UNE panel debates climate education

Fiona Wilson, the University of New Hampshire’s chief sustainability officer and the executive director of the Sustainability Institute, played off Pingry’s suggestion to pull together different communities to find solutions to the climate crisis by offering data that showed: This kind of full-court-press approach is exactly what young people want.  

Wilson quoted surveys that show 85% of young Americans say they are very worried about climate change, 43% say it’s impacting their mental health, and 40% say it negatively affects their daily lives. Moreover, over 40% of Gen Z said they’ve actually left a job now or planned to leave a job because of climate or sustainability concerns that their employer is not doing enough, Wilson added.  

“Gen Z, and Gen Alpha that is coming behind them, is a generation who is deeply aware of the climate crisis, but they also really want to be part of solutions. You are very clear that you want to work for and invest in companies and organizations that you think reflect your values,” Wilson said to the students in the audience. 

Wilson was critical of academia today, noting that too many universities are built around silos in the form of academic programs and different colleges that never work together.  

“The problems of the climate crisis and sustainability — they don’t work in silos,” Wilson said. “In fact, the opposite is true. We need to have people from different sectors, different disciplines coming together and innovating and collaborating.”  

Robert Lawrence, professor emeritus from Johns Hopkins University and the founder of the Center for a Livable Future at Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the complexity of climate change on human health is far greater than experts thought a few years ago. He pointed to the increase in cardiovascular and pulmonary disease, the rise in vector-borne diseases, such as Lyme disease and malaria, and the mental health crisis surrounding climate change. 

To develop a workforce that’s capable of solving all these climate problems, Lawrence suggested adopting case-method teaching, which would allow groups to work together across disciplines.  

“It would also allow people to work with non-science, health science faculties, and students,” he said. “We need that desperately.” 

Then Lawrence, a former director at Harvard Medical School and at the Rockefeller Foundation, where he participated in human rights investigations for organizations around the world, offered himself as an example. 

“I alone know the health consequences of heat islands, but know nothing about architecture or about forestry, or what trees might be best planted in urban areas to have the cooling effect that we now have documented and so forth,” Lawrence said. “So that’s my plea: Think about multidisciplinary case method teaching and pull in all these different strands that are impacting us through climate change.”