Save the Climate, change STEM to STEAM

     Australian poet Erica Jolly is one of the leaders of the STEM to STEAM movement in Australia -- she has introduced me to The Conversation, and, in it, this interesting and relevant article, "Did Artists Lead the Way in Mathematics?"
     For many years a secondary school teacher in South Australia, Jolly has written Challenging the Divide:  Approaches to Science and Poetry (Lythrum Press, 2010) -- a book that is rich with citations and arguments for integrating the arts and the sciences -- and includes a variety of poems.  Also rich with math-science content is Jolly's poetry collection, Making a Stand (Wakefield Press, 2015).
     And here is one of Jolly's recent poems -- sent to me with this comment:   Here's a poem - it deals with numbers in my way. Someone can do the multiplication.   Best wishes  Erica

A Significant Cabinet Change by the Prime Minister
in this New Coalition Government                           by Erica Jolly

And reading “Lab Girl: A story of trees, science and love”
by Hope Jahren, published by Fleet, in the UK, 2016.
Professor Jahren was named in 2005 as one of the
“Brilliant 10” young scientists. Geobiology is
her area of study and she is now a tenured
Professor at the University of Hawai’i.   

At last, it’s an and, not either/or.
What a change, no longer a choice.
Energy and the environment.
Do we dare to hope at last?

Have they learnt the lesson?
Without environment, less energy,
less energy of the kind we need
but more sending debris to the sea.

Have they learnt the lesson?
I have to wonder about that.
Climate change has no place
in their strategy for the Reef.

Corporations clearly came first.
When Minister for Energy alone
he’d insisted there was a moral case
for the quarrying of more coal.

A moral case! Remember a former PM?
He said “Coal is good for humanity”
and “Climate change is crap.” Is this PM
showing he rejects those points of view?

Do I need to question the PM’s motivation,
ponder once again whether this time it is
yet another illusion he hopes will soothe,
placate voters who did and do care?

With the living energy of trees in mind
I go to the Epilogue, take in her warning and
those awful numbers. “ Every year since 1990
we have created more than eight billion new stumps.”

Here is a link to earlier blog postings that include Erica Jolly.