skip to main content
skip to newscasts

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Public News Service Logo
facebook instagram linkedin reddit youtube twitter
view newscast page
play newscast audioPlay

SD public defense duties shift from counties to state; SCOTUS appears skeptical of restricting government communications with social media companies; Trump lawyers say he can't make bond; new scholarships aim to connect class of 2024 to high-demand jobs.

view newscast page
play newscast audioPlay

The SCOTUS weighs government influence on social media, and who groups like the NRA can do business with. Biden signs an executive order to advance women's health research and the White House tells Israel it's responsible for the Gaza humanitarian crisis.

view newscast page
play newscast audioPlay

Midwest regenerative farmers are rethinking chicken production, Medicare Advantage is squeezing the finances of rural hospitals and California's extreme swing from floods to drought has some thinking it's time to turn rural farm parcels into floodplains.

For NC College Students, Coronavirus Spurs Climate Urgency

play audio
Play

Wednesday, May 27, 2020   

By Mallory McDuff for Yes! Media
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for North Carolina News Service/Public News Service
Reporting for the YES! Magazine-Public News Service Collaboration


ASHEVILLE, N.C. -- "Next week, classes will be online, but we've got an hour to brainstorm ideas for our environmental education class," I told my students.

That was March 12, 2020. After a week of monitoring the news, the surreal had happened: The threat of the coronavirus consumed the small campus where I'd taught for 20 years. Seated at a picnic table near the college's vegetable garden, I looked at my nine seminar students knowing most would soon leave these mountains of North Carolina. Some who were graduating seniors would be leaving for good.

I didn't mention the deep pit of dread in my stomach: How would I transform a course in which we taught nature awareness, gardening, and cooking in elementary and high schools in our rural valley into one delivered by videoconference? After a half-semester developing lessons on topics such as food security and the climate crisis, we faced another kind of emergency-a global pandemic-and we'd have to continue our learning through a split screen on Zoom.

But my students are resourceful and accustomed to MacGyvering whatever it takes to creatively respond to environmental puzzles. Ours is a work college, one of nine in the country where each student logs 10 to 20 hours a week - on crews such as the garden, farm, blacksmith shop, genetics lab, and the library. This model of education is often messy, but it's always real. In my courses, students use skills from their work on campus, such as growing food and managing forests, to address local and regional needs. In short, they are used to digging their hands into whatever needs doing-even if they have to do it virtually.

"We could learn new skills in sustainable living and then teach each other," one student named Lucy said as we sat by the garden - the day everything changed. Her response sounded so practical: We'd been preparing to facilitate lessons such as transplanting kale and learning about the life cycle of chickens with teenagers and first graders. But public schools would be closed in a matter of hours: We'd have to cancel our community projects.

On a piece of paper, the students made a list of skills they already had - from weaving fiber to making herbal remedies - and then another column of what they wanted to learn.

After an anxious weekend of rewriting the course schedule, I greeted them from my laptop in the bedroom of my 900-square-foot house on campus. This was the only place where I could close the door to the sounds of my grown children home from school. From my window, I could see grazing cows and rolling mountains. What my students had here and what they looked forward to-graduation, jobs, housing, community, Internet access-was suddenly gone when they left the dorms for home.

During class time, I peered from behind my screen into their kitchens and living rooms - from California to Maine. I tried not to fixate on their childhood bedrooms with the athletic trophies and flowery comforters. My 21-year-old daughter-who hadn't lived at home in three years - was sequestered in her top bunk in a room shared with her 14-year old sister. She'd left a similar work college in Berea, Kentucky, where student labor maintains the school. When she stayed awake after midnight doing homework online, it was like she was studying abroad at home-living several time zones away in our tiny rental. And so I empathized with how my students navigated their own dislocation while learning about sustainable living: I was trying to live with that dissonance too, a metaphor for the anxious months ahead.

Together, but apart, we dove into our "Virtual Skills Share," my attempt at rebranding a hands-on course. Spending synchronous time online during our class period was optional - in case they couldn't access the Internet - but most of the students showed up for the weekly sessions. One learned to preserve vegetables and fruit and taught us from her parents' kitchen: "I canned strawberry preserves," she said, after explaining how to work a pressure cooker. Then she sheepishly added: "And my mom wanted to can these hot dogs, too."

Another studied meditation and led us in breathing exercises, an antidote to the anxiety many felt without the structure of school. One student created a series of gardening videos. A graduating senior named Cayce, who had stayed to work on the campus farm, learned how to make sourdough bread in his dorm and promised to bring me a loaf before graduation.

Their faces looked years younger in the childhood spaces and dislocated places: the cobalt-blue paint color on the wall, the stuffed animals on a shelf, the interruption from a sibling: "Mom said to put the meat in the freezer!"

I felt like an interloper absorbing the entirety of their lives and the uncertainty of our future together. At the closing of one class, I showed drone footage of campus: soaring images over the white barn, pink azaleas budding, and a swooping descent above a rushing stream. The students were silent after the video ended until one piped up: "It's like Minecraft meets nature!" Somehow this semester, we were young and old at the same time, reminding me of writer Rebecca Solnit's line: "Many disasters unfold like revolutions."

The coronavirus may foreshadow how climate change will disrupt our communities. The devastation might also unveil a counterrevolution already brewing, especially among young people such as my former student Kelsey Juliana, the lead plaintiff in a case suing our federal government to try to protect the right of youth to a healthy climate. Other students such as Sally Thames protested at city hall as part of the Sunrise Movement to ask local officials in Asheville to declare a climate emergency, which they ultimately did. I felt this cocktail of hope and fear for my students who will graduate as a diaspora in the coronavirus class of 2020.

The week before virtual graduation, my student Cayce brought that hot loaf of sourdough bread to my doorstep, and we visited from the new normal of 6 feet. After working on the farm, he described admiring those farmers who understood in-depth environmental and agricultural issues but could do the practical work: like assisting a cow giving birth and then putting up a fence to protect the mother and calf.

"I think a better world will include people with sustainable skills and knowledge they can use throughout their lives," Cayce later wrote me. "That's why I love understanding sourdough bread making. I can share the scientific biochemical process if I want, but I can also relish the doing of it, kneading, folding, mixing, and baking a beautiful meal for others."

To envision a new world, beyond this pandemic and our climate crisis, my students hope for just and healthy communities for all. While a loaf of bread or a can of preserves won't solve our problems, it's a step toward a community of right intention, rather than the amoral dysfunction they often see in the news.

I am not a farmer, but at the end of the semester, a call went out over e-mail for campus residents who could line the road to ensure the yearling cows didn't escape during the move from one pasture to another as a part of rotational grazing. So, after my online class, I ran to join a motley crowd including the admissions director, the physics professor, the farm manager, the blacksmith, and a core crew of students such as Cayce. With brown, black, and reddish cows running toward us, I saw a scrappy but vibrant community - one teaching and learning together, even when we don't know how this story will end.

That same week, I spied photos on Instagram of saplings planted in honor of the seniors who worked on landscaping. "It felt wrong to do it without the entire crew," said John, their supervisor, "but planting trees and honoring tradition seemed like the only logical thing to do as we think about our future."

Underneath the post, a student had added these words: "I wanna come home :)"
After spending seven weeks together online, I watched my students taking steps to build a better world and a home for us all.

---

Mallory McDuff wrote this article for YES! Magazine. McDuff teaches at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C. She has written two books about faith and the climate crisis and has published essays in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Rumpus, and more. Follow her at mallorymcduff.com.


get more stories like this via email

more stories
Iowa families can apply for up to $7,600 a year for private school costs. (Adobe Stock)

Social Issues

play sound

An ethics committee in the Republican-led Iowa House has dismissed a complaint filed by a group of community activists against a state lawmaker for hi…


play sound

Each spring, hundreds of thousands of California high school seniors have to figure out if they can afford to go to college in the fall - and two new …

Health and Wellness

play sound

A health care workforce shortage in New Hampshire is leaving Alzheimer's patients and their families with few options for treatment. Patients facing …


South Dakota ranks 49th in the country for its contribution to indigent legal defense costs, according to a 2023 report from the Indigent Legal Services Task Force. (Adobe Stock)

Social Issues

play sound

South Dakota is creating an Office of Indigent Legal Services after House Bill 1057 passed the Legislature with nearly unanimous support this month…

Environment

play sound

A Knoxville-based environmental group is voicing concerns over what it sees as an increasing financial strain imposed on taxpayers by nuclear weapons …

Environment

play sound

A bipartisan law set to take effect this summer prohibits foreign adversaries from buying Hoosier farmland. The signature of Gov. Eric Holcomb was …

Social Issues

play sound

Today, people across Arizona are voting in the Presidential Preference Election, a chance for registered Democrats and Republicans to choose their …

 

Phone: 303.448.9105 Toll Free: 888.891.9416 Fax: 208.247.1830 Your trusted member- and audience-supported news source since 1996 Copyright © 2021