Please limit posts on this ITRC site to articles and stories directly related to: 1. The mental health and psycho-social-spiritual impacts of climate change, and 2. Methods for building individual psychological and collective psycho-social-spiritual resilience. Please do not post articles related to other dimensions of climate change as many sites exist elsewhere where they can be posted. Thanks! Bob Doppelt
It’s one of the most important questions of the 21st century: Will climate change provide the extra spark that pushes two otherwise peaceful nations into war? In the past half-decade, a growing body of research—spanning economics, political science, and ancient and modern history—has argued that it can and will. Historians have found temperature or rainfall change implicated in the fall of Rome and the many wars of the 17th century . A team of economists at UC Berkeley and Stanford...
Last fall, California's Office of Planning and Research (OPR) issued new guidelines for general plans , the documents created by the state's cities and counties to guide their future development. For the first time, the OPR guidelines include specific recommendations for how local general plans could address health, equitable development, and public engagement. ChangeLab Solutions, with many statewide partner organizations, helped drive this innovation by submitting a detailed set of...
Each year the ITRC offers a series of free 1 hour introductory webinars on different aspects of building individual psychological and collective psycho-social-spiritual resilience for climate impacts. The list of the Spring 2018 free webinars along with links to register can be found here: http://www.theresourceinnovationgroup.org/?SSScrollPosition=164 Please pass this around to others that might be interested!
The slides used by speakers and panelists at the ITRC January 24-25 conference in Oakland are now available at: http://www. theresourceinnovationgroup. org/california-2018- conference/
The ITRC will hold follow-up conference calls for participants at the recent ITRC conferences in late February. Follow-Up Call for Participants at the ITRC November 15-16 2017 PNW Conference The call for participants in the Nov 15-16 PNW conference will be held on Wednesday, February 22 from 12 noon to 1 pm . To participate in the call register at this link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vQW1Tivw9bjDRpKrsyj9LzcFk2JvFwgZ9mEFYGwJSxk/edit The agenda will include: Presentation on methods for...
California schools ravaged by fire, floods and mud this year have mostly re-opened and are diving in to a new semester, but district leaders say they’ve learned some crucial lessons about handling natural disasters that all schools could benefit from. “A disaster could happen anywhere at any time in California,” said Steven Herrington, superintendent of the Sonoma County Office of Education, where two public schools were destroyed, nearly a dozen schools were damaged and hundreds of students...
“Human relations were laid bare and the strengths and weaknesses in relationships came sharply into focus. Thus, socially isolated women became more isolated, domestic violence increased, and the core of relationships with family, friends and spouses were exposed” – written in response to a major flood in Australia (Dobson, 1994, p. 11). Racism. Sexism. Classism. Immigration status. Violence against LGBTQ communities. These are just a few of the various forms of oppression that the...
As Sonoma County students settle back into the classroom routines after winter break, school officials will be watching closely for dips in academic performance and attendance, outbursts and other behavioral reactions as they continue to wrestle with the aftermath of October’s wildfires. Ed Navarro, principal of Rincon Valley Middle School and Santa Rosa Accelerated Charter School, said students showed kindness, camaraderie and support for displaced classmates immediately after the fires.
A recent study from researchers at the University of Missouri found more communication among family, friends and neighbors who experienced the devastating and deadly 2011 Joplin Tornado was related to more post-traumatic growth. The 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri, was one of the most destructive in U.S. history -- killing 161 people, injuring 1,150 and destroying approximately one-third of the city's homes. Individuals who experience such disasters can exhibit a range of mental health...
In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, a nonprofit leader shares lessons on preparedness, collaboration, and resilience. Disasters of this scale do not discriminate; they affect the vulnerable and the privileged, the constituents and the leaders. During a disaster, everyone must shore up their available resources—ideally in close collaboration with the rest of the community. Effective collaboration requires leaders—even from unexpected places. Now that the water has receded (though the relief...
Read "The Promise of Post-Traumatic Growth Part I" here . What do you imagine post-traumatic growth looks like? Feeling stronger in the face of a new challenge, knowing we’ve already overcome the worst that life can throw at us? Being more grateful for the little things? More connected to our friends and family? Finding new perspective and priorities? Or maybe having a deeper sense of the mystery and sanctity of life? The answer is all of the above. In the first part of our article “ The...
A study published yesterday (Jan. 8) in the journal Current Biology about green sea turtles that nest along island beaches near Australia's Great Barrier Reef found that turtles born in areas most heated by climate change are 99.8 percent female. Turtles born farther south, along a cooler beach, are only about 65 percent female. Due to climate change, Raine Island — the site of the key breeding ground in this study — has warmed significantly since the 1990s, the researchers wrote, likely...
It can be hard to find hope in climate change mitigation. But that’s exactly what NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus does in Being the Change. While he’s not your typical government scientist—he commutes by bicycle, meditates, grows and exchanges food—he does approach his life and global warming with the solution-driven focus of one. To Kalmus, individual actions matter: His family cut their climate impact to one-tenth the national average. He finds hope in the data—cutting out some things,...
As temperatures rose to 111.5 degrees Fahrenheit (44.2 degrees Celsius) in Campbelltown in the Australian state of New South Wales, a colony of flying fox bats that lives near the town's train station felt the effects. Volunteers struggled to rescue the heat-stricken bats, according to the Campbelltown-Macarthur Advertiser , but at least 204 individual animals, mostly babies, died. "They basically boil," Kate Ryan, the colony manager for the Campbelltown bats, told the newspaper. "It affects...