The MAA Committee on Mathematics and the Environment held a
"Dicussions
on the Environment" and a Committee meeting in
Albert Bartlett and Roger Pielke of the
of physics and earth science, respectively, gave brief presentations at
the beginning of the Discussions. Al Barlett emphasized the extent to
which the public doesn't recognize the behavior of the exponential
function. He referred to an old story of something doubling every minute
until the capacity is full at
are many doubling examples in our present world, and people do not seem to
realize how close we are to
slides describing various environmental events of the past century, and
emphasized that we ARE having climate change, no matter what we do, and it
is not too clear what we can do to mitigate it. However, we should be
looking much more seriously than we are at how we can live with it;
prevention is too late.
In the discussions we kept coming back to the centrality of curbing human
population growth and, "What can we do in our classroom?" The
conversation seemed quite dismal at times, but I pointed out that
educating people, especially women, seems to be a major step toward
limiting population growth. And that's what we do -- educate, and give
people a variety of things to live for. (The average number of children
per woman in
mentioned that the WHO predicts a world fertility rate of 1.85 for 2050,
concern was expressed that that's not fast enough. Al Bartlett emphasized
the "overshoot" of population after the growth decreases;
population is still growing decades after implementation of the
one-child-per-family policy. It was a pleasant and stimulating, if not
exactly cheery, conversation.
The EM Committee meeting had, not surprisingly, a much smaller
attendance than the Conversations. Those attending at least part of the
time included Fred Chichester, Rick Elderkin, Ben Fusaro, Pat Kenschaft,
Patrick McCray, Bob Megginson, Anita Solow, Bill Stone, and Marcia Sward.
It began with a discussion about the roles of the Committee(s) and
SIG(s).
We then discussed at some length our hope of getting more
mathematicians to go to local high schools for Earth Day. Bill Stone has
been doing this with success for some time, and will be leading us toward
more participation. He will post on our website presentations that have
been successfully used by others. He will submit an article to FOCUS
soliciting othrs. Meanwhile, if you are interested in learning more or
if you have a presentation worthy of posting on our website, he
would be glad to hear from you at wdstone@nmt.edu.
We hope to get more careers in environmental mathematics into the
forthcoming revisions of 101 CAREERS and SHE DOES MATH. I offered to get
in touch with Andy Sterrett about this.
We also should be coordinating with NeXT, and made plans to approach its
leaders.
We should also be coordinating and linking more with Lawrence Hall of
Science; Bob offered to investigate this.
We planned another Conversations for
discussion leaders. Bob will investigate finding someone who would train
us as discussion leaders. The plan is that in
people to divide into groups of fifteen, each led by one or two people
trained in
reasonably focussed.
After the meeting some of us talked informally. Rick will be in a
discussion group of faculty interested in the environment back at Pamona;
he will be the only one from the math department, but his colleagues are
supportive of his environmental concerns and outreach. We agreed we (the
Committee and the MAA) should be better publicizing the "clinics" run
by
some universities to help nearby companies and organizations with
mathematical challenges. We concluded with a more general discussion of
(1) how do we make change? and (2) how do we keep our
own spirits up in
such doleful times?
It occurs to me that someone else should be taking notes at the
Committee's public meetings, since I can't do that in a large group while
leading the discussion, so my report of the Disucssions does not do it
justice (although the Committee Meeting report is far more detailed since
I WAS taking notes there). If others want to add or alter my comments,
please feel free to do so, telling me whether I am free to forward yours
to the larger group.
Pat Kenschaft, Chair, MAA Committee on Mathematics and the Environment