Concerning the key troubles of our time, these being finding solutions for climate change impacts that will work for all – from Bamako to Berlin, and for changing the course of human history characterized by unsustainable development towards pathways that will transform all societies toward sustainable forms of development – there is no shortage of solutions in the science and policy sphere. Yet, yet, here we’re, with solutions and challenges abound!
What explains this paradox?
Could it be that scientists, and science, has traded its distinguishing value of objective purity for idealism? What explanation could there be for common misty misunderstandings at the interface of science and politics? Is it a pretentious enterprise to maintain impartiality on climate change impacts that compromise human life and lifeforms. Is there room left for objective science in political spheres characterized by partisan politics? Is it a mugs game to answer such?
As Michael Davies-Venn, formerly an interdisciplinary science communicator, now work on finding scientific solutions for climate change and sustainability within these global frameworks, such questions play at the background while searching for policy solutions questions such as how developing countries mostly across Africa and those in developed regions could cooperatively solve global environmental problems – as they must. And such queries often come to the foreground when I am called to engage with politics, such as recently to the German Bundestag (parliament) to discuss the Sustainable Development Goals. A Junior Fellow in Ethics of the Anthropocene at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and cosmopolitan, I exact from scientific solutions on climate and sustainability an essential value of global relevance, even as I contemplate the sometimes homogenizing effects scientific outcomes taken up by policymakers could have on societies.
Other ways I engage with the non-scientific community is by writing commentaries on energy and sustainability policies that are often published:
By the Heinrich- Böll-Stiftung: Link
And the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung: Link
Recent Publications:
Pattberg, P. & Davies-Venn, M. (Forthcoming 2024). Global Sustainability Governance in the Anthropocene. In: Wissenburg, M. & Machin, A.(eds.), Handbook of Environmental Political Theory in the Anthropocene, Edward Elgar.
Pattberg, P. & Davies-Venn, M. (2022). The Anthropocene and Global Environmental Politics. In: Kassiola, J. & Luke, T. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook on Environmental Politics, Activism, and Theory, Palgrave Macmillan Publishers.
Pattberg, P. H., & Davies Venn, M. (2020). Dating the Anthropocene. In G. Duerbeck, & P. Huepkes (Eds.), The Anthropocenic Turn: The Interplay between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age (pp. 70-89). (Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature; Vol. 117).