Commentary

My Conversion: A Story of Al Gore, Mayor Hodges and the Pope

How The Inconvenient Truth becomes personal.written in 2015 as Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges was heading to the Vatican for a conversation with city leaders around the world about climate change As a young girl growing up in Prior Lake, Minnesota, I was biking distance to the Franciscan Retreat House. At the time, it was almost…

TEEN: Why I’m Tired of the Climate Change Discussion

Why a Minneapolis teenager is both tired, and hopeful, talking about climate change and Pope Francis.By Sophia Morrissette, 16, Minneapolis, as Pope Francis prepares his talk to U.S. Congress in 2015 As a teenager, I’m tired of talking about climate change. At school, I’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth about 20 times and done a project…

Looking From the Light Into the Dark

On a recent Wednesday night, 15 of us sat under the vortex of the Lake Harriet Spiritual Center dome and had a conversation about dark matter and dark energy, led by a political science graduate. For 45 minutes the assortment of us – none of whom to my knowledge had any particular scientific career –…

About science, storytelling and social conscience

How might we tell stories differently so that instead of deepening the grooves of a fragmented society, we shift the way we have conversations?One of the joys of my life as a writer is that I get to meet and hear firsthand so many stories. Yet, as a communicator by profession, I have a profound…

How we create boundaries

Can we create a place where anyone—regardless of age, race, gender identity, religion—can walk into a city, be welcomed and find the footing they need to succeed?When Bill Remmer left his home in Melvin, Iowa, in his mid-30s, to walk 230 miles to Minneapolis to find a better source of income for his growing family, his…

Loving our community to failure

If we start with the notion that our community/ world/ universe is connected, then maybe the ways we divide ourselves up politically, economically and socially will no longer make sense to us and we’ll get about the business of repairing it.A few years ago, Roy Scranton, an opinion blogger for The New York Times, wrote…

A nuanced story about consumption

One of the home designers I’ve gotten acquainted with as I work toward a book about Minneapolis and sustainability is Michael Anschel of otogawa-anschel design+build. At my December “Sustainable We” forum he was not afraid to speak his mind about the limitations of energy efficiency as a concept, despite being on a panel of efficiency-minded…