John Kerry helped bring the world into the Paris climate agreement and expanded America’s reputation as a climate leader. That reputation is now in tatters, and President-elect Joe Biden is asking Kerry to rebuild it again – this time as climate envoy, a position Biden plans to include in the National Security Council. It won’t be easy, but Kerry’s decades of experience and the international relationships he developed as a senator and secretary of state may give him a chance of making real progress.
The bottom line is that the earth’s natural ability to pull carbon out of our environment is beyond strained. From deforestation and carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, the path that we are on is not sustainable. Wind and solar farms are great except that they are costly to build, do not produce enough energy to sustain any of our large cities, and require subsidies from our public institutions to be built and maintained.
Every year the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum features works by students graduating from the Master of Fine Arts program in the College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts at Florida International University. This year, the museum is featuring the work of Dianna Grace and Elizaveta Kolesnikova. Grace is informed by immersive spaces and engages in innovative experimentation with materials. Kolesnikova's current work presents Peruvian cultures and traditions.
The film’s title, “Uprooting Addiction,” refers to one of the support tools used by a social worker named Hope Payson who has helped hundreds of people with their addiction. The tool is a tree made of paper up on a board that embodies the roots of someone’s addiction and how they managed to heal from past traumas and deal with their vices. The tree shows that the most common cause of addiction is some type of childhood trauma.
