During the last month, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made waves by calling for a Green New Deal to combat climate change, a call that has been branded impossible and unrealistic despite climatologists’ urgent calls for wide-scale change. However, human impact on the Earth’s environment has been so devastating that geological scientists have indicated that we are in a new planetary epoch called the Anthropocene. Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA point out that the five warmest years on global record have come in the 2010s. Frequent wildfires, extended droughts, and increased duration and intensity of tropical storms characterize this new climate. Unfortunately, the IPCC predicts that these conditions will worsen, as they expect the Earth’s temperature will rise 1.5 Celsius by 2030.
In spite of this existential threat to human existence, climate change has received little attention in recent presidential elections, and the Trump administration is undermining, rather than aiding efforts to slow global warming.
This month, we have four outstanding contributions that analyze environmental activists from multiple regions. Many thanks for their contributions on this topic:
- Pablo Lapegna, University of Georgia (essay)
- Hilary Boudet, Leanne Giordono, and Chad Zanocco, Oregon State University (essay)
- Chie Togami and Suzanne Staggenborg, University of Pittsburgh (essay)
- Lucas Christel, National University of San Martín (essay)
Editors in Chief,
Grace Yukich, David Ortiz, Rory McVeigh, Guillermo Trejo
Mobilizing Ideas 