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A weekly homework assignment offers one university student hope amid the climate gloom.
“I totally agree — we need corporations to drastically reduce their carbon footprint in order to start mitigating the effects of climate change.”
As an environmental studies student at a liberal arts college, I could hear a variation of this sentence on any given day in nearly every one of my classes. All of my classmates agree — the sixth mass extinction of the planet is well under way, we’ve accelerated this process through exploitation, and we need to act now in order to mitigate the impacts of this destruction.
If I’m being honest, I’ve grown weary of these sorts of discussions. The dissonance between the conversations I have in my classrooms and global conversations surrounding climate change is overwhelming.
This morning I woke up to the headline “3 massive changes you’ll see as the climate careens toward tipping points” while preparing for a class where we discussed the ethics of anthropomorphizing trees. That’s not to say anthropomorphication isn’t important to the climate movement. But it can feel like a moot point when you consider that 14% of Americans don’t believe climate change is even happening.
There’s a certain insularity that happens on any college campus, where lots of people with similar mindsets come together to more or less agree on fundamental issues. This sort of myopia can be frustrating, if not dangerous, when climate change is the topic of conversation. Ideas that might lead to significant changes can’t take shape in practice because they’re unable to break out of the echo chamber that is the classroom.
But there are professors making an active effort to break these sorts of conversations out of the ivory tower and into more contextualized spaces.
Last semester, I took a class called Psychology of Climate (In)Justice. At the beginning of the semester, my professor, Dr. Phuong Dinh, instructed us to pick a “conversation partner,” someone outside of our class with whom we would discuss our weekly readings. The only rule for this exercise was that we had to disagree with our partner about something related to the climate crisis.
I had weekly conversations with my friend Lia, who’s a computer engineering major, but many of my peers had conversations with parents, grandparents, or siblings — some of whom had drastically different perspectives about climate change. As a result, these conversations were often challenging in a way that in-class discussions are not: Instead of simply agreeing the majority of the time, we had to come up with new ways to find understanding.
My friend Grace is from New Mexico, and she had weekly conversations with her dad. “I loved having structured time to connect with my dad both on a personal level and about the climate crisis,” she told me.
She and her dad, a liberal Gen-Xer, shared many views about the need for urgent action but had different thoughts about how race, class, and other socioeconomic markers impacted the climate movement. “We come from two different generations who were raised with entirely different views [of climate change], so it was really interesting to see how our upbringings impacted our perspectives,” she said.
These conversations were often challenging in a way that in-class discussions are not: Instead of simply agreeing the majority of the time, we had to come up with new ways to find understanding.
Grace and I were both grateful for the free-flowing conversations that took place during our weekly meetings with our conversation partners. We were able to connect with them on an individual level while also learning more about how our loved ones perceive the climate crisis that’s affecting us all, in a non-judgmental, casual setting.
“Learning often happens in a social, communal, and relational context, regardless of whether we intend for [it] to be that way,” Dr. Dinh said. “Learning happens both inside and outside of the classroom, and within the confines of our classroom we can only do so much.”
Dr. Dinh took the idea for these conversations from their own life, where they were having “various conversations … that were very challenging for different reasons, but after the fact I realized these were conversations that needed to happen.” Part of Dr. Dinh’s teaching philosophy is to be as much of a student as they are a teacher, so they did the conversation assignment alongside us students. They had weekly conversations with their dad, who still lives in Vietnam, where they grew up.
The two have a challenging relationship where they often butt heads: “Our conversations are a balancing act. We have to figure out in real time how to share what we know without telling the other person what to do,” she told me. “We honestly usually don’t get to share much about the readings, and I’m not even complaining because, in turn, what he shares with me are all things in the context of Vietnam that I don’t know in virtue of not being there physically. I’m learning so much.”
Throughout the semester, I learned how this sort of departure from the material at hand often yields the most interesting and connective conversation. During one of my conversations with Lia about Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, the topic ambled over to a debate about the efficacy of different types of protest.
I was hesitant to accept the idea that groups of people congregating together and marching and chanting can have a tangible impact on climate justice, until Lia shared the feeling of going to a protest and standing in solidarity with fellow protesters. “It’s uplifting,” she told me, “and makes me feel hopeful, and that in itself is a worthwhile feeling.”
With this idea in mind, I realized that hope is at the core of Dr. Dinh’s teaching method. That’s the point of this assignment — gaining the belief that we’re able to be a part of a more equitable, natural, and connective alternative to our current reality.
Conversations from within the academic context are helpful in learning more about a complex topic, but they fall short in their ability to make tangible changes. Conversations with people outside of the academic bubble can help to disseminate complex ideas about the climate crisis in a horizontal and relational — rather than a top-down — way.
These sorts of conversations can get at the heart of what catalyzes movement in the climate crisis: understanding that comes from mutual respect for people who are different from us.
