Lily Twining
Lily Twining
Recent Stories
TWINING: Unhealthy competition in Yale’s sciences
At least one uncomfortable issue does appear to be Yale-specific: the unhealthy and unnecessary amount of competition among faculty in natural sciences at Yale. I am all for healthy competition between researchers — after all, the race to make new discoveries is an essential part of what makes the scientific process so exciting — but it’s hard to make students feel welcome in a world where everyone seems to hate each other.
Twining: The nature of our environment
Today marks the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. A lot has happened in the 40 years since April 22, 1970. The modern environmental movement has transformed itself from a movement lead by counter-cultural hippies to one lead by companies like Walmart and institutions like Yale. Instead of suing the people polluting our planet, we’ve learned to work with them to find solutions. These are all accomplishments that merit celebration, but not every change that environmentalism has gone through has been for the better.
Twining: Care about more than climate
Does the thought of nitrogen deposition keep you up at night? If you answered no, you’re not alone. When my professor posed this question to a classroom full of environmental studies majors and students at the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, we all shook our heads. Who worries, really passionately worries, about nitrogen pollution? Yet, when my professor had asked us if we worried about climate change moments before, the response was, unsurprisingly, a resounding yes. Nitrogen deposition is just one of many pressing environmental issues that most people, including environmentalists, have never heard of because we’ve become so focused on climate change. In recent years climate change has almost come to represent the environmental movement itself: We’ve become not the environmental movement, but the defenders of climate legislation and science movement.
Twining: A problem right now
The most important negotiations in the world start on Monday in Copenhagen. At stake is no less than the future of our planet’s climate. International delegates will gather for two weeks in Copenhagen at the United Nation’s 15th Congress of the Parties, COP15, to discuss how we can prevent catastrophic climate change.