Christopher X J. Jensen
Associate Professor, Pratt Institute

How will the COVID-19 crisis affect action on climate change?

Posted 12 Apr 2020 / 0

The New York Times “What the Coronavirus Means for Climate Change“ This is a great overview of the promise and perils associated with post-coronavirus climate action. For me, the greatest potential for turning this terrible global health crisis into a catalyst for global climate action is to tie economic recovery efforts to sustainability. The “Green Read More

A Minor Post, Articles, Climate Change, Public Policy

Core of Me short video

Posted 09 Apr 2020 / 0

I was fortunate to be a collaborator on a STEAMplant team that included Sirovich Family Resident Jeremy Pickard (@jeremy_pickard) and my Pratt colleague, anthropologist Jennifer Telesca. Jeremy’s STEAMplant project focused on the creation of a short “hike-play” which required the audience to take a walk in the woods before seeing the actual performance. This short video, created Read More

A Minor Post, Art & Design, Climate Change, Ecology, Public Art, STEAMplant, Temperate Forest

Eco-Performance Lab during Pratt’s 2019 Green Week the first step of “To the Core of Me”

Posted 17 Mar 2019 / 0

As I have posted before, I am lucky to be involved in a new STEAMplant project entitled “To the Core of Me: A Hike-Play“. I have begun my collaboration with Sirovich Family Resident Jeremy Pickard (@jeremy_pickard) and my Pratt colleague, anthropologist Jennifer Telesca, and we are excited to announce the first outward-facing step of the Read More

A Major Post, Activism, Climate Change, Ecology, Pratt Institute, STEAMplant, Sustainable Pratt

My newest STEAMplant collaboration is “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play”

Posted 17 Feb 2019 / 0

I have been very fortunate to be a collaborator on a number of Pratt STEAMplant (@prattsteamplant) projects. The latest is called “To the Core of Me: A Hike Play” and supports Sirovich Family Resident Jeremy Pickard (@jeremy_pickard). My Pratt colleague, anthropologist Jennifer Telesca, is also a collaborator on the project. Core of Me will be Read More

A Major Post, Anthropogenic Change, Climate Change, Cultural Anthropology, Ecology, Ecology Education, Environmental Justice, STEAMplant

How renewable power sources grow more trees

Posted 27 Sep 2018 / 0

Science “Climate model shows large-scale wind and solar farms in the Sahara increase rain and vegetation” These kinds of positive feedback loops are exciting. Generally, we are really good at creating deleterious positive feedback loops: changes that further exacerbate our environmental dilemmas. But as this modeling article demonstrates, careful re-engineering of our environment can create Read More

A Minor Post, Climate Change, Ecological Modeling, Ecological Restoration, Ecology, Modeling (General), Sustainable Energy

Australia’s a hot spot for climate change politics, climate change science, and climate change suffering

Posted 27 Sep 2018 / 0

Nature News “Global warming tops the agenda as climate brings down a third Australian prime minister” As this article makes clear, Australia is an interesting country. It’s not “ground-zero” for climate change per se, but compared to other developed countries it is suffering from climate change in rather profound ways. Some of this suffering relates to Read More

A Minor Post, Anthropogenic Change, Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Political Science, Public Policy

Wildfires driven more by lowered precipitation than elevated temperatures or reduced snowpack

Posted 06 Sep 2018 / 0

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences “Decreasing fire season precipitation increased recent western US forest wildfire activity” There’s a little bit of a “choose your climate change poison” to this study, but it is interesting to be able to isolate the specific climate-driven effects that are causing more wildfires to crop up.

A Minor Post, Climate Change, Urban Ecology, Urban Planning

Are corals riding ocean currents to exert climate change dominance over macroalgae?

Posted 06 Sep 2018 / 0

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences “Ocean currents and herbivory drive macroalgae-to-coral community shift under climate warming” What’s really interesting in this study is the interaction it discovered: climate change may change competitive dynamics, but it does so in the presence of other factors which also must be modeled in order to predict future competive Read More

A Minor Post, Climate Change, Ecological Modeling, Marine Ecosystems, Modeling (General), Spatially Explicit Modeling

No-till has some big no-catastrophic-climate-change potential

Posted 06 Sep 2018 / 0

I learned about this from reading Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, but here are some other sources reporting on the same study… NPR St. Louis Public Radio “Missouri could offset carbon emissions from agriculture by conserving the soil, report says” Climate Central “Missouri Farms Hold Big Potential as Carbon Storehouse” These are exciting findings! They Read More

A Minor Post, Climate Change, Sustainable Agriculture

What might we discover in the ocean twilight zone?

Posted 30 Aug 2018 / 0

Science “What lives in the ocean’s twilight zone? New technologies might finally tell us” We tend to think that there’s nothing unexplored on the earth, that we know what kinds of organisms inhabit different ecosystems. So it’s pretty striking that there’s a whole area of the ocean that we know so little about. The scientific challenges Read More

A Minor Post, Articles, Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Fluidity of Knowledge, Marine Ecosystems, Sustainability