“The human species is ingenious and not suicidal,” he said at the event, which was hosted by Fordham, Columbia University, and NYU.

Cohen, author of The Sustainable City (2017), noted that the growth of the GDP and pollution corresponded in the U.S.; both rose at the same rate until the Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970. He said it would take another decade from then before the effects could be seen, but after 1980 there was “an absolute decrease” in pollution.

Throughout much of Cohen’s talk, he buttressed his belief that humankind will move toward a cleaner environment with an argument that the free market will provide the impetus.

He used the Hudson River as an example of how environmental regulations alongside public pressure and private investment can help resuscitate a damaged resource. Up until 1984, New York City dumped raw sewage into the river.

“There’s a reason why Riverside Drive is far from the river,” he said.

But as city, state, and federal governments spent billions on cleaning up the Hudson and surrounding waterways, real estate developers moved their projects closer to the river. Today, some of the most desirable real estate in New York sits along waterfront, something that was unimaginable 30 years ago. Likewise, other international cities are competing to clean up.

“Cities are in global competition for people and business,” he said. “If I got off the plane and the air is bad, I’m not bringing my family there.”

He said that Beijing, which is notorious for its smog, is under tremendous pressure to cut pollutants. And while there’s currently a debate in the United States about the science of global warming, he said there is little debate about living in a clean environment.

“As Mayor LaGuardia once said, ‘There’s no Republican or Democrat way to pick up the garbage,’” he said.

Cohen also said consumers can and do force manufacturers and government to come up with more efficient, cleaner solutions. He noted that once young consumers realized that their Apple products contained poisonous materials, the company pressured its engineers to design less toxic products.

“We have to turn our organizations into sustainable organizations,” he said. “McDonald’s has hundreds of people working to reduce their environmental impact.”

He said young people understand the risks associated with living in an unsustainable environment and consuming for the sake of consumption isn’t what it used to be.

“Part of the sustainable lifestyle is more about physical fitness and wellness, not going to the mall,” he said. “People are paying attention to their health and that’s a huge industry.”

He said millennials’ embrace of the shared economy has also led to decline in consumption, with auto ownership down for those under 25, many of whom choose Uber over a new car. He noted that Rent the Runway, a company that rents designer clothes, allows consumers to leave a smaller clothing footprint by renting and not buying.

“I’m not saying we don’t have people like the Kardashians, but if you look at young people today, we’re starting to see a change,” he said.

To be sure, much work and research needs to be done. Cohen said that more people live in cities than in rural areas for the first time in history. And to build sustainable cities, city dwellers will need technology to improve old systems, from water to waste disposal to transportation and, especially, food. Cities are a part of the “world-sourced food economy,” which he labeled a “ferocious business,” adding that farms are essentially factories that pollute as much as any industry. But as with other industries, he said, human ingenuity will find efficiencies.

“When you think of water, technology, and air pollution control, many of them are improved and will continue to improve over our lifetime,” Cohen said. He later added, “It’s a kind of mindfulness; that’s not to say we don’t see mismanagement … we’ve seen disasters, but they have tremendous teaching power.”

Sheehan received a residency fellowship that is allowing her to do infrared and other photographic processes on a tall ship in the northern latitudes, just off the coast of Svalbard, Norway.

The residency, sponsored by The Farm Foundation, will bring Sheehan together with scholars, scientists, choreographers,composers, sound designers, a cinematographer, and a children’s book author to collaborate on projects relating to the environment and climate change.

“So much of what we experience in contemporary life is filtered and fleeting,” said Sheehan. “I will use my camera as a drawing tool to look for patterns of light and ephemeral, spectacular moments in landscape,” she said. “I plan to work with micro lenses and infrared photography to show the environment in an engaging, and unfamiliar way”.

For Sheehan, who views her artist’s methods in almost a scientific manner, and whose primary focus is the environment, the collaboration is a perfect fit.

“When I start a project, I like to work in an experimental way with materials, opening the work to new outcomes,” she said. “I’m very excited to be in the arctic, where I’ll have time to push new ideas, collaborate, and collect visual data to use back in the studio.”

Sheehan said she primarily thinks of herself as “someone who draws” but she incorporates “all levels of visual information.” That includes photography, painting, charts, maps, and anything that helps convey “the collaged, compressed experience of contemporary life.”

Focusing on content that highlights the rapidly disappearing ice and snow, Sheehan said she’ll be using photo techniques in a “painterly way,” playing with light, color, and texture. The use of infrared can transform a landscape that is green to appear as if it is pink or white, thus returning a verdant landscape to the color of the ice and snow that once covered it.

Aside from landscapes, Sheehan said she’ll also be making photograms of ice shadows using cyanotype, a blue-toned, early photographic printing process used frequently in the 20^th century. As the process uses iron oxide, out of concern for the environment she won’t be developing the prints until she returns to her Brooklyn studio. As with the infrared, the cyanotype photos will also highlight global warming.

“Rather than showing ice melting, they’ll show you absence,” she said. “There are lots of mythic stories of shadows being the soul of something.”

Sheehan expects the overall theme of the work to be about “light, shadow, and ghosts,” themes which she says will allow her to play with the nearly 24 hours of light a day at the Arctic Circle this time of year.

“I use my camera as a drawing tool. I look for patterns of light and ephemeral moments in landscape,” she said. “I hope to bring that sensibility to the arctic.”

“Climate change is real, it’s serious, and it’s worsening,” said Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia.

“There is no real scientific debate . . . The facts are rigorously established and the risks are absolutely understood—but we have confabulated a political debate in this country. This is a reflection of our money politics beyond anything else, [including]the oil, coal, and gas industries,” he said.

“But that chokehold is coming unstuck. The public doesn’t want to be owned. And they know something’s not right.”

Sachs and Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, SDB, Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, were panelists for “Our Planet’s Keeper? The Environment, the Poor, and the Struggle for Justice,” an event sponsored by Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture on Nov. 3.

In a discussion moderated by Joan Rosenhauer, executive vice president for Catholic Relief Services, both Sachs and Cardinal Rodríguez praised Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, which recognizes global warming and addresses environmental degradation.

The pope consulted more than 200 experts on these topics, yet Laudato Si has been met with strong criticism, said Cardinal Rodríguez. Some critics decry the encyclical and its condemnation of consumerism; others argue that the pope should refrain from political matters altogether.

“This is wrong,” said Cardinal Rodríguez. “The encyclical talks about global warming in passing. Its main argument is that the earth is our common home. And every house needs maintenance—especially when we live in a house that is a little old.”

Our house, the cardinal said, is in dire need of repair. “California—rationing water. In Texas, there is terrible flooding. And here in the Northeast, look at this autumn—or rather, what a beautiful summer we’re having!”

Now more than ever the world needs the church’s moral leadership, said Sachs. As for whether a pontiff’s words could change the world, he offered a historical example:

In the spring of 1963, at the height of the Cold War, an ailing Pope John XXIII vowed to devote the remainder of his papacy to establishing peace. The result was Pacem in Terris, an encyclical that urged governments to recognize their civic responsibility for the well-being of the world and to situate power relations within a moral framework.

Two months after the encyclical’s publication, President Kennedy gave the commencement address at American University. Drawing on the encyclical’s push for a geopolitical moral framework, the president called for Americans to reexamine their attitudes about peace. The starting point, he said, should be the recognition that we are all human beings.

“We all inhabit this small planet,” Sachs said, quoting Kennedy, “we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s future, and we’re all mortal.”

Upon hearing the “peace speech,” Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party, called the U.S. envoy to Moscow and said: “That was the finest speech by an American president since FDR. I want to make peace with this man.”

Six weeks later the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed, and five years later came the Treaty on Nuclear Non-Proliferation.

“Framing the situation in a moral way is what pulled us back from the brink,” Sachs said. “Not game theory calculations, not talk of mutual assured destruction, not a list of what the other side has to do and here’s the red line—it was saying that we have to examine our own attitudes, because the other side is also human and they will make the same judgment.

“The encyclical played a fundamental role in shifting the world. And here we are today. It’s happening again.”

David Budescu, Ph.D., the Anne Anastasi Chair in Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology, teamed up with researchers at the University of Illinois-Champaign Urbana to measure how well the public understands phrases such as virtually certain, very likely, likely, unlikelyand very unlikely when reading the findings of climate change research.

These terms are among seven simple qualifiers used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to describe scientists’ research findings to policymakers and the public.

In the context of the reports, each term is meant to correspond to a range of numerical probabilities (i.e.,virtually certain refers to 99 percent or higher probability,very likely refers to 90 percent or higher probability, andlikely means 66 percent or higher probability).

But Budescu’s research revealed that the public usually perceived the verbal terms as meaning something less extreme than the scientists had intended.

The study asked 223 volunteers to weigh in on their interpretation of a group of 13 IPCC sentences containing the various phrases. For example, one sentence read: “It is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent.” Less than 5 percent of the volunteers interpreted the probability of that statement consistent with IPCC guidelines, the study showed.

For example, in another sentence, “Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years,” a quarter of all volunteers interpreted the phrase “very likely” to mean a probability lower than 70 percent rather than 90 percent.

“The paradoxical . . . consequences of the ‘one size fits all’ solution adopted by the IPCC are that the report may lead to underestimation of the magnitude of the problems being discussed,” Budescu and colleagues wrote.

However, supplementing the verbal phrases with numbers considerably improved communication, the report said. The researchers recommended that the IPCC use both words and numbers to communicate uncertainty and probability.

The study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, appeared in the March issue ofPsychological Science.

Focus The Nation features a variety of presentations by several members of the faculty, administration and student body on the Rose Hill campus. More than 40 presenters from a variety of disciplines will lead and participate in sessions that will address climate change and sustainability.

The all-day event features more than 40 presenters from a variety of disciplines who will lead and participate in the many sessions that will address the vital issues concerning climate change and sustainability. There will also be an art and photography exhibit and a Sustainability Marketplace of Goods and Good Ideas on the second floor of the McGinley Center, and a student-built wind farm on Edwards Parade.

More than 1100 colleges and universities in all 50 states will participate in the national teach-in.

The teach-in is the culmination of Earth Week at Fordham, which begins on Thursday, Jan. 24, when the fifth annual conference of the Environmental Consortium of Hudson Valley Colleges and Universities will be held at McGinley Center. The theme of this year’s two-day conference is “Climate Change: Science, Culture and the Regional Response.”