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.
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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.
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By Jack McGovan for Sentient Climate.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
When Guherbar Gorgulu arrived to study at Erasmus University Rotterdam, she was surprised by the many plant-based options.
"In Turkey, you don't really have a lot of vegan options," she says, not to mention many people interested in talking about the impact of what they eat. "I really didn't have a community of people who also cared about animal rights and the environment."
That all changed when Gorgulu started attending weekly vegan cooking workshops hosted by the Erasmus Sustainability Hub - a student-led organization encouraging students to lead more sustainable lifestyles. Inspired to join the Hub as Food and Agriculture Manager, Gorgulu, along with her colleagues, have been active in fighting for climate action on campus. Initiatives include workshops, discussions and petitions to demand fully plant-based cafeterias.
The work seems to be paying off. In February, the university announced that they are aiming to make plant-based foods the norm on campus by 2030. The goal is part of the university's climate commitments; animal agriculture is responsible for around 20 percent of global emissions, and is also a leading cause of habitat loss.
Change is happening beyond Rotterdam. A dozen universities across the U.S. joined an incubator program this year to provide more plant-based foods on their campuses, and across the UK, student unions in Cambridge, Stirling, Birmingham and London voted in support of vegan menus this academic year. In 2021, universities across the entire city of Berlin went predominantly meat-free.
Rising Demand for Plant-Based Foods at Universities
It's no surprise to see rising plant-based initiatives on campus, says Emma Garnett, PhD, a researcher focusing on strategies for promoting more sustainable diets at the University of Oxford. "Students often form the backbone of many climate campaigns," she says. The Fridays for Future school strikes began in 2018, and many of those students are now at university.
In 2021, Nathan McGovern helped launch the Plant-Based Universities Campaign, which aims to push universities to serve 100 percent plant-based foods on campus.
McGovern is now a spokesperson for Animal Rising, previously Animal Rebellion UK, a group working on mobilizing student action on campuses.
"Our strategy is to pass motions through student unions," says McGovern, which become a mandate from the unions to the university itself. "This gives us a platform for negotiation." The four successful student union votes in the U.K. were part of this campaign - with the group eyeing 36 more universities for future efforts.
Garnett also highlights research which suggests that a big life change - such as moving to university - can an increased willingness to adopt green behaviors. Representatives from the student organization in Berlin, Studierendenwerk, attribute their decision to rising demand for vegan meals on campus. There, 16.5 percent of students identify as vegan, in comparison to an average of 1.6 percent across the rest of Germany.
Universities Hoping to Meet Climate Commitments
A growing number of universities are now committing to reduce their emissions by serving more plant-based foods on campus, says Edwina Hughes, Head of the Cool Food Pledge at the World Resources Institute (WRI).
Universities make up roughly a fifth of the 67 organizations who have taken the Cool Food Pledge run by WRI. The rest include hospitals, hotels and cities like New York, whose mayor has promised to reduce 30 percent of food-related emissions by the end of the decade.
Cities and schools that sign on must aim to reduce their food-related emissions by at least 25 percent by 2030 - a rate calculated by WRI to fall in line with Paris climate targets. The first 30 organizations who took the pledge have already successfully reduced their per-plate emissions by 21 percent, according to the organization's data.
The Cool Food Pledge team begins their work by looking at each organization's procurement data, and then calculating their carbon footprint. They measure this with the direct emissions of the food purchased, as well as the carbon opportunity cost - an amount based on how much carbon the land could store if it had been left alone as forest or other wild landscape.
What becomes clear, says Hughes, is that in order to drive down the climate impact of food, "it's really important to move away from climate impactful foods like ruminant meat and all animal based products towards plants."
Using Behavioral Science to Promote Plant-Based
Each organization also receives behavioral science recommendations to help them encourage diners to select plant-based options. Such small interventions - known as nudges - can be effective in university settings.
One meta-analysis spanning 21 years and 24 universities across different continents found that over two-thirds of nudges were successful in reducing meat consumption. The analysis also found that multiple complementary nudges were more effective than singular interventions. Nudges can take many forms - like adding more meal options, promotional messaging, pricing incentives, manipulating the layout of dining areas and changing the arrangement of food choices on menus.
Even in the classroom there are opportunities to promote plant-based eating. Economics students at a U.S. college reduced their meat consumption by roughly 10 percent over a three year period hearing a 50 minute informational campaign that talked about the environmental impacts of animal agriculture, combined with information on the health benefits of reducing meat consumption.
The intervention wasn't coercive, says Andrew Jalil, an associate professor in economics at Occidental College, Los Angeles, and lead author of the study. "It was just saying, here's what the scientific literature says, you do what you want to do."
Jalil highlights similar research in which students in a philosophy class were exposed to material arguing for vegetarianism. Based on student cafeteria purchases, this too translated to a reduction in meat consumption. With roughly half of all young people going to university, at least in the U.K., universities are an ideal institution for disseminating information to a range of people from different backgrounds.
Jalil points out there might be other factors influencing students to be more open to dietary shifts. They attend university to learn, they might be more concerned about the climate crisis due to their age and access to dining facilities removes any cooking barriers that might exist to trying out vegan foods.
Universities Still Face Challenges to Climate Action
Shifting what an entire university eats isn't easy. Many schools, Hughes says, are decentralized in the way they provide food, with different colleges offering their own menus. The logistics of reduction can be complicated.
What's more, Hughes adds, it would be naive not to think that "there are universities and faculties who are quite opposed to doing this kind of work because it comes into conflict with their ethos or with their research." Many universities, for example, have research centers focusing on livestock production.
Plus, as the Cool Food Pledge is voluntary, there's no guarantee that anyone will stick to it, and the same is true of any claims made in a press release separate from the pledge.
"It's their responsibility if they want to make progress," says Hughes, adding that she sees students, faculty and investors as the "informal police," who should act to put pressure on their universities if they fumble their targets. The WRI doesn't publish any data on individual organizations, which Hughes says universities could do in order to hold themselves accountable.
"Ultimately what you want is data - you want to be able to track progress," she says. "It's not very interesting to a lot of people but it is the material way to see whether anything is changing."
Even if these schools were accountable and making strides to reduce their food emissions, they might be hogging the limelight in a way that obscures trends elsewhere in society. In the case of the Cool Food Pledge, only a fraction of the organizations who've taken it are universities.
"We should bear in mind that universities often receive a lot of press interest, so we could be missing similar initiatives at other organizations due to less publicity," says Garnett.
In April, the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, made a commitment to reduce food emissions in the city by 33 percent by 2030, in part by serving less meat at schools and hospitals. Other councils, such as Cambridge City and Oxfordshire County, have made similar commitments to only serve plant-based foods at events and meetings, and push for more vegan options in schools. Last year, Ingka Group, responsible for a majority of IKEA stores, began selling plant-based foods at the same price or cheaper than meat options in their restaurants.
But for some activists, the publicity that universities attract is exactly why they should be targets for climate action.
"A lot of universities, by continuing to serve animal products on their menus, are giving legitimacy to an industry that has none," says McGovern. "These are the places we're referencing when we talk about the need to move to a plant-based food system, and they really need to be aligning their actions and their menus with that."
Jack McGovan wrote this article for Sentient Climate.
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As Coloradans begin to weigh their options in this year's presidential election, a new Carbon Brief analysis projects that a second Biden term would help reduce climate pollution - but the administration will still fall short of meeting its 2030 goals.
Report co-author Simon Evans - senior policy editor at Carbon Brief - said by contrast, a second Trump term that successfully rolls back Biden initiatives, including the Inflation Reduction Act as promised, would add four billion extra tons of fossil fuel pollution.
"That's equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the European Union and Japan," said Evans. "That amount of extra emissions, four billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, would cause global climate damage worth something like $900 billion."
Trump has repeatedly claimed that climate change is a hoax, and advanced policies that increased crude oil drilling in order to maintain American energy dominance.
Researchers project a second Trump term would wipe out all emission-reduction gains made over the past five years by installing wind turbines, solar panels, and other clean energy technologies across the globe twice over.
In the 20th century, Evans said nations controlling large fossil fuel reserves did hold significant economic and other advantages.
But in the 21st century and beyond, he said he believes countries with large portfolios of clean energy will have the advantage.
"Actually, clean energy technologies are a great way of bringing energy security," said Evans. "Because you're not relying on import, you're just relying on the wind and the sun that you have in your own country. And the U.S. is certainly very well endowed with wind and solar resources."
Four billion tons is also equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the world's 140 countries with the smallest carbon footprints.
Evans noted that people who can't afford air conditioning to survive extreme heat, or move away from areas prone to flooding and wildfire, will continue to face the biggest threats.
"The people around the world that are least responsible for climate change," said Evans, "whether that's in the poorest countries in the world, or the poorest people in the richest countries - those tend to be the people that are most exposed to the negative impacts of climate change."
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Environmental groups in Virginia are among those looking at how to improve and modernize electrical grid transmission.
Experts said the grid's age and current state aren't conducive to the boom in renewable energy projects being developed. The lack of preparation is being felt all over the country but particularly in Virginia, where the latest report card gives the state's grid operator the lowest score.
Quentin Scott, federal policy director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, said grid operators' long-term planning needs to consider increasing renewable energy.
"They don't really account for high usage of renewables," Scott pointed out. "They're not accounting for the popularity of the Inflation Reduction Act. They're not accounting for state policies that require states to be 100% clean energy by 2050 or 2040."
Other experts feel grid operators like Virginia's PJM Interconnections need to hire more people to deal with interconnection requests. But increased demand for those jobs makes it harder to address the problem. Virginia's General Assembly passed House Bill 862 to make the process more efficient.
If grid operators cannot make the changes in time, around 80% of the emissions reductions outlined in the Inflation Reduction Act might not happen. Scott and other environmental advocates are worried about losing ground. Along with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission being a backstop authority for such projects, he noted microgrids can help improve the grid's efficiency.
"Solar panels that are on your roof or community solar projects; small businesses that erect you know, a wind turbine near their business," Scott explained. "Microgrids allow those sort of localized communities to have more planning, more control over their local resources."
Microgrids are also known to be weather resilient. Given the strong effects climate change is having on states' electrical infrastructure, it can be prudent to prevent blackouts. Research has shown if Texas had more connections with the Southeastern U.S., there would not have been as many power outages during the deadly 2021 winter storm.
Disclosure: The Chesapeake Climate Action Network contributes to our fund for reporting on Climate Change/Air Quality, and Sustainable Agriculture. If you would like to help support news in the public interest,
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