The Worldviews Network: Digital Planetariums for Engaging Public Audiences in Global Change Issues
Abstract
Utilizing the capabilities of digital planetariums, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, the California Academy of Sciences, NOVA/WGBH, The Elumenati, and affiliates of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration formed the Worldviews Network. The network's mission is to place Earth in its cosmic context to encourage participants to explore connections between social & ecological issues in their backyards. Worldviews launched with informal science institution partners: the American Museum of Natural History, the Perot Museum of Nature & Science, the Journey Museum, the Bell Museum of Natural History, the University of Michigan Natural History Museum, and the National Environmental Modeling & Analysis Center. Worldviews uses immersive visualization technology to engage public audiences on issues of global environmental change at a bioregional level. An immersive planetarium show and dialogue deepens public engagement and awareness of complex human-natural system interactions. People have altered the global climate system. Our communities are increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather events. Land use decisions that people make every day put both human lives and biodiversity at risk through direct and indirect effects. The Worldviews programs demonstrate the complex linkages between Earth's physical and biological systems and their relationship to human health, agriculture, infrastructure, water resources, and energy. We have focused on critical thresholds, such as freshwater use, biodiversity loss, land use change, and anthropogenic changes to the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. We have been guided by environmental literacy principles to help our audiences understand that humans drive current trends in coupled human-natural systems--and that humans could choose to play an important role in reversing these trends. Museum and planetarium staff members join the Worldviews Network team and external advisers to produce programs that span cosmic, global, and bioregional scales. Each presentation employs a 'See, Know, Do' transformative learning model. 'Seeing' involves the creation, presentation, and experience of viewing immersive visualizations within the planetarium to engage visitors' visual-spatial intelligence. For 'Knowing,' the narratives are constructed to help visitors understand the web of physical-ecological-social systems that interact on Earth. The 'Doing' component emerges from interaction among participants: for example, researchers and non-governmental organizations help audience members conceive of their own relationship to the highlighted issue and ways they may remain involved in systemically addressing problems the audience identifies.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFMED21B..06W
- Keywords:
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- 1630 GLOBAL CHANGE Impacts of global change