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I work at a Catholic college. Catholic blog readers are likely aware of Laudato si', a letter (technically, encyclical) from Pope Francis that Wikipedia summarizes as: critiquing consumerism and irresponsible development, lamenting environmental degradation and global warming, and calling all people of the world to take "swift and unified global action."
My mother has been trying to get me to watch a film about the Laudato si', released in 2022, but I just haven't so far.
Instead, the impacts of the letter are reaching me in different forms. The Catholic college where I work is a Franciscan institution, and as a part of its mission, seeks to be a regional leader in sustainability. A couple of weeks ago, leaders of an ecological center on campus came to a faculty meeting to announce plans for a symposium next fall where they plan to bring together students, faculty, campus community members and more to learn and talk about climate change from ecological, political, and social justice perspectives.
While I will miss the symposium due to being on sabbatical, I can't even begin to tell you how glad I am to see it happening. It turns out to be very important to me to work at an institution that expresses the values this institution does, even knowing that the institution has a ways to go between intent and action.
Narratives need to move beyond crisis and hand-wringing, into action. I'm recently reading things about expected global demographic changes in terms of population size and population growth; there's an anticipated peak population size, but a lot of assumptions and practices are structured around unrealistic concepts of continual growth. A transformation, action, is called for, in light of this projection. There are multiple horrifying wars taking place across parts of the globe, and where war is happening it is nigh impossible to even think about the ecological consequences, let alone try to take action. It can be tremendously hard to transition out of crisis.
What I appreciated the most about the announced plans for the symposium was the emphasis on moving beyond just understanding the global climate change crisis, and into actual work to tackle the accompanying challenges and issues. That has always been the aspect of the Catholic church I've appreciated the most: people who take a stance and take action where they see injustice, even when doing so may come at great individual cost.
There are two arenas where I'll tie my own endeavors in with the above initiatives. In the first semester of General Biology, I talk about speciation and mass extinctions, and bring up the idea of and evidence that supports that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. This is some of the hard news that younger generations are growing up with: climate change is doing the many things it has been predicted to do, and on top of that, habitat destruction continues to be rampant and translates into mass extinctions, from which there is no going back, on a human timescale, at least. I think it's crucially important to note that human welfare is directly tied to ecological welfare, so the things needed to slow extinction rates and mitigate impacts of climate change are related to things that can reduce human suffering.
Of course, knowing that transformation needs to happen, versus actually knowing how to transform or what the result of transformation needs to be, are three different things.
I will continue to maintain my conviction that bicycling is a component of the transformation. And thus, this is the other place where I'll tie in my endeavors with these initiatives, in the bicycling class I've been offering. For me this one is more tricky, because I need to figure out how to get the students who register for the class to generally reach some agreement about what the issues are, and where and how bicycling can fit in. I have had a couple express a desire to figure out how to commute by bicycle, and I've had some discover that having access to a bicycle for transportation is lifechanging for many people.
I experience a lot of the challenges with getting people to go from talk to action in my everyday life, where many of the people around me comment that they could never picture living the way I do. Is the way I live really so impossible? I really don't think so. Is it difficult? At times, sure. But I think a lot of people never even try because they don't see the other side of things enough, the daily benefits for body and mind (and wallet!) that keep me going.
There are other transformations I'm not so sure about. Will this college survive the current challenges facing higher education in this country? We do know that if we are to survive, we have to be open to transforming what we do and how we work. And so the work goes on.
My mother has been trying to get me to watch a film about the Laudato si', released in 2022, but I just haven't so far.
Instead, the impacts of the letter are reaching me in different forms. The Catholic college where I work is a Franciscan institution, and as a part of its mission, seeks to be a regional leader in sustainability. A couple of weeks ago, leaders of an ecological center on campus came to a faculty meeting to announce plans for a symposium next fall where they plan to bring together students, faculty, campus community members and more to learn and talk about climate change from ecological, political, and social justice perspectives.
While I will miss the symposium due to being on sabbatical, I can't even begin to tell you how glad I am to see it happening. It turns out to be very important to me to work at an institution that expresses the values this institution does, even knowing that the institution has a ways to go between intent and action.
Narratives need to move beyond crisis and hand-wringing, into action. I'm recently reading things about expected global demographic changes in terms of population size and population growth; there's an anticipated peak population size, but a lot of assumptions and practices are structured around unrealistic concepts of continual growth. A transformation, action, is called for, in light of this projection. There are multiple horrifying wars taking place across parts of the globe, and where war is happening it is nigh impossible to even think about the ecological consequences, let alone try to take action. It can be tremendously hard to transition out of crisis.
What I appreciated the most about the announced plans for the symposium was the emphasis on moving beyond just understanding the global climate change crisis, and into actual work to tackle the accompanying challenges and issues. That has always been the aspect of the Catholic church I've appreciated the most: people who take a stance and take action where they see injustice, even when doing so may come at great individual cost.
There are two arenas where I'll tie my own endeavors in with the above initiatives. In the first semester of General Biology, I talk about speciation and mass extinctions, and bring up the idea of and evidence that supports that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. This is some of the hard news that younger generations are growing up with: climate change is doing the many things it has been predicted to do, and on top of that, habitat destruction continues to be rampant and translates into mass extinctions, from which there is no going back, on a human timescale, at least. I think it's crucially important to note that human welfare is directly tied to ecological welfare, so the things needed to slow extinction rates and mitigate impacts of climate change are related to things that can reduce human suffering.
Of course, knowing that transformation needs to happen, versus actually knowing how to transform or what the result of transformation needs to be, are three different things.
I will continue to maintain my conviction that bicycling is a component of the transformation. And thus, this is the other place where I'll tie in my endeavors with these initiatives, in the bicycling class I've been offering. For me this one is more tricky, because I need to figure out how to get the students who register for the class to generally reach some agreement about what the issues are, and where and how bicycling can fit in. I have had a couple express a desire to figure out how to commute by bicycle, and I've had some discover that having access to a bicycle for transportation is lifechanging for many people.
I experience a lot of the challenges with getting people to go from talk to action in my everyday life, where many of the people around me comment that they could never picture living the way I do. Is the way I live really so impossible? I really don't think so. Is it difficult? At times, sure. But I think a lot of people never even try because they don't see the other side of things enough, the daily benefits for body and mind (and wallet!) that keep me going.
There are other transformations I'm not so sure about. Will this college survive the current challenges facing higher education in this country? We do know that if we are to survive, we have to be open to transforming what we do and how we work. And so the work goes on.
