book, Inventing the Future (shown above), as well as several blog posts on related topics. 

However, when I tried guessing what specific research would be included before reading the Daily Difference article, I barely came close on only four of them (identified with asterisks in the outline below). 

Although I agree with the aims of the first, second, and fourth of these project categories, I remain somewhat dubious about the objectives of the third. 

1. Deployment of clean energy:

•  envelio - intelligent power grid design
• PVcase - PV site selection and design
• TS Conductor - high performance conductors for modern power grids

2. Decarbonizing the construction industry:

•  Aeroseal - duct and envelope air-sealing technology
• CelsiusEnergy   sustainable geo-energy building and cooling*
• KelvinSystems - smart technology for old buildings*

3. Creating alternative fuels:

•  CoverCress - advanced breeding and gene editing to create climate-smart winter-growth cover crop that can be refined to produce ethanol.*
• XFuel - conversion technology producing waste-derived bio synthetic fuel.*

4. Wild Cards – outside these categories:

• ElementZero - converts metal ores to pure metal with zero carbon emissions
• Li-Metal  creating scalable technologies for next-generation batteries
• NatureMetrics  scalable nature intelligence & biodiversity metrics powered by eDNA

Climate change and decarbonization research is a much wider field than I imagined.  And it’s growing exponentially!

Reducing the food component of your carbon footprint

 Mt. Meager
watercolour and crayon
©2020 Charlene Brown

A Canada/UKstudy published in Nature Food, a peer-reviewed online journal covering research, reviews and comment on all aspects of food production, processing, distribution and consumption, outlined the environmental and nutritional benefits of reducing consumption of red meats (significant) and dairy products (not so much).

They found that replacing half of the red meat in the average Canadian diet with plant proteins would shrink an individual’s food-related carbon footprint by a striking 25%. But replacing half the dairy products with plant alternatives only erased 5% of dietary emissions.

The relatively small size of the environmental gains for dairy substitutes were put into perspective when they were weighed against some of the nutritional losses which would result from such a shift.  

The most striking figure was that a 50% dairy replacement would lead to a 14% increase in the number of people experiencing a calcium deficit in Canada—an ingredient that is critical for the growth of healthy muscles and bones.

The study produced much more detail, and many more measurements, ratios, and percentages, but I am only mentioning the most easily interpreted results   ̶  coincidentally, the results which lead to dietary recommendations I agree with.  To a certain extent, I'm already following these recommendations in an effort to reduce my own carbon footprint. It’s not difficult to eat red meat less frequently, but I’d hate to try to live without cheese.

I’ve used the painting of Mt. Meager to illustrate this post because it seems to be my only painting that includes livestock. They started out as horses (by no mean a significant part of the Canadian diet) but for now they are going to be cattle.