Dark Ecology and Dr. K. (#13)
My academic career has involved a lot of conferences and meetings, many of them having to do with climate change and most of them, until now, held at conference centers, hotels, and college campuses across the U.S. Last year I traveled to Washington D.C., New York, Florida, Illinois, Texas, Arkansas, California, Oregon, and Arizona. This summer I would have gone to a meeting in Montana, and then a student summit in Quebec, on my way to Munich, Germany to participate in an international symposium on climate anxiety. Instead, this is the first summer in a decade that I have stayed home, in Hawai’i.
Yes, I have suffered carbon guilt, flight shame, and climate hypocrisy from flying as an academic. Several of the faculty interviewed for the Teaching Climate Change study have mentioned the discomfort and dissonance related to flying for academic conferences, especially climate-related ones. I have followed small revolutions like No Fly Climate Sci that seek to shift the structure of academic research and conferences, especially in the sciences. According to a study by Seth Wynes, academics fly more than we really need to. But most of the no-fly academic types are in Europe where they can take trains instead. It’s different when you live in the most remote archipelago in the world…the Hawaiian islands.
My summer trip to Munich would have been an 18 hour flight each way, or 15,212 miles round trip. According to carbon offet calculator, TerraPass, I would have contributed 14,354 lbs of CO2, which is 6.51 tons.
To meet the terms of the Paris Agreement (Remember #We Are Still In?) each human has an annual carbon budget of 2.3 tons CO2 per year, although O’Neill et al calculated a more stringent 1.6 tons per person, per year. Was my trip to Munich going to be worth almost four years of my carbon allowance?
The impact of academic travel is nothing compared to global tourism. Let’s think about sun and sand travel to Hawaiʻi, which is a hot topic right now, with the islands still imposing a 14-day Covid quarantine as we stall for time to rethink runaway tourism and restart a more local economy. Last year, Hawai’i had 10.5 million visitors, each one traveling a mean distance of 2,845 miles. Using TerraPass, that’s 2.4 tons of CO2 for each coach class tourist, or 17.4 tons added to the carbon footprint of every resident in Hawai’i, every year. By allowing runaway tourism, Hawai’i is one of the biggest carbon emitters on the planet.
With all this purposeless flying, does it make sense for academics to agonize over going to a conference? Is flying more justified for work, than for vacation? Who “owns” carbon guilt, anyway? The traveler…. or the destination that created the desire and opportunity for the trip? And there is no loophole. Carbon offsetting is only psychologically viable at small, individual scale. To offset Hawaii’s tourism industry, we would need to plant 843 million trees every year. Where, and how, will we plant this many trees…and what else could be done with all this guilt?
Each day of this strange summer flows into the next, in a wave of read, write, walk, swim, teach, read, write, mop, play with the cat, teach, eat, walk, swim, sleep. I keep saying things like “how can it be 2 o’clock already?” and “where did this day go?” and “I feel like I’m in a time warp”. Time is recalibrating. When I stay in one place, I look at the same tree, and the same mountain ridge, every day. I actually feel the temperature, and notice the wind, and mark the rain, the sunset, the rise of the moon, every day. Western scientists call this observation process phenology and Hawaiian scientists call it Na Kilo ʻĀina. Maybe we can actually understand climate change better by just staying put!
One fun thing I get to do with all this time at home is interview my grounded colleagues who would otherwise be off measuring glaciers or pollinating plants. This week I interviewed my friend Kate, (a pseudonym) whom students affectionately call “Dr. K”. She has a B.A. in Zoology and a doctorate from the University of the Pacific (also a pseudonym) in Conservation Biology & Ecology focused on native birds, specifically, the threatened i’iwi. Dr. K has a particular knack for mentoring, and she brings young people, particularly women, under her wing to see themselves as scientists. This is no small thing.
As an undergraduate in 1990, long before she became Dr. K., Kate convened the environmental committee on campus, hosting the 20th anniversary of Earth Day in 1990 and working to get recycling into the dorms on her campus. It’s the exact same kind of stuff she does on campus today, and this year was the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. It’s kind of like deja vu all over again, and sometimes this sense of exasperation is emitted.
Kate and I used to team-teach a 6 credit course called Decade Zero: Understanding the Science & Rhetoric of Climate Change. Having a scientist friend has given me a whole different perspective on how I teach climate change. Part of our team-teaching was that I would sit in on her Introduction to Ecology class, which I’ve now taken two or three times. One of the things you have to do in Dr. K’s class is learn how to draw the Earth’s Energy Balance on a napkin. She says:
I am a big believer that understanding the science is the foundation for being able to make informed decisions. Science gives people more agency. They look at it, and it’s not an insurmountable problem anymore. With climate change we actually know what needs to be done, we just need political will to make it be done. The Earth’s Energy Balance — It’s not an unknown thing. We know how to solve this issue. We know we need to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The science helps students be more specific.
And yet, do students really understand global warming? In the Worry & Hope study, we asked students, “can you explain what’s going on with the climate?” and even science majors would squirm and defer. We heard some eyebrow-raising explanations, from the common misperception about the Ozone layer, to an idea that plastic in the ocean is displacing water, making it appear to rise, to theories about North Korea destabilizing the ocean floor with nuclear testing. Why is something so simple so hard to describe?
I’m teaching a summer course right now, Cli Fi, Sci Fi and the Culture of Sustainability. In the first week, we talk about climate change, and one of my students just posted: I’ve learned about the greenhouse effect over and over but I still sometimes don’t get it. And to be honest, for as much time as I spend thinking about climate change, sometimes it really helps to just get out piece of paper and remind myself what is going on.
Dr. K. says that you use different language depending on whether you are talking to a scientist or to your mom, so let’s imagine I’m going to ‘splain this to my mom.
Okay mom, you see, Light comes out of the sun, right? Some of this light is reflected back into space which is infinitely dark. We need lots of Light energy to sustain life, so it is absorbed by everything: rocks, people, plants, the ocean. Only a small fraction of Light energy from the sun is used by plants for photosynthesis: the rest is transformed and re-emitted as Heat energy. Some heat can get out into space, no problem. And some getting trapped is good, so that the earth doesn’t freeze. But, greenhouse gases (carbon being the one we focus on the most, since it’s the one that humans emit the most of) stay in our atmosphere and each molecule of CO2 traps, and then re-emits, some Heat energy. Some goes out into space, but let’s say about half of it comes back to earth. These greenhouse gas molecules act like a blanket, trapping heat energy.
In the blanket metaphor, carbon (and methane and other greenhouse gases) make up the blanket. If it’s a nice thin crochet blanket like my mom might make for me, then, you know, some of my body heat reflects back to my body, and the right amount dissapates into the room, and I feel nice and cozy. But if it’s a wool blanket in summertime, nothing escapes and I try to kick off the covers. But we just can’t kick off the excess carbon.
Dr. K says “People need to practice with the information and use it and really understand it. There are mutliple layers of understanding.” It seems simple to a climate scientist, who might review these basics briefly before moving on. “But in any content-heavy class– and this has been shown with neuro research, people will memorize, get an A on the exam and then dump all the information.That’s a really common phenomenon.”
“I don’t think science teaching has caught up to that. We have a lot of students who got an A in a Biology class, or Physics or Chemistry, but six months or a year from now they couldn’t answer anything about it. What replaces that is they go back to their misconceptions.”
Another shift in climate education, according to Dr. K, “was when we started trying to focus less on science and more on solutions and what people can do. I agree with that, you know, ‘think globally act locally,’ but the honest truth is that it’s not about individuals. We need public policy to make changes.”
I’m a perfect example, she says, before going into a carbon-guilt loop about the 30 minute drive she makes to campus (back in the days when we went to campus). It would take her 2.5 hours to take the bus to campus (and then again to get home) but she carries this burden about driving. “So much is out of my control, short of becoming a hermit in the forest, we need realistic policies where I could have a solar car that I could plug in…I don’t have access to these things, and I’m better off than many people.”
Climate educators seem to bear an unreasonable amount of guilt.
So we are back to my reflections on academic flying. Does it matter if Dr. K. drives her car to campus, or if I fly to Germany? What function does this guilt serve? Like many faculty, I have designed and taught assignments that have students calculate their carbon footprint and then commit to one change (one less flight, one less meal with meat, one bike ride, one bus ride, one less child…) These things all add up, for sure…And yet…
Did you know that anti-littering campaigns in the 1970s were started by “ a consortium of industry groups who wanted to divert the nation’s attention away from even more radical legislation to control the amount of waste these companies were putting out.” Mother Jones, 2006. Anti-littering, and later, recycling, and then, carbon calculators, were all invented as way to make consumers — instead of producers of plastics and emitters of greenhouse gases— take responsibility.
I remember littering, actually, in the 70s. I remember being a kid sitting in the backseat of the car and my dad throwing food wrappers out the window. That’s not like a glowing memory, not something I’m proud of, but littering wasn’t really a“thing” until there was plastic, and then whose “fault” was it? My dad’s?
Why is that carbon shame is borne by a regular person with lots of other problems instead of by the industry that created the problem?
I remember one of my students at San Francisco State citing a British Petroleum carbon calculator for a remedial English paper about global warming. I felt like such a failure.
Why must we make students chew this bitter and impossible pill of carbon guilt?
Welcome to Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology:
There you are, turning the ignition of your car. And it creeps up on you. You are a member of a massively distributed thing. This thing is called species….Every time I start my car…I don’t mean to harm Earth, let alone cause the Sixth Mass Extinction Event in the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of life on this planet….I’m not harming Earth! My key turning is statistically meaningless. (Dark Ecology, p.8)
Basically, once you learn about the climate crisis, then you are responsible for everything, but the longer you can remain ignorant, then you are somehow still free — encouraged! — to take an affordable vacation to Hawai’i. You are worth it!
There is something irrational about how we are teaching climate change. And guilt. Whose agenda are we teaching? How does the left hand promote tourism as a normal thing to do “for fun”….and then the right hand teaches students to bear guilt for the same thing? I’m rethinking carbon footprint assignments and the pedagogy of guilt for teaching climate change. Why? Because guilt becomes shame which becomes melancholy which becomes depression which becomes what Sarah Jaquette Ray calls eco-nihilism, “the notion that we should just erase ourselves because we are so bad for the planet.” — p. 40, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. And that is not what I signed up for.
Our job as educators is not to ask students to erase themselves. As Dr K. said, “it’s overwhelming for students if it’s all about the plastic straw… and then on the other hand they can feel like ‘I hung my laundry up, I donʻt need to worry about anything else.’”
Teaching in a dark ecology paradigm is, as Morton would say, weird.
That symposium on climate anxiety that I was supposed to attend in Munich? Yeah, we did that, over the fourth of July weekend, in a flygskam-free international schedule of breakout sessions with climate educators from the U.S. as well as Finland, Romania, Pakistan, Kenya, China, Ireland, Chile, Nigeria…66 participants representing every continent and all academic disciplines: scientists and English teachers and counselors all rethinking higher education together. Mahalo to Sarah Jaquette Ray, Elin Kelsey, and Jennifer Atkinson for bringing these global educators together in such a profound way. Watch this space for interviews with them and some sharing of the Rachel Carson Climate Educators’ Toolkit, coming soon.
Meanwhile, I’ll be at home, watching the tree.
