State of the Planet

Two things happened this week (or actually last week, by the time I’ve gotten around to writing about it) that deserve mention.
I wholeheartedly enjoy skipping classes from time to time, especially if I have a good reason. Professors often seem to forget that we are the ones paying them, and that if there comes a day that we have something better to do with our time than be in class, that is our prerogative. Attendance policies that are built into course grades are two things: tyranny and cowardice. Tyranny, because nowhere else would you find a class system that you sign up for, pay money for, and are then charged fees if you don’t show up for class. And cowardice, because good classes don’t need them. I’ve never taken a math class that had one, because with math, unless you already know the material, if you don’t show up to class, you’ll fail. It’s as simple as that. So they don’t need something as artificially punitive as grade docking to see that students show up. The only classes I’ve ever had that require them are ones like humanities and languages, and frankly I think in many cases they are nothing but smokescreens that let instructors pressure students to attend in order to prop up their own somewhat shaky egos and feel better about themselves, because they actually aren’t very good teachers and wouldn’t be able to get students to come any other way. Utter nonsense …Anyways, back to SotP. SotP was a two day conference held by the Earth Institute here at Columbia, which is headed by Prof. Jeff Sachs, who is pictured below. I won’t go into all his accomplishments, but I’d known about him before coming here and have found him even more impressive in person than I’d hoped. Briefly, he is an economist by training who worked with some of the very difficult transitional issues in the eastern European nations after the fall of communism, and now focuses mostly on Africa. He is a brave, modest, and brilliant man, an excellent communicator and speaker, and someone who cares deeply about what he does. I respect him greatly. This conference was organized by him primarily, and invited scholars & leaders from around the world to address a number of very important topics that affect us all, such as global warming & sustainable economic development. (IE, econ. development that won’t destroy our planet in the long run) The topics covered would be too numerous to address here, as would be the impressive list of speakers and the things I learned. (Among them that the issue with fossil fuels isn’t availability, there is still plenty of oil around, but pollution, if we don’t change something soon the global warming will have serious consequences. Also that ‘socially responsible investing’ is going from being a niche market to something that brings in serious dollars for companies like Goldman Sachs) Long story short, this was a great learning opportunity, and on these two days a far better use of my time than being in class.
I should say too, in order to be fair, that my instructors were all very gracious when I told them (not asked, told) that I would not be in class those two days. I still think attendance policies are head-hammeringly stupid, but even a bad policy can be applied with decency, and all my instructors did so with me. This was a great event, and I’m glad I had the chance to go and learn.
I just saw that much of the content from the lecture series is available online. Anyone interested can go check it out at www.stateoftheplanet.org