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All right, then you had some topic in mind, so take it away.
Take it away, I can do that. Yeah, so recently I was part of this workshop called Climate Fresk.
I had no idea what that meant and did not learn about what fresk meant until about halfway through
the workshop, but I won't give away the surprise yet, I guess, before we build up to that.
So Climate Fresk is described in a couple of different ways. I guess if I had to summarize it,
it's a more approachable way to both beginning to think about climate and specifically sort of
global warming and its transition to overall climate change, and trying to both visualize
and sort of process the sort of complicated cause and effect of these things. So the ways in which
humans play that role and the cascade of effects that kind of come from these things.
And it, from the way that it was described, for instance, it tries to do this in a much more
approachable way than like reading the X thousand page IPCC reports on the climate, right?
Okay.
So it was designed by somebody whose name I have just forgotten, but the website's easy enough
for people to find if they're interested. It's just climatefresk, F-R-E-S-K, dot org.
And so this was Cedric Ringenbach, I believe. And so he designed with a big team,
essentially a game of all sorts. It's not quite like a board game that you would expect,
but it is in essence a game. So there are a bunch of these sort of cards that have a
main topic on them with an image that is evocative or comes from the IPCC reports.
So some of them are like graphs from that report, and some of them are just visuals,
right, to connect with. For example, there's a human activity one, and it's some photograph
of, you know, the blurry people moving around in like a city street. So just a visual trick.
Okay. Okay.
And so you get all these cards, and you're like, okay, well, I'm going to look at this
So just a visual trick.
Okay. Okay.
So you get all these cards, and you're given sort of sets at a time, like, you know,
five sets of these cards. And you work with a team and a facilitator, in particular mine,
there was like five people in the team, to essentially build out a concept map, perhaps
would be a good word for it, of how these things relate to each other. And so the sort of simple
start is what are the causes or the things that happen? And then what are the effects? And you
03:05
try to put them in order, that gets more complicated as the next stack of cards pop up.
And it becomes a little less clear what could really be cause to effect, but how the things
are related to each other. Okay, you you work on this, you take those cards, and you just start
laying them out on a giant, you know, table or like, scrap paper and all these other things,
whatever you want to use.
And when does the game end? Or is that not really a point?
The game ends when you have finished the set of cards, and you have kind of decided upon,
and the facilitator has helped you to see the important connections that are, you know,
ones you really want to draw between all of these factors. And you've kind of gathered
a greater understanding of different aspects of the sort of climate change effect process.
So it's there's no winning, right? But I related it to like a game because,
all right, if you want competition,
there was playful competition, but it was more for the point is the discussion,
the process of how to get there, not really about how it ends.
Even so far as at least in this particular case, it ended with a series of sort of reflections.
So a little like mini gentle quiz just to be like, hey, like, this is an important piece that you
want to take away from those and a reflection between everybody, not just what they were
taking away, but also in the space of like, how are you experiencing sort of the awareness of
climate change. So it's meant and aimed at a wide range of age groups, I think I was told age 14
and up, which seems about right, because I considered this would be good for even the
high school that perhaps I had been at. So was this workshop
hosted with you disseminating this in a classroom setting or something of that nature, or?
It was, so it was hosted by a particular department that's in charge of a variety of
like sustainability efforts. It's like a collection of all these older projects.
And so it was just an open option for, I think it was, I don't know actually who it was
limited to, but a lot of people that were there were either grad students or many of them were
other faculty. So it was the idea of introducing what the game was, having the experience of it,
because not everybody comes from a specifically climate related discipline. And the option
06:02
at the end of this is that there are other ones that people might want to take part in.
I guess even as far as there being not just sort of science specific ones, but I guess there is
a gender based one, although it seems to be harder to get facilitators that have already been
trained and prepped for this. And there was a suggestion of, if you would like to, you know,
run these or, you know, help to be a facilitator, right, to propagate this out there,
then you can do that. And one of the facilitators there also does like trainings and stuff for this
game, right? The entire game is in essence driven by we want more people to understand the complexity
behind climate change without being overwhelmed by it, and to give a space where that is approachable
and reasonable. So what would you say your sort of, not takeaway, but how did you feel?
What did you walk away thinking? Yeah, I mean, this was one of the last questions that we got.
And in my case, I walked away having sort of walked in with the hope that I could even use this
game for, yeah, I think game is still fair. This game for, I think in my classes was a bit of an
approach. I don't think I can use them in the classes I teach now. But my specialty was always
around, even though it was computational, in essence, for a while, it was still always around
the things that we are doing in order to deal with slash combat slash, you know, adjust, you know,
the effects of climate change. It was renewable energy in that sector, right. And as much as a
lot of the people in those fields get comfortable, quickly connecting the effects to, you know,
whatever principle it is that they're trying to sell you on in research. I don't think a lot of
people, including myself, sometimes have stopped to consider all of the other factors and how they
play a role in each other's sort of effects. And so that was my hope with this game was like, oh,
is it an approachable way to do this to get people more invested in understanding how this
goes, and perhaps to even clear up some misconceptions, perhaps around like different
terminology, because there's a lot of terms that get tossed around. I can only remember right now
that a few of the people who attended were not necessarily bothered, but they were like, why do
we call carbon sinks, sinks? And like, why is there like a carbon what budget carbon sinks? So
like, oh, yeah. So yeah, right. So this this example, a carbon sink is anywhere that carbon
09:05
essentially gets stored in. So it's like, why a sink? And it's like, yeah, yes, I can explain
why I visualize it. And I take the sink as you know, it sort of drains down into a storage
facility or storage space, right? That's the right, some kind of global minimum, where carbon is no
longer like, spreading out, right? Like it's kind of being funneled down to, right? I think that's
the intention. But it also doesn't explain itself right away. Right? So I guess, yeah, like, if you
don't immediately picture that kind of potential, well, so to say, yeah, you see the problem, like,
like, sink could be like, sink where you do dishes, or, yeah, it just sinkhole sink. Yeah,
like, what is sinking? And where? Why don't I think the, the question was, why don't we just
call it storage? Language is too difficult. Yes. Like, I feel like that's not even the point of
the problem we should be tackling. But here we are. Yeah, I mean that we get distracted, right?
That's and I think that you've just nailed the, you know, language being difficult. It's one of
the barriers to people, myself included, investing in the time it takes to unpack something. Right?
So nobody in the general public, or at least not nobody, very rarely, perhaps in the general public,
will you get somebody who is willing and interested and able to sit down with something
like an IPCC report, right? Yeah, just the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
which I had forgotten until they told me yesterday. The, the actual, like, essence of
that document is not going to come out, right? Like you, you need something a bit more approachable.
And that's what I think these games attempt to do. You're not getting this super high level of
sort of theoretical or even even experimental, like details, you're getting a couple of graphs
which are informative and interesting, right? Like, you don't need to know every statistics
that is most up to date, in order to recognize this as a pretty fucking urgent problem.
Do something about it. Exactly. It's just and that there is another, an end. So I talked about like
this sort of map of cause and effects that are created. And each team does this in slightly
different ways. We had two totally different looking frescoes, which is where fresc comes from.
12:01
So they're frescoes, as in like the art, like artwork. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so we had those
at the end. But then, which you just hinted at, which was the, how can you do things? There is
a part of this that I believe is still connected to fresc and not just connected to something these
facilitators did, because they also have like another, I think, aspect to their work. But there
was a graph that they generated just using string on the table for axes and like some note card
things for low to high impact actions and like low difficulty implementation. That basically,
how easy is it to implement and how much of an impact does it have? And then we brainstormed
all the different types of things that we could think of and tried to lay these out
to see what types of options we collectively agreed on for those types of actions. And that
was another rounding out of the sort of workshop session. Yeah, this was a three hour session.
I didn't say that, by the way. Wow. Three hours. That's pretty intense. Yeah. But I guess, yeah,
it would take that long to go through all of the discussions. And yeah, it was, I did not feel like
it had been three hours, which I believe is due a lot to the facilitators, the way that they were
able to sort of like pace it and let us run through things and go to the next stages. And also your
prior engagement already on this matter. Yeah, that's true. You already give a shit about
climate change and you already give a shit about outreach. So you are engaged in layers
and levels that maybe not an average audience already are. Yeah, that's true. We definitely
considered the sort of bubble that we were in, right? Like of people wanting to come to this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, because it was a voluntary workshop. Yeah, it was a voluntary workshop. And
they mentioned, the facilitators mentioned that when they have mandatory ones, right? So sometimes
they're asked to do these for companies or they create deals with companies. It's not as engaging,
but you still get sort of something from it usually. And in this case, you definitely had
just people that wanted to be there and wanted to be engaged with the space. It relies a lot.
And I liked this term because I don't think I'd heard it said, at least not this way before,
but they started off with a cup, excuse me, with a couple of like,
bullet points on what the workshop is and what they're trying to do. And they use the term
collective intelligence. And, you know, one might think of this, not quite the same, but on the same
15:05
spectrum as like crowdsourcing. So the, the collective intelligence of all the people in the
room, none of us here are experts in every aspect. All of us have a different perspective. We take all
of this in, which is something that I've never used that term, but it is a way that I approach
a variety of my classes because I assume that my resource of information and knowledge and
what I deliver is just one aspect of what could come from like the collective engagement on a
topic. Easier to do when you are teaching maybe higher level classes, right? Where the students
are more aware of things or how to, to think and engage. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Your chat, your, your, your topic, this is giving me a couple of things I want to share.
So let's go to the next episode and talk about that.
Yeah. Okay. That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening and find us on X at
Eigo de Science. That is E I G O D E S C I E N C. See you next time.
