Communities are pushing their limits to adapt to extreme heat, water scarcity and other environmental challenges. There are helpful resources available for resiliency and adaptation strategies.
FLOR MORALES
Flor Morales is ambitious and has always wanted to make her community a better place. Inspired by her mother and her community, she’s constantly seeking opportunities to improve her life and the lives of those around her. To make these types of improvements a reality she builds long-term strategies for the future.
In the intensifying heat of southern Arizona Flor is focusing on building cooler and healthier futures for Tucson families. Through a nonprofit organization Flor organizes lay health workers called promotoras to support and educate underserved neighborhoods on matters of environmental health. Flor and the promotoras are helping families adapt to the heat by planting desert trees to offset rising temperatures, and constructing rainwater harvesting systems to store water. She works closely with families to manage material logistics, and she conducts workshops on rainwater harvesting and tree care. Naturally, when it’s time to build and plant, she’s out in the dirt helping families bring a brighter future to life.
With these forward-thinking strategies yards can flourish and trees shade houses to create adapted, healthy, and resilient oases.
SCIENCE IN EVERYDAY LIFE
RECOMMENDED BOOKS AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Consider these selections for your Strategy theme reading and discussions. Full descriptions of each book and suggested discussion questions can be found in the download file at the bottom of the page.
Forty Signs of Rain, by Kim Stanley Robinson. (Fiction)
Senate environmental staffer Charlie Quibler cares for his young son and deals with the frustrating politics of global warming while his wife takes a more rational approach to the looming crisis in her work at the National Science Foundation. A proposal has come in for a process that could solve the problem of global warming. But when a race to control the budding technology begins, the stakes only get higher. - amazon.com
Nature’s Confession, by J. L. Morin. (Non-fiction - young adult)
A smart-mouthed, mixed-race teen and is girlfriend set out to save civilization. Can they thwart polluters of Earth and other fertile planets? The heroes come into their own in different kinds of relationships in this diverse, multi-cultural romance. Along the way, they enlist the help of female droid Any Gynoid, who uncovers cutting-edge scientific mysteries. Will Starliament tear them from the project and unleash 'intelligent' life's habitual pollution, or will youth lead the way to a new way of coexisting with Nature?
The Rough Guide to Climate Change, by Robert Henson (Non-fiction)
Cutting a swathe through scientific research and political debate, this completely updated 2nd edition lays out the facts and assesses the options- global and personal- for dealing with the threat of a warming world. The guide looks at the evolution of our atmosphere over the last 4.5 billion years and what computer simulations of climate change reveal about our past, present, and future.
The Stone Gate, by Mark Mann. (Fiction – young adult).
When Jack and Kaya see a dazzling white light shining from a giant rock in the forest, it takes them on an adventure to a place both familiar and yet like nowhere they know. But where exactly are they? And can they find their way back in time? The Stone Gate is a young adult fantasy adventure that explores the issue of climate change in a unique and exciting way.
Tipping Point, by Simon Rosser. (Fiction)
Robert Spire is contacted by Doris Stanton, mother of the late UK climatologist Dr. Dale Stanton, with a request that he finds a suitable home for her dead son's legacy - a large sum left to global warming organizations. Spire sets out to investigate, but soon realizes his life is in danger as he uncovers a conspiracy with far reaching global implications.
Spire soon discovers that someone wants climatologists silenced at all costs as he becomes entangled in an international conspiracy set to push the Arctic to its tipping point and the Earth to disaster.
Waiting on the Bounty, by Mary Knackstedt Dyck. (Non-fiction)
Mary Knackstedt Dyck’s diary of farm life on the far western border of Kansas during the grim Dust Bowl years. From the point of view of a wife, mother, and partner in the farming enterprise, Dyck recorded the everyday events as well as the frustrations of living with drought and dust storms and the sadness of watching one's children leave the farm.
A remarkable historical document, the diary describes a period in this century before the telephone and indoor plumbing were commonplace in rural homes - a time when farm families in the Plains states were isolated from world events and radio provided an enormously important link between farmsteads and the world at large.
Senate environmental staffer Charlie Quibler cares for his young son and deals with the frustrating politics of global warming while his wife takes a more rational approach to the looming crisis in her work at the National Science Foundation. A proposal has come in for a process that could solve the problem of global warming. But when a race to control the budding technology begins, the stakes only get higher. - amazon.com
Nature’s Confession, by J. L. Morin. (Non-fiction - young adult)
A smart-mouthed, mixed-race teen and is girlfriend set out to save civilization. Can they thwart polluters of Earth and other fertile planets? The heroes come into their own in different kinds of relationships in this diverse, multi-cultural romance. Along the way, they enlist the help of female droid Any Gynoid, who uncovers cutting-edge scientific mysteries. Will Starliament tear them from the project and unleash 'intelligent' life's habitual pollution, or will youth lead the way to a new way of coexisting with Nature?
The Rough Guide to Climate Change, by Robert Henson (Non-fiction)
Cutting a swathe through scientific research and political debate, this completely updated 2nd edition lays out the facts and assesses the options- global and personal- for dealing with the threat of a warming world. The guide looks at the evolution of our atmosphere over the last 4.5 billion years and what computer simulations of climate change reveal about our past, present, and future.
The Stone Gate, by Mark Mann. (Fiction – young adult).
When Jack and Kaya see a dazzling white light shining from a giant rock in the forest, it takes them on an adventure to a place both familiar and yet like nowhere they know. But where exactly are they? And can they find their way back in time? The Stone Gate is a young adult fantasy adventure that explores the issue of climate change in a unique and exciting way.
Tipping Point, by Simon Rosser. (Fiction)
Robert Spire is contacted by Doris Stanton, mother of the late UK climatologist Dr. Dale Stanton, with a request that he finds a suitable home for her dead son's legacy - a large sum left to global warming organizations. Spire sets out to investigate, but soon realizes his life is in danger as he uncovers a conspiracy with far reaching global implications.
Spire soon discovers that someone wants climatologists silenced at all costs as he becomes entangled in an international conspiracy set to push the Arctic to its tipping point and the Earth to disaster.
Waiting on the Bounty, by Mary Knackstedt Dyck. (Non-fiction)
Mary Knackstedt Dyck’s diary of farm life on the far western border of Kansas during the grim Dust Bowl years. From the point of view of a wife, mother, and partner in the farming enterprise, Dyck recorded the everyday events as well as the frustrations of living with drought and dust storms and the sadness of watching one's children leave the farm.
A remarkable historical document, the diary describes a period in this century before the telephone and indoor plumbing were commonplace in rural homes - a time when farm families in the Plains states were isolated from world events and radio provided an enormously important link between farmsteads and the world at large.