Storm runoff can pose challenges for waterways like Paint Creek, which is known for being clear and cold. Runoff can disrupt a waterway's habitat by carrying sediment into the water. Hernz Laguerre, Jr., The Detroit News
Carol Thompson:
As climate change fuels storms and brings warmer average temperatures to the Midwest, it also is ushering in a challenging era for Michigan rivers and the fish and bugs that live in them.
Read More (subcription required)
Detroit News File Photo
Melissa Nann and Burke Riley Beggin:
$1 billion for the federal Great Lakes restoration program from the bipartisan infrastructure bill will speed the cleanup of nine damaged areas in Michigan to completion by 2030, officials said.
The Michigan areas to be cleaned up, including the Detroit, Rouge and St. Clair rivers and River Raisin, are among 25 in the lakes region designated as "areas of concern" by the Environmental Protection Agency due to damage caused by industrial pollution and development.
President Joe Biden is expected to announce the new funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative during a trip Thursday to Lorain, Ohio.
MODIS satellite image of the Great Lakes showing maximum ice extent on March 4, 2009. Image credit: NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory
Nearly all scientific sampling of the Great Lakes is done between May and October, when the lakes are free of ice and the water is warmer.
But this month, scientists from more than a dozen U.S. and Canadian institutions, including Central Michigan University, will brave the elements to sample all five Great Lakes and Lake St. Clair in a first-of-its-kind coordinated campaign called the Winter Grab.
Teams will drill through ice to collect water samples, measure light levels at various depths and net tiny zooplankton as part of a broader effort to better understand the changing face of winter on the Great Lakes, where climate warming is increasing winter air temperatures, decreasing ice-cover extent and changing precipitation patterns.
The specific goal of the Winter Grab is to help fill key wintertime knowledge gaps about ice properties, water movement, nutrient concentrations and lake biology. The event is funded in part by the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research at the University of Michigan, a partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Scientists have studied the Great Lakes extensively, but surprisingly, we know very little about what takes place during the winter,” said Don Uzarski, director of the CMU Institute for Great Lakes Research. …
We’ve updated our events pages with lots of new films, talks, and other activities on the theme of Deep Waters. Please see the events page for details and watch this space for more. We’ll be updating the site regularly with new events and links — including, in the not-too-distant future, details on next year’s theme and some of the events we have planned.
This is one of many stories this summer about the brutal drought in the Southwestern United States. As water levels rise in the Great Lakes, rivers, aquifers, and irrigation canals are running dry in the West.
Anticipating next year’s CE theme, “Deep Waters,” please see this call for submissions from CMU Libraries, in collaboration with the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Libraries:
People of all ages may submit works of art or research that depicts the impact of recent big water events on the people who live in Michigan. This virtual exhibition will launch in September 2021.
Learn more and submit an application at library.cmich.edu/BigWaterExhibition.
This exhibition is co-sponsored by Central Michigan University Libraries and the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Libraries and is made possible by a grant from the American Library Association.
Art Spiegelman
Join us for a virtual conversation with author and illustrator Art Spiegelman, who created the Pulitzer Prize winning Holocaust narrative Maus, portraying Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The book weaves Spiegelman's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into a retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. The book offers an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma.
Art Spiegelman will share images from Maus and discuss how they relate to today’s context at home and around the world. Following the presentation, audience members are invited to participate in a Q&A session with the author.
Every child matters. And Orange Shirt Day, a movement that started in Canada to recognize the attrocities carried out against generations of children in boarding schools across Canada, affirms this each year.
The Saginaw Chippewa are recognizing this day as a commemoration of human rights violations that took place locally here in Mount Pleasant and across the United States.
You can read more about Orange Shirt Day here.
These T-SHIRTS are from Northern Ontario School of Medicine’s Orange Shirt Project.
Our first featured event for Critical Engagements is the virtual opening of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls exhibition at the Ziibiwing Center on September 25, 2020. Information is below.
2020. It’s been a year like no other, and we’re not yet done with it.
2020. It’s shorthand for a dense tale of human tragedy—death, murders, racial injustice, floods, fires, hurricanes—that many living today have not experienced. We heard our parents’ or grandparents’ tales of wars and devastations and we studied them, too. But this year, we have lived them.
2020 is the year in which we realized that we are very much still human, that we are of our bodies.
Critical Engagements’ focus this year could only be on being human in the ways we have been this year. Below is our revised description for the year ahead.
Be well. Keep well.
***
This year’s pandemic, economic chaos, and natural disasters have all underscored how fleeting those basic things that make us human can be: bodies, identities and abilities, languages, families, communities — even our dreams and beliefs have been upended. And with George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, we had yet another devastating reminder of the ongoing ways in which we have seen and defined each other as less than human.
While this year’s theme can lead us in many directions, we will emphasize in particular the dignities and rights essential to human beings. How do race, gender, sexual preference, and other identities relate to basic human rights across history and today? We will also explore questions around definitions of humanity and language, technology, and sciences because they contribute to our understanding of those identities and rights. While we don’t have all the answers, we know that they are as critical as they are complicated. Please join us as we engage the resources of our university and community to work on a question that matters so very much.
Human identities: gender, race, sexual preference and others
Rights, human rights, animal rights
Hominids, human origins, biological anthropology
Language, linguistics, linguistic anthropology
Medical and psychological definitions of life, death, consciousness, personhood
Philosophical and religious accounts of life, death, consciousness, personhood
Artificial intelligence, artificial consciousness
Robots, robot ethics, robot rights, robot definitions; the future of work in a world of robots
What does it mean to be humane?
Shankar Vedantam and NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast:
The value of local newspapers can hardly be overstated right now. We read our local papers to track the spread of COVID-19 in our states, and the availability of ICU beds at nearby hospitals. We read to get a sense of how nearby businesses are faring, and what nursing homes are doing to keep residents safe. More of us are reading more news all the time. But at the same time that readership is soaring, advertising revenue—which keeps newspapers financially afloat—is plummeting. As a result, a number of newspapers across the country are laying off workers, even shuttering. …
Whereas most of us treat newspapers like consumer products, new research from Paul Gao, Chang Lee, and Dermot Murphy suggests that they might be more like police departments. Gao, Lee, and Murphy looked at how newspaper closures might affect the cost of borrowing in local governments. What they found is a price tag that may give many taxpayers sticker shock.
This week on Hidden Brain, we look at an unusual case of what economists refer to as a free-rider problem. And we ask, who bears the cost when nobody wants to pay?
The Critical Engagements team has recruited professors and experts from around CMU’s campus to create a special pop-up course to address the coronavirus crisis from a variety of perspectives. (What’s a pop-up course? See the Chronicle of Higher Education for an introduction.)
“Perspectives on Pandemics” (LAR 397D) is a one-credit online class that runs from April 6–May 3, 2020. Taught by professors with expertise in biomedicine, economics, history, public health, literature, medical anthropology, and public policy, the course features four weeks of lectures, discussions, readings, and other materials that will offer a contextualized examination of COVID-19 and other pandemics in world history and culture.
Registration for LAR 397D is open now. Contact Christi Brookes for details or register directly using CMU’s Course Search and Registration portal. Updated information about the course will also be posted on the COVID-19 page hosted by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.
Critical Engagements and this blog are run by a small if unusually dedicated staff who have been scrambling, like the rest of the world, to keep up in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. We’re professors and parents trying to create and manage the headspinning transition to online learning and online everything. So we want to take a moment to observe or announce three things.
First, when we created Critical Engagements and began planning its annual themes in 2017, we could hardly have envisioned a “Question That Matters” quite so comprehensively as the coronavirus, or that engages our past and future topics this directly and urgently. A list of the themes makes the point for us:
People On the Move: Borders, Boundaries, and Migration (2017–2018)
Fake News: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? (2019–2020)
The dots don’t need much connecting but COVID-19 has made us think in new ways about boundaries and people on the move; it has lots of people talking about the end of the world (and using the word ‘apocalyptic’ with unusual frequency); it has been the subject of both brilliant reporting and fatally misleading claims; and it has reminded us of what it means to be human in the midst of a crisis.
Second, because of the scramble and the teaching in particular, we haven’t been able to update this site in the way we’d hoped. Just when fake news (and its opposite) become more urgent than ever, we’ve not only had to cancel this year’s remaining events but also have had to interrupt our regular updates to the blog. This is, to be sure, a minor irony among the many that have emerged with the virus: our urge to be among and with our people, physically, or to be out on the streets or in homes or shelters doing what we can to help — all these turn out to be exactly what we can’t do now. So we apologize, and announce here our resolution to make it right as soon as we can. [Update: See our new course, “Perspectives on Pandemics,” for a down payment on this promise.]
Third, we’re also delighted to announce that part of the solution has already arrived, in the form of a generous offer of help from Bryan Whitledge of CMU’s Clarke Historical Library. Regular CE followers will know Bryan already from previous posts, panels, and events, but we’re especially glad that he’s offered his own expertise in archives and (sometimes fake) news, to help keep us and our readers up to date. Stay tuned, then, for guest posts from Bryan and the Clarke.
Writing for Ars Technica, Scott K. Johnson has a useful summary of fake news research by Andrew M. Guess, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler, recently published in Nature Human Behavior.
Overall, the researchers conclude that “widespread speculation about the prevalence of exposure to untrustworthy websites has been overstated.” Of course, not everything is captured in their dataset, like content viewed purely within Facebook, for example, or the effects of misinformation on the broader information ecosystem. But it is a unique study that supports what others have found—a relatively small fraction of the public is consuming much of what the researchers call “factually dubious content.”
From Washington Post China correspondent Gerry Shih:
As new coronavirus cases and the sense of panic ebb in China, the country that was first struck by the disease has been gripped by a wave of nationalist pride, conspiracy theories and a perennial mix of anti-American sentiments: suspicion, superiority, schadenfreude.
NPR’s Sam Gringlas, February 26, 2020: “With An Election On The Horizon, Older Adults Get Help Spotting Fake News.”
Special thanks to WCMU’s Amy Robinson for alerting us to this story.
From the Post Reports podcast, Kim Bellware on how disinformation about the coronavirus is spreading online.
→ See also, from the same source, “The coronavirus is spreading rapidly. So is misinformation about it.”
Please join us on Tuesday, February 18 for “Climate Denial Isn’t About Science: Like Fake News It’s a Symptom, Not a Cause,” a presentation by Dr. Alan Rudy.
See the events page for details
From our Evening With Wes Lowery (January 23):
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wes Lowery visits Central Michigan University. Lowery is a journalist for The Washington Post and a CNN political contributor. He is the author of They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement (2016), which describes his experiences while reporting on the 2016 Ferguson unrest and also chronicles the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS / REUTERS
Alexis C. Madrigal, reporting for the Atlantic.
Is the future urban? Is geography fate? Why and where are we polarized? The CE theme for 2022–2023 is “Cities, Coasts, and Everywhere Else.”
→ Details, events, and resources
Critical Engagements is a collaborative project housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences that makes the academic mission of Central Michigan University concrete by highlighting how our students, faculty, and community are tackling the world’s most pressing and difficult questions. → More details
