Over the last few days, I’ve been texting with a former student, Joe Thompson, from the Local Climate Action Program who lives in Orange, CA. The Palisades fire has been raging around him, so he’s been assisting his community by taking food the local shelter for it to go to Los Angeles. With the Santa Ana winds picking up again this weekend, the threat has roared back. The importance of our work to mitigate greenhouse gases is obvious & pressing. He’s offering to help communities do what we do in the LCAP, inventory emissions and get to work on implementable policy, plans, and programs for greenhouse gas mitigation.
I’m so glad he’s safe. Grateful he’s on our team and grateful to work in a program where higher education is acting on climate change.
Given the intransigence of leaders to deal with the fossil-fuel supercharged greenhouse effect and draw down carbon emissions, these fires were inevitable. The results are tragic: people have lost their lives, thousands upon thousands of structures have burned, livelihoods have literally gone up in smoke, and Donald Trump has decided to blame anyone but those who are actually to blame.
The incoming President and all leaders should be dealing with the problem. First, we need to assist communities, business and industry, and states to adopt renewable energy and nature-based solutions that draw down greenhouse gas emissions. That means phasing out fossil fuels. My friend and University of Pennsylvania Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action, Michael Mann pointed this out deftly on MSNBC’s 11th Hour the other day.
Second, we should be calling on and supporting governments, insurance agencies, and businesses to incorporate climate risk into planning so we can prepare for and avoid threats. As my colleague and Director of Penn State’s Climate Consortium, Erica Smithwick wrote in a piece of correspondence to Nature in 2016, we need to incorporate “social & economic risks into [wildfire risk] maps [to] increase the effectiveness of fire-management policies.” That’s even more true today.
Third, we have to help the public and our future workforce understand what and why we face these threats and how we can mitigate and adapt to them. There is no point in only being reactive. Every institution of education must respond to this challenge. It is imperative that we respond to the hyper threat of climate change and sustainability’s polycrises into the fabric of higher education. Some universities are doing this—Arizona State, Colorado State, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, and UC San Diego, Colorado State has a perfect score in academics for sustainability on their most recent submission to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System.
My own university, Penn State, is en route to passing a set of sustainability learning objectives through its faculty senate. We have close to four hundred courses in sustainability as well as dozens of undergraduate majors, minors, certificates, and graduate degrees where sustainability is a learning outcome. But it’s a rat maze at Penn State for students to find their ways into degrees that prepare them to work in sustainability professions. We have a web gateway in design right now to help students find their way. In the future, will more universities create schools for sustainability, units like Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability? They should.
The threat has grown so great that anything less than a full-throated all-hands-on-deck response is a failure. It will require us to create and revise courses that develop systems thinking & interrogate our ethics, new design spaces & interactions with & for communities, a transdisciplinary approach to research at every scale—individual, family, community, state, & beyond–and a genuine commitment to community.
Our universities will be judged by their response to this crisis. Inaction, inertia, & lagging will not be accepted. Those who take the mantle today will cement themselves in history as leaders.
Who will rise to this occasion? Joe. He’s facing the fires. We’re lucky he understands what drives them and is ready to do something about it.
Peter Walks for Democracy 