Ikigai for Econo-planners: Caitlyn, the policy expert (#15)
We just passed the two-year anniversary of Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation paper, which challenged, inspired, divided, and freaked out over a hundred thousand people, many of them academics. One of them, me.
Bendell, a Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria in the UK, focused for months on reading the scientific literature of climate change, in order to really take it in and figure out what it meant, for society in general but also presumably for Institutions of Higher Education (since he is part of one).
In the Introduction to the 2020 update of the now famous paper, Jem says, (all his followers on Facebook call him Jem. I guess this is first name basis subject matter.) “I am aware that some people consider statements from academics that we now face inevitable near-term societal collapse to be irresponsible due to the potential impact that may have on the motivation or mental health of people reading such statements.” This is a statement that is relevant to the content of the Teaching Climate Change study.
Jem is responding to a peer reviewer’s request not to “dishearten” readers by expressing the opinion that we face “inevitable near- term societal collapse”. For that is what the paper sayeth. In the 2020 paper, Jem adds new information about the emergent field of collapsology and also ponders “collapse-denial” . Let’s think about what that might be about.
Do you think higher education might be in “collapse-denial”?
Of course, by releasing such work, professor Bendell immediately opened himself up to a barrage of love/hate vitriol, and changed the course of his career to envision a Positive Deep Adaptation movement focused on:
This scholarship of restoration is where it’s at right now. I am fascinated by the work of scholars like Manulani Alula-Meyer, Kyle Powys Whyte, and Lyla June.
I also recently reread “What is Education For” by David Orr. The introduction to this also famous paper says that “as environmental educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster.” Orr, whom I find invigorating, writes:
“More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival — the issues now looming so large before us in the decade of the 1990s and beyond. It is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.”
Orr (hey, can I call you Dave?) also identified several myths of higher education, one of which is the myth that we can repair “what we have dismantled.”
In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large.”
I was in a meeting once, a few years ago, about a new Life Sciences building on campus and the idea that it might somehow integrate Sustainability. The people at this meeting were really smart. Neuroscientists, biologists, chemists, doctors. It was incredible to witness their discussion. All of these amazing scientists were getting excited about the idea of a shared laboratory, some common projects around Sustainability. One woman, a Biologist, said something like, “What we know about the origins of life has changed so much that what I do and what he does” (gesturing towards a Botany colleague) “is not so different.” I think that what she was saying was that the line between Biology and Botany or Life Science and Earth Science really, actually no longer has any meaning. What we know about the origins of life has changed.
What we know about the future of the planet has also changed. In this meeting, I actually remember kind of hyperventilating for a moment. I was like “What is happening here?” And then, the moment passed. Because Mike’s grant was bigger than Joe’s and so and so really needed such and such for their lab, and how would students find the office, and it would all just be so confusing. So let’s just keep everything like it is. Because it’s easier to organize the offices and laboratories that way. It would just be such a hassle!
There has been enough tinkering around the edges. A deeply substantive rethinking of the endeavor of higher education is required in order to meet these times.
Here’s a question — a koan, really — that I ask in the Teaching Climate Change study, “Is it better to have some students know a lot about climate change, or all students know something about it?”
So, I recently asked this question to Caitlyn (a pseudonym, a professor at University of the Pacific (also a pseudonym) who teaches a graduate seminar in Urban Planning. It’s actually a global learning community: Three professors, located in Hawai’i, Japan, and Samoa have figured out how to zoom their classes together and talk about things like carbon tax policy and cross-cultural ecological footprints. The class has been running for 12 years.
I really admire Caitlyn, and I also like her — she’s extremely likeable, and happy, and sometimes wears this really pretty floral print dress that I love. She’s younger than me, but more accomplished: MA and PhD in Economics, undergrad in International Relations. Full professor in Urban & Regional Planning (“somewhere between an economist and a Planner”, she said. “oh, an econo-planner then!” said I.) She described her position:
“It’s pretty typical to keep an economist on faculty within our planning program to teach the quantitative courses, quantitative methods and Micro and Urban courses which is kind of my original focus in this department as well as the environmental planning courses. You teach all the sort of normal Econ courses and also the Environmental Planning courses, Environmental Law and Policy courses.”
Climate change is like Ikigai for econo-planners.
Caitlyn entered her career in a pivotal moment for climate change policy, as an intern during negotiations around the Kyoto Protocol. I remember 1992; I had just completed AmeriCorps service and started graduate school. It was all about NAFTA. It was before 9/11. In fact, president Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1998, which would have set targets for countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But the senate failed to ratify, and then the presidency changed and in 2001 Bush delivered the “death knell” to the Kyoto protocol. Because, it was going to be bad for business.
As an undergraduate in international relations, Caitlyn studied the treaty as an international document. This was her entry point to climate change. “I think that was my first knowing about climate change. It was elevated to that level of importance. But maybe not urgency or severity.” She became more “keenly aware” of climate change issues, in another winter internship in the environmental office of a US Trade Representative. “The woman I was working for, she had been one of the lead negotiators of Kyoto. And that was when George W. Bush came in and said Kyoto will not be ratified by the U.S. That was a very upsetting moment.”
Caitlyn teaches her graduate students the tricks of the trade in the climate policy world: “like cap and trade systems and how successful they were with global air pollutants. And if you put a cap and trade on greenhouse gases at the national level, as we have been talking about for the last 20 years, you would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, no problem. It’s a very textbook version of how these markets would work.”
But who is writing the textbook?
Caitlyn has accomplished a lot on campus: organizing cross-disciplinary curriculum at the University that focuses on climate change; vastly improving an Interdisciplinary Studies degree in Sustainability Science; creating greater visibility for sustainability focused courses through crosslisting. All of this is much harder, and much slower, than it looks.
“There aren’t that many courses that are just about climate change, but there are a lot of courses that weave climate change in as a way which is really important and probably the way it should be, actually….
“We do need to go back to Gen Ed. When the moment is there, that’s going to be the thing we need to address. Having a stronger environmental science, environmental policy. I don’t think it’s good enough just to understand the mechanism. I think you also need to understand the policy mechanism, otherwise, you can’t really make informed decisions about how to move forward.”
Of the new improved BA degree, she said, “maybe at the moment it’s a little bit pulling together all these different pieces. But then there’s something that if those faculty have a way to talk to each other, we all get a little better at this over time. That structure will kind of tighten up over time, I think.”
So, what do you think is more important? All students knowing a little or some students knowing a lot?
“On my really good days, I think we have really great goals and I’m like, “Oh, they set the tone. It gives us something to work towards. They’re really ambitious goals. Carbon neutral by 2045. It’s so important. We absolutely need to meet that goal. It gives us sort of like marching orders and helps line up the ducks.”
“And then on my really down days? I think, ‘Oh, we have all of these goals that people feel comfortable saying out loud because they have no teeth.’ There’s no way to comply with them. And when I talk to policymakers about the ways to comply with them, generally what I experience is, ‘Oh, that’s hard.’ Not all the time…there’s some really great people who are trying to push forward really good policy. But the goals that seem to pass through, like easy breezy, no big controversy are the ones that sound really good, and the media snaps them up, but they have no real muscles.”
I ask about her emotional landscape, because I think it must be difficult to know what she knows. But she said, “I don’t really find regret or grief to be super helpful emotions. They are emotions that should be registered and they’re valid and on a personal level, of course, I have felt those emotions very much. But for me, my work is all about getting people to do things about climate change.”
And grief is not helpful in that space. And expressing grief to people is not helpful in that space.
It’s my personal philosophy, and I know this doesn’t work for everybody, but my experience is that sort of extending the idea of grief to students isn’t particularly productive. If they have grief, we have to help them cope with it. But extending grief to them isn’t really what we want to do.
Talking with Caitlin, I feel all of the information and pressure, all of the Ikigai inside of that Venn diagram where she lives. I understand what she’s carrying in her role within the University and how she makes the decisions she makes. I really want to give her a hug. It feels resolute, and like a conclusion, when she says:
I think there’s a lot of good research that shows that grief does not lead to action.
