I spent a quaint Friday evening in New York in the company of DJ Spooky, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, and hundreds of other attendees of the Do The Math tour. Like an old fashioned tour (and I mean old fashioned—think traveling presidential campaigns of the 19th century), McKibben and friends were there to rouse the audience to their feet around the biggest threat facing us this century—today and in the next 50 years: climate change.

I've been mulling over a few of McKibben's points, including what could be considered a movement's currencies and actionable media literacy. These are explained in more depth at the end of the post, but before we get there, let's set the scene:

The recent fun tumblr "Charts from the floor of the US Senate" (and Orrin Hatch's gem) brought this story to mind:

One of the formative moments of my youth came from a town hall meeting with Hatch's colleague, senator Bob Bennett, on the topic of wilderness protection of federal land in Utah. I had come to the meeting with a petition of around 1000 signatures that I had gathered at my high school supporting wilderness, which he derisively dismissed as a "push poll", and said things to the effect that "I'm elected to do what I want, not what the polls say."

He then brought out a floor chart, with two images of the Escalante River in Utah, one from the mid 70's and one from the mid 90's. The older picture was barren of vegetation, the recent picture was lush and green, and he asserted "This is what 20 years of non-wilderness management can do. We don't need wilderness."

Cape Cod Bay Watch is dedicated to protecting the species, habitat and health of Cape Cod Bay. The most immediate goal is to educate the public about impacts of Entergy’s Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station—especially its "once-through cooling" system. This system uses over a half-billion gallons of water from the bay every day, killing marine life in the process and dumping the water, heated 32⁰F degrees warmer and polluted with toxic chemicals and radioactive materials, back into the bay. In our opinion, Pilgrim Station does not have a valid permit to operate in this manner and is violating numerous state and federal water quality standards. Despite this, the facility was recently re-licenced to operate for another 20 years.

Great news for the Civindex project. Right after I wrote here about the idea of creating an index to measure personal activist participation on the internet, I received an interesting message on the comments section: “Hi Andre, I came across this interesting post. I found this idea intriguing. I am also conducting some research on similar topics. Why don't we have a chat on this?”

It turned out to be a message from Stefano de Paoli, an Italian researcher from the <ahref Foundation and University of Trento, who studies the interactions between technology and society. One of Stefano’s colleagues Luca de Biase (chairman of Fondazione ahref) visited the MIT last year, and they are implementing the Civic Media concepts in Italy.

After some difficulty in finding a common time for this chat, we ended up talking, earlier this week, and decided to work together on the project.

I've joined the Media Lab's Changing Places group for a week in China to design the future of sustainable cities in Shanghai.

China presents enormous challenges and huge opportunities, all at a dizzying scale. 300 million Chinese, the population of the entire United States, will move to urban areas over the next 20 years. 20 of the world's 30 most polluted cities are in China. Only 1% of China's 600 million urban residents have access to clean air, as measured by EU standards. Anyone serious about climate change, human welfare, and other challenges of the 21st century must consider China's role.

If you've read a magazine or traveled through an airport in the last couple of years, you've probably seen ads for IBM's Smarter Cities initiative. Today in our Post-Oil Shanghai course, we got to learn about some of the projects behind the very public campaign. Dr. Lisa Amini is the first director of IBM Research Ireland, based in Dublin. They focus on creating urban-scale analytics, optimizations, and systems for sustainable energy and transportation.

Lisa's group focuses on transforming cities with:

In early June I was at the city of Sao Luis, in the fringes of the Amazon rainforest, in Brazil. I waited with a lawyer, in front of the city’s harbor, while 20 of my colleagues, activists and volunteers, occupied the port in a protest against shipments of charcoal that were destroying the rainforest. Hordes of police cars arrived to the area and the situation was very tense. My boss tried to negotiate a solution with the vice-governor and anything could happen. My thoughts, however, were already somewhere else. My thoughts were focused on the future.

After 20 years of professional experience as a journalist and social activist, --and 8 years on a job that I loved with the environmental group Greenpeace--, there I was, leaving everything, in the pursuit of a dream. A few months earlier I had been admitted to the Harvard Kennedy School and accepted the challenge of being a student again. In the following week I would jump on an airplane towards a new city, a new school, with new friends and new possibilities. At that moment, with bags packed, I had no idea how it was going to be.