Ever since I've started to learn more about climate change, I've noticed that those who would be most negatively affected by global warming are already the worst off in the world. Look at how Hurricane Katrina affected the Gulf Coast, then multiply that numerous times to reflect how those types of storms become more of the norm.

The feeling heightened after reading about the results of the IPCC report in the news, where some scientists predicted that all the islands of Indonesia would disappear from rising oceans by the end of this century. I became ever more convinced after reading a couple articles in The Atlantic Monthly, one focusing on the winners and losers of global warming, and the other which points to global warming as one of the root causes of genocide in Darfur.

My theory is now crystallized as environmental imperialism: the intended and unintended behaviors and policies in industrialized nations that change environmental conditions, resulting in increased economic capital for these nations at the expense of all forms of capital--economic, environmental, and social--in developing nations.

This doesn't mean that we're consciously spewing carbon dioxide into the air in order to maintain and expand our hegemony over the rest of the world. China's air pollution, for example, makes up a significant amount of toxic material in the air over the Pacific Northwest.

Nobody consciously goes around wanting to add more detritus to the world by purchasing an iPod, nor do corporations consciously do the same by selling cool widgets to consumers. Everyone wants the lowest transaction costs. When costs to the environment and to society aren't internalized, you aren't even aware of your impact. It isn't until you multiply the impact by 88 million times (number of iPods sold) that the impact is really tangible.

The geopolitical patterns of environmental imperialism remain the same. The northern (hemisphere) dominates the south. To illustrate the effects in the example of Darfur, Stephen Faris writes:

Until the rains began to fail, the sheikh’s people lived amicably with the settled farmers. The nomads were welcome passers-through, grazing their camels on the rocky hillsides that separated the fertile plots. The farmers would share their wells, and the herders would feed their stock on the leavings from the harvest. But with the drought, the farmers began to fence off their land—even fallow land—for fear it would be ruined by passing herds. A few tribes drifted elsewhere or took up farming, but the Arab herders stuck to their fraying livelihoods—nomadic herding was central to their cultural identity. (The distinction between “Arab” and “African” in Darfur is defined more by lifestyle than any physical difference: Arabs are generally herders, Africans typically farmers. The two groups are not racially distinct.)

The name Darfur means “Land of the Fur” (the largest single tribe of farmers in Darfur), but the vast region holds the tribal lands—the dars—of many tribes. In the late 1980s, landless and increasingly desperate Arabs began banding together to wrest their own dar from the black farmers. In 1987, they published a manifesto of racial superiority, and clashes broke out between Arabs and Fur. About 3,000 people, mostly Fur, were killed, and hundreds of villages and nomadic camps were burned before a peace agreement was signed in 1989. More fighting in the 1990s entrenched the divisions between Arabs and non-Arabs, pitting the Arab pastoralists against the Fur, Zaghawa, and Massaleit farmers. In these disputes, Sudan’s central government, seated in Khartoum, often supported the Arabs politically and sometimes provided arms.

In Nicaragua, Green Empowerment, in partnership with a local NGO, installed solar panels to power water pumps in villages that didn't need them before. Why? These villages that depend on freshwater from nearby snowpack are scooping up mud instead of water from their wells, while industrialized nations can afford to pump water. The inequality will only widen as energy costs increase.

Yes, this is a bleak picture... only if you care about human life. After all, most of your own lives won't be affected as much as fishermen on the Indian Ocean.

But if you don't care about them, go ahead and keep on driving your SUVs. Keep the global economy moving by purchasing cheap products from halfway around the world instead of things made in the US. The corporations--no, the United States and all of the people of the industrialized world including you--depend on that.

If you do care about your impact upon other inhabitants on our planet, I urge you to think about and analyze how you live. Read the news, go out and vote, change a lightbulb, and be the change.

Ian posted a somewhat heated comment to my entry about how long division really helps students. I don't know about the rest of you, but I think that long division is a basic math skill. You might as well learn it because chances are you won't know what career path you'll be taking at that stage in life.

And if you don't like it, then maybe that's why math and science isn't for you. I realized that a career in IT would be mind-numbing for me. But that happened only after I had an internship doing IT stuff.

Yet Ian's point is still valid. When Steven D. Levitt looked at student performance in Freakonomics, he tried to find out whether the implementation of school choice had really made a difference in students' lives. The data showed that the students who tried to transfer out of their schools (but couldn't) did just as well as the students who escaped and went to greener lawns. The key factor was that they aimed high.

There was, however, one group of students in Chicago who did see a dramatic change: those who entered a technical school or career academy. These students performed substantially better than they did in their old academic settings and graduated at a much higher rate than their past performance would have predicted. So the CPS (Chicago Public Schools) school-choice program did help prepare a small segment of otherwise struggling students for solid careers by giving them practical skills. But it doesn't appear that it made anyone much smarter.

So the practical nature of education definitely needs to be addressed. But that doesn't prepare students for post-secondary education. In other words, it's great when we can send high school grads directly into certain careers, but will we still need the rest of them to be better prepared for collegiate-level work, which is supposed to provide the skills needed for professional careers.

Let's look at Finland, ranked the best education system in the world, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. You'd think the best would be some Asian country that shoves rote learning down students' troats. Yet one of Finland's strengths, as pointed out in a Financial Times article, is an innovative approach: "...learning to learn, as it is called here. Students evaluate themselves and their teachers. Social and emotional development are part of the educational requirements."

After looking at all these random data and anecdotes, the most likely causal factor to Finland's success is their low student to teacher ratio of 10:1. The individual attention means a much better learning environment: "Students, a third of them immigrants, are rewarded for making improvements during their time at the school and not just through final examinations."

So it looks like we just need get back to the basics and cut back on the emphasis of standardized testing, which provides educators with the incentive to cheat. Pay good teachers more. Make it easier to kick the bad teachers out. Spend more on books instead of bombs. Yeah, it isn't going to be easy.