Live-blogging the Dickinson College International Climate Symposium, day 3

This week I’m participating in an exciting conference, the Science-Based Choices for Climate Action, Insights from the IPCC 6th Assessment Report.  I look forward to soaking up presentations, and also to feedback from my presentation about higher education’s future.

I‘m tweeting the event (hashtag #DsonICS22) and live-blogging it here.  (Here’s the post for day 1.) I’ll update this post during the day.

Today we began with a panel about higher education and climate change.  I was on it, alongside  Tim Carter, President, Second Nature, and Debra Rowe, President, U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development.  Our moderator: Ken Shultes, Dickinson College, started things by asking us to describe positive developments we see.  Rowe mentioned her model of change via nudging and nurturing. Carter described higher education as a climate accelerant.

[more notes tk]

After this panel concluded I worked my way back to the audience for conversations.

Then the next panel, Teaching Climate Change in the Liberal Arts Curriculum, started up. All participants were from Dickinson College.  One professor (I missed the name) teaches Earth science, emphasizing the concept of the Earth system as a complex system. Tony Underwood, Dickinson College, economics, approaches the climate crisis through a social science lens.  His two classes on this subject examines the circular economy, externalities, how to frame the growth-sustainability dynamic. Moderator Emily Pawley is also an environmental historian, and her challenges include scale (a vast topic!) and convincing people that the past matters for climate change.  Kristin Strock teaches environmental studies and focuses on water, yet has to deal with policy changes (definitions of navigable water) and wants to turn students into turbulent problem-solvers.

Question: how do you deal with despair?  One professor describes current, traditional-age students are the climate generation, concerned about social justice, digitally connected, isolated, and stressed. Identifying community is one way to help that population deal: teaching “connecting before content.”  It’s unfair to ask students to generate solutions and to blame their elders. Many climate solutions have a history which we can draw on.  Faculty are able to share resources on trauma-informed teaching.