iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Forrest Fleischman

Erik Schlenker-Goodrich @riogranderift.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

1. The Senate "permitting reform" bill will (likely) be released this week. 2. It is a data center & energy development bill, not a climate bill. 3. It will erode bedrock environmental safeguards—in particular the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Supposedly Minnesota is known for good governance, but apparently the mayor of St. Paul has been sexually harassing the policy chief, while the mayor of Minneapolis supports the police department in massive cost overruns while refusing to answer any questions about how the money is spent?

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Darth Vader awarded professorship of practice of planetery leadership at Alderaan University.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I haven't had time to read the original article, but the coverage here focuses on the "hidden curriculum" as a barrier to lower class advancement in academia. What about the availability of extra resources to sustain periods of low income needed to succeed? www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/b...

nytimes.com

The Working Class Face a ‘Class Ceiling’ in Elite Occupations

Being female or a person of color has long been seen as a disadvantage in hiring and promotion. A new study of college professors shows that class may loom as large.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

While I'm seeing alot of posts about GenAI generated applications, the drying up of funding for research in many fields in the US must be driving a large portion of this shift.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

What are your favorite recent examples of randomized control trials done in the environmental policy arena (or adjacent to environmental policy)? Realizing the examples I'm using in my course are all now 7-10 years old, and I bet there's some really cool new examples...

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Its not the $5000 that Trump claims, but if we taxed away all of Elon Musk's money, it would be enough to give every American about $2500.

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Reposted by Forrest Fleischman

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

every time carbon removal gets posted about there's a certain "we have trees at home" genre of response. which I get, on some level, because the forces of fossil capital are indeed that comically evil and dishonest. but: 1) actual scientists also research these things 2) they thought of that

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I found this great quote from Rebecca Lave in a review of Daniel Suarez's new book which sums up my view of many of the faddish concepts we are promoting for solving environmental problems:

tandfonline.com

Biologists Unite: The Rise and Fall of Ecosystem Services

Published in The AAG Review of Books (Ahead of Print, 2026)

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Once I was talking to a Nepali guy who had lived in Salt Lake City for a time. He told me he liked it there, they had some nice small hills.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Its kind of weird that national media is focusing on polls being off in Wisconsin, where a Progressive underperformed their polls, and not on the polling miss in Minnesota, which was nearly even in the polls and the progressive won by about +20?

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

This is a great article, and could apply to many situations.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

This is your periodic reminder that many of the largest and most destructive (to human lives and property) wildfires in US history occurred in the upper midwest. Fires, including large fires, are part of our history and our biome.

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Reposted by Forrest Fleischman

Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa @benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

A really interesting piece on reducing AI cheating in the classroom from a Professor of English and former Dean of Humanities at University of Utah. The solutions? Smaller classes, lower teaching loads for faculty, and in-person classes.

hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com

How to limit unauthorized AI use in the classroom

A handy rule

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Reposted by Forrest Fleischman

Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

What a great article not only on faculty workloads, but how little our salaries actually factor in to most university budgets. A few highlights. First, our salaries are falling:

Third, faculty salaries are falling even if we statistically control for faculty rank and institution. By our analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data, tenured and tenure-track salaries are down 10 percent in real terms since 2016 and are lower today than they were in 2002; nontenured faculty salaries are down 4 percent since 2016 and are at 2002 levels today.

To put this plainly: Suppose sharply increased teaching loads enabled institutions to cut one out of every seven full-time faculty. (That’s roughly what we saw last year in severe cuts announced at West Virginia, Western Illinois, and St. Cloud State Universities.) The associated savings in salary and benefits even through such drastic action would amount to less than 2.5 percent of total institutional expenditures for the typical university.

The upshot? If you think higher education has a cost problem, squeezing more teaching out of faculty is not the first place you should look.

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Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · 28/06/2026

If we build enough clean power and grid capacity to accommodate winter peaks from electrification of space heat in colder climates (like most of Europe and North America), we'll have more than enough capacity for carbon-free air conditioning for all. If we win heat, we get AC pretty much for free.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

I installed a heat pump system on our old non-AC Minnesota house. Summers are increasingly intolerable here (tomorrow the heat index is expected to exceed 40 C), so its nice to get the AC, but we also are using far less fossil energy to heat our home in the winter because the heat pump.

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Reposted by Forrest Fleischman

Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 28/06/2026

Here’s what the air conditioning discourse illuminates: to deal with climate change we need to electrify & we need zero carbon electricity, we also need more electricity- like double or triple what we have. And we need more cooling & cooling equity. There will be folks fighting against all of that.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

There isn't alot of scholarship or critical thinking about the politics of restoration, and this is unfortunate. A new paper finds that UN designated "restoration flagships" are disproportionately located in undemocratic contexts, as are the largest restoration pledges (doi.org/10.1162/GLEP...).

doi.org

Ecosystem Restoration Across Political Regimes: Why Are So Many ‘Successes’ Located in Undemocratic Contexts?

Abstract. International bodies like the United Nations increasingly champion ecosystem restoration as a key tool to combat environmental degradation. Democratic governance is often positioned as a key...

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Reposted by Forrest Fleischman

Elizabeth Davis @elizabethdavis.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

To chime in as a Minneapolitan: whistles made a huge difference (and still do, ICE is still kidnapping people here, just at a slower pace). But what really helped was the pre-existing neighborhood groups from the summer of 2020, so get yourself whistle kits and start talking to your neighbors *now*

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

People are dunking on Zotero for some reason?

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Another in the long series of unintended consequences of poorly thought out tree planting initiatives.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

This is not a good look for the "independent" standards board. Industries should not write their own regulations.

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Reposted by Forrest Fleischman

Danny Cullenward @ghgpolicy.org · 08/06/2026

I have resigned from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol's Independent Standards Board. The Protocol is openly violating its own rules and has effectively delegated forest carbon accounting standards to a secret, industry-led working group. ghgpolicy.org/s/2026-06-08...

Text too long; see machine-readable PDF at this link:

https://ghgpolicy.org/s/2026-06-08-Cullenward-resignation.pdf

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Great coverage of some of our recent research in Mongabay. We found that some programs seem to increase tree cover, and some don't. Great template for improving things! Unfortunately, the programs that aren't working are big and the one that works well is small. india.mongabay.com/2026/06/why-...

india.mongabay.com

Why India's tree-planting programmes are falling short

A new study examined eight major government schemes and programmes aimed at increasing tree cover, and their impact.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

I think some of this is based on a misreading/compression of the fall of German research universities and the rise of American ones. In the fantasy, lots of German academics fled the nazis and moved to the US to build great universities here.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Its always puzzling to me that well-off people in areas with widespread mosquito born illnesses don't see window screens as totally essential. I get that poor people might not be able to afford them.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to measure, report, and verify it, does the carbon still accumulate in the forest floor?

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Reposted by Forrest Fleischman

David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Think of CO₂ removal like a time machine. How far back does planting 100 million trees take us? One mature tree takes up ~25 kg of CO₂/year, so 100 million trees will take up 2.5 MtCO₂. That's a time machine that takes us back ~33 minutes in a year. Nature will not save us from fossil fuel CO₂.

static.klipy.com

DeLorean Time Travel: Back To The Future

Alt: DeLorean Time Travel: Back To The Future

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Reposted by Forrest Fleischman

David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

NYT: "no one has ever thought of teaching ranching at university" Every ag school: um, would you like to meet our cows NYT: "No, not like that. More romantic. More dilletante. Ugh, we're not /farmers/."

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Apparently what Ivy League colleges don't do is have students work real jobs while studying, something that the vast majority of college students in this country, including nearly all at the state flagship I work at, do.

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Reposted by Forrest Fleischman

Adam Mosley @adamjmosley.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

I've lost it now: but someone on here said the solution to the AI problem in academic publishing is simple: editors just have to insist that all articles are handwritten in blue books under exam conditions. And I thought that perfectly skewered two forms of 'it's here to stay, adapt' commentary.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

My view is that if only 20% of your students in an extremely selective university demonstrate the "extraordinary distinction" needed to earn an A, you probably aren't a very good teacher. This of course fits quite well with Harvard's reputation. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | 60 Percent of Grades at Harvard Were A’s. Enough Is Enough.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

A surprise for me on sabbatical in Europe was faculty discussing their votes in the election for the university's rector. I've only ever voted for an essentially powerless university senate.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Let's divert funding from basic research to subsidizing tech companies.

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Reposted by Forrest Fleischman

Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Cool, so NSF is now going to be used to essentially launder money to tech bros because universities are just too cumbersome and disciplinary oversight and regulations and accountability are all just too stifling for innovation. $1.5B for “X-Labs.”

nsf.gov

NSF X-Labs

NSF's mission is to advance the progress of science, a mission accomplished by funding proposals for research and education made by scientists, engineers, and educators from across the country.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

This reminds me of my grandmother who always thought it was important that I learn how to "use" computers because the "future was going to be the computer age," but didn't seem to understand that by the 1990s, computers, much like today's Gen-AI, were designed to be really easy to use.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

I had the very good fortune to have a campus job and then a summer internship my freshman year in college doing what I thought I wanted to do for a career, and I learned that it was not what I wanted to do (but these experiences helped me find the career I'm in now).

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Many places in the US are experiencing a severe housing shortage, and there is a prominent group of people blaming this on regulatory permitting, including environmental laws.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

re. Canvas outage, University communications tells students to look for communication from faculty about what to do. But as a faculty, I was told that I should only communicate with students via Canvas and I literally do not have another way of reaching them.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

My dad told me to read this article about the end of a Pennsylvania dairy farm, and he was right. I was amazed to learn that in the 1970s, the US had 700,000 dairy farms, and it now has... 25,000. I've observed this massive consolidation from multiple vantage points. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/03/u...

nytimes.com

The Last Days of Butter Ridge

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

US federal land management is clearly undergoing a period of major transition.

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Forrest Fleischman @forrestf.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Abundance bros interest in stripping local control over infrastructure development seems to be on a collision course with the rapidly rising bipartisan concern about data centers.

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