East meets West on climate change || With BARD College (2022)
Questioner (Q): It is a true honor to be here today talking with you about climate change. I am an economist and the director of the graduate programs of sustainability in Bard College of New York. Along with my colleagues, we are making an effort to create a worldwide teach-in on climate and justice. We are seeking to really tap into the deep concern that so many educators, teachers, students and staff members of universities and colleges and schools around the world have about climate change.
Global warming is probably the biggest fundamental challenge facing humanity and the other creatures of this planet today. Our belief is that most students now understand the fundamental science of climate change; they understand that we are putting pollution in the atmosphere and that is trapping the heat, which is causing the atmosphere to warm up. But by and large they are just in despair about this, and as a consequence they are ignoring it because they feel that there is nothing they can do. So, they just live their lives kind of pretending that it’s not happening.
The idea of these teach-ins is that these thousands, tens of thousands, millions of educators around the world who care about climate change and are concerned about the issue, can move these students from a sense of despair to a real sense of possibility and agency. The fact is that this is an incredibly exciting and decisive moment to be a human on this planet, because more than any other generation before ours, we have the ability to profoundly change the future. The work that we can do in these next five years or ten years or fifteen years can not only have an impact on their own lives and the lives of their children, but in fact the lives of every human who is going to walk the face of the planet until the end of time, and for the millions of species also.
So, that’s our mission, and we are eager to get tens of thousands of schools around the world to get globally involved. We have translated our website in Hindi and we have the resources to support teachers, but the basic idea is the bottom-up conversation tapping into the existing concerns of the existing communities towards helpful solutions. So, I am very eager to get your take on how this might work, and how to identify the basic issues and find out what the basic obstacles are.
