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| News & Events > Distinguished Lecture Series |
Understanding the Planetary Emergency as a "Human Crisis"Dianne DumanoskiFormer writer for the Boston Globe, The litany of symptoms recited to describe our deepening dilemma -- the ozone hole, climate change, pervasive contamination, the collapse of major ocean fisheries, the depletion of water and degradation of soil -- is just that: a litany of symptoms. The question is what ails us? Are these discrete problems or all aspects of a single larger story? What ails us is not simple nor is it simply an "environmental crisis." The crisis in nature is only the most visible aspect of a four-fold "human crisis," which is also historical, cultural/political, and philosophical in nature. This growing planetary emergency entails not only human behavior, but this culture's overarching goals, institutions, beliefs, and values. An enlarged view of this dilemma, which sets it in historical and cultural context, makes it clear that such a civilizational crisis cannot be simply remedied with technological fixes. Tinkering with the car won't help if the trip has gone awry because of an outdated map. In the second half of the twentieth century, our modern global civilization emerged as a planetary force comparable in disruptive power to Ice Ages or asteroids which have redirected the planet's history. This development cuts to the heart of our current civilization and challenges its most basic premises. The new generation of global problems such as the ozone hole and climate change raises anew fundamental questions about human power, the nature of the world we inhabit and act upon, and humanity's place in the larger scheme of things. The modern pursuit of knowledge, power, and control of nature has not taken us where promised. We've fallen through the ozone hole and, like Alice, landed in a strange place indeed. The challenge posed by the planetary era is this: how do we proceed in a situation where humans have awesome power, but lack control. In one of history's supreme paradoxes, domination has not given humans dominion. To understand this is to recognize that the modern era has ended and the world has fundamentally changed. The urgent and unavoidable challenge is changing ourselves and our civilization to meet this new historical reality. The immediate task is to gain an understanding of our own civilization and how and why it has become problematic is this new era. This is the first step toward figuring out the new map and what comes next. About the LecturerDianne Dumanoski is an author and environmental journalist, whose credentials in the field date back to Earth Day 1970. She got her start in journalism as a producer for WGBH-TV in Boston, one of the nation's leading public stations, and then spent four years as a television reporter before taking the unorthodox step of switching to print. As a staff writer for The Boston Phoenix, a weekly specializing in arts and politics, she wrote about energy, nuclear safety, and environmental issues, as well as desegregation, religious cults, and transsexuals. She joined The Boston Globe in 1979, where she spent 17 years reporting on such major stories as the Solidarity movement in Poland, the Claus von Bulow trial, and acid rain. From 1983 to 1993, she worked full-time on the environmental beat at the Globe and was among the pioneers reporting on the new generation of global environmental issues, including ozone depletion, global warming, and the accelerating loss of species. Her reporting combined expertise in the scientific questions with a strong interest in the political process of making policy. She covered not only the scientific expeditions to discover why Antarctica was suffering dramatic ozone loss but also the negotiations on the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty signed in 1987 to phase out the man-made chemicals attacking the ozone layer. In June of 1992, she reported on the Earth Summit in Rio. She also wrote One Earth, a unique environmental column for the Globe's Health and Science section, where she explored cultural, spiritual, and psychological dimensions of the environmental movement as well as innovative ideas such as "green" taxes. With scientists Theo Colborn and Pete Myers, she wrote the book Our Stolen Future, released in March 1996 by Dutton, which lays out the emerging scientific case that a wide range of man-made chemicals can disrupt delicate hormone systems and derail development. This book, which has been translated into more than a dozen languages, explores evidence that these chemicals have already disrupted sexual development, reproduction, and behavior in some animal populations and pose a hazard to humans as well. Excerpts from her essay "Rethinking Environmentalism" appeared in a new anthology of environmental thought titled Our Land, Ourselves: Readings on People and Place and in a collection of essays on the challenge of sustainability. Dumanoski's work has been cited as a model for environmental and science reporting, notably in Conrad Smith's book on disaster coverage, Media and Apocalypse; in a book on science and public policy titled The Ecosystem Approach: Its Use and Abuse by Gene Likens, a leading ecologist and authority on acid rain; and in a November/ December 1990 Columbia Journalism Review article on the greening of the press. Besides winning a variety of awards for her reporting, she has been a Knight Fellow in Science Journalism at MIT in 1983-'84, a fellow in 1993 at the University of Colorado's Center for Environmental Journalism, and a Poynter Fellow in Environmental Journalism at Yale in 2001. She holds a B. A. from Vassar College and a Master's Degree in English Language and Literature from Yale University. Since leaving daily journalism in 1996, she has been traveling widely and speaking on chemical hazards and the broader environmental crisis. She has also taught graduate courses on environmental issues at Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts and worked as a consultant to major foundations. She continues to write freelance articles for magazines and journals and is at work on a new book about the implications of humanity's new status as a planetary force. More Information |
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