Blessed-Cursed to Be Here: meet Fred, the Geologist who became a messenger of Doom (and Hope)
Interview #3 in the Teaching Climate Change study
One thing I wonder about, as a researcher in the field of higher education, is whether, or how, any university is able to ensure that college graduates have a working understanding of climate change and its anticipated impacts. It seems reasonable to me that “climate literacy” should be part of what it means to be a college-educated person. And yet, when we interviewed groups of students from multiple campuses for the Worry & Hope study last year, we asked them point-blank if it was possible for a student to graduate from college without being exposed to basic information about climate change. They laughed and said, “of course!” — like, duh. It’s apparently hit or miss how much climate science an average college student (say, an English major like myself, back in the day) will encounter.
Another study in 2018, conducted by the department of Institutional Effectiveness at the University of Hawaii, found an overall high level of concern about climate change, with a very interesting variability by major. Level of concern varies according to what you are studying, with lower levels of “very concerned” in professional fields than in academic ones. It’s sort of like the Global Warming’s Six America’s phenomenon, but at college.
This week I interviewed Fred*, a geology professor at University of the Pacific.** (*not his real name **not a real place). Fred specializes in paleo and modern sea level rise impacts on ecology and human communities. A few minutes into our conversation he shared a story that I sense is common at any university:
“So, yesterday, I was sitting here at 5pm and a student appeared at my door. not one of my students, not even from my department, but a student from another department who came by, unscheduled, to ask if it was appropriate that her professor was giving them a group problem on sea level rise and proposing 1 feet sea level rise by the end of the century.” He shook his head incredulously as he described the 45 minutes he spent with the student, who presumably will have to go back to her class and set the professor straight.
According to the most accessible and accepted reports such as the United States Fourth National Climate Assessment, which predicts 1–4 feet SLR by end of century, or the IPCC which predicts 3 feet by end of century, or even Wikipedia, which says that a sea level rise of 7–9 feet by end of century is “physically plausible” and of course, there are the real disaster kin like Guy McPherson who are hunkered down for 20 feet of SLR when those Arctic sheets slide off. I actually feel sorry for the prof who assigned the 1 foot problem — I mean, what should a professor be assigning? Who decides whether to teach to 1, 3, 6, or 20? Surely a university on a Pacific island has an expert who might know.
Well Fred happens to BE that expert, with a PhD in geology and 30 years of specialization in coastal sea level rise. He continued the story about the student:
“No place in her curriculum — and she is a senior in a STEM field — has climate change been part of her learning. The only place she has gotten climate change is through electives that were cross-listed. This is a young person who will be released to the professional world with an incredibly important job helping our community adapt to these problems, but with zero training in this specific area of sea level rise.”
“My colleagues are not retraining themselves for the new world we’ve created. They risk making academe irrelevant.” said Fred.
While this sounds shocking, it’s actually the norm. And this retraining is not easy.
Fred gets up at 4 am to go through the “first shot of media for the morning.” He describes a complex set of keywords and filters that help him navigate general media like the Guardian, expensive scientific journals like Nature and Science, as well as media streams from several countries. His most valuable resource, however, is press releases. I didn’t know this, and apparently it’s a new practice, that when a scientist releases a paper with community importance, a press release goes out. Fred values the direct quotes from the scientists, which are included in the press releases but often don’t make it into the final paper. It’s an interesting ping-pong of knowledge translation, isn’t it? Scientists and media passing information back and forth, with laypeople trying to follow along. Fred then takes the day’s collection of what he ironically calls “fun facts” and turns them into a Powerpoint slide or a figure or a graphic that he adds to the day’s lecture for Geology 101, or for graduate level seminars, or public talks.
For early-career faculty, Fred told me that the general rule of thumb is 8 hours of preparation for a 1 hour lecture. These lectures become the visual aid for a complex oration that reminds me of Homer’s orations of the Odyssey (Homer, I bet, would have loved Powerpoint). Powerpoint becomes like a filing system, a type of distributed cognition that holds what the scientist knows and helps them to share it. (Although Fred has tried innovations from clickers to group work, lecture is still the coin of the realm in most science courses). The problem of retraining is linked to the complex hoop-dance of tenure which requires faculty to carve out a niche and then “stay in their lane.” (He also blames the time-suck of email.)
So I asked Fred, since he talks about wide ranging impacts of climate change, including economics and political science, if he ever picks up the phone and calls a poly-sci colleague across campus to fact check. “Actually no, that never occurred to me.” This is what “silos” are like; the experts just can’t find each other, and there’s no mechanism for updating the map.
So why do some college faculty undertake the “retraining” and others don’t? Fred said:
“I saw the reality of the situation and I felt a clear ethical and moral calling as a human to really get into this. I was in an obligatory role as a messenger.”
The words “moral obligation” and “sense of responsibility” come up frequently when I talk with college faculty who are actively teaching to the climate emergency. This seems to be a unifying factor, part of their professional identity. Fred credits Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth (2006) as a turning point.
“Anybody who saw the movie will never forget him going up in a mechanical lift to get to where CO2 is today. He shows this million-year-long history of CO2 and then it comes up to the modern day and it just keeps going up and up and up and up and he has to climb on this mechanical lift and its very … he’s very dramatic and he has to go up on this lift to show that carbon is at 350 ppm, at that point.
“And I was watching him teach this thing that I teach every day, and I was thinking, ‘how brave is this guy…he’s a politician and he’s teaching the science that I am extremely familiar with…what am I afraid of?’ His courage gave me courage to deeply investigate the reality of the emergency. And I did.”
Imagine what it would be like, to get up at 4 am every day, and deliver the same information, updated with new “fun facts” to two, or three, or five different audiences every day. (And then stay after hours to talk to students who aren’t even in your class!) Fred approaches each audience as if they don’t know, because they don’t. And because it takes a few sessions for it to sink in. (As I imagine one would have gotten new insights from each retelling of the Odyssey, when Homer came through the village.) New slides are added. The message of hope wavers sometimes. Public crying occurs. The mechanical lift keeps going up and up and up.
Fred wondered, for a while, “am I the guy on the street corner with the sandwich board that says the world is coming to an end?’ That phase lasted over a year until finally I realized, No I’m not just the latest crazy.”
This is actually happening now, and I am blessed-cursed to be present in this moment, and part of it.”
