By Jessica Kutz for The 19th.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Sage Lenier attended her first environmental class as a high schooler in Corona, California in 2015. It was an AP course that addressed some of the urgent problems facing the natural world, issues like biodiversity loss, climate change and the ravages of industrial scale farming. 

One lecture stood out to her in particular: The teacher told the class about the crisis of topsoil loss, or the layer of dirt where most plants — including the crops we eat — grow and flourish. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, the world is expecting to lose 90 percent of its topsoil by 2050 if countries don’t take action.

She remembers her teacher talking about this fact almost casually, pointing out that once we’ve depleted the topsoil, people will face extreme hunger. Lenier wanted to know what governments were doing about it, but her teacher’s answer was disappointing: World leaders would need to cooperate politically on an international scale that had never before been accomplished. In short, the planet was screwed. 

The whole class made her feel helpless. 

“I was really, really panicked, obviously,” Lenier said over a Zoom call. “Environmental education as it stands is extremely alarmist, and I was freaking out.”

Her best friend dropped the course because she found it too depressing. Lenier also felt scared by what she was learning about the future of the planet. Instead of ruminating in that fear, Lenier began to wonder what she could do to change things. Her parents and friends weren’t talking about these issues, and this was a few years before the climate youth strikes had raised the profile on the climate crisis. 

“I was really confused, really panicked, and wanted to do something,” she said. “What I realized is that maybe our biggest problem is that no one knows any of this stuff.” 

After she graduated high school, Lenier began to develop the kind of curriculum she wanted to be taught — one focused on solutions. The University of California, Berkeley, where Lenier attended, offers a unique opportunity for students to teach their own university courses. The classes vary in subject matter from the whimsical — think Harry Potter — to the technical, like computer coding and software engineering, but they all have to meet academic standards to be certified and sponsored by a faculty member. 

Lenier’s class, Solutions for a Sustainable and Just Future, was radically different from the environmental education norm, focused on explaining both the most pressing environmental issues of our time, and then offering solutions. 

She taught it for the first time in 2018. It broke records for student enrollment, growing from 25 students to over 300 a semester at its peak. So far over 1,800 people have taken the course, including 200 students who took the class virtually during the pandemic through Zero Waste USA. Though Lenier has graduated, it’s now being taught by student teachers she’s helped train. It also won a best practice award from the California Higher Education Sustainability Conference. 

According to data that Lenier collected from her students, two-thirds of those who took the class came from non-environmental majors, and more than 70 percent said they had been inspired to, or were becoming involved in environmental work and activism. 

Now 24, Lenier is aiming to take her curriculum to universities and high schools across the country. She is at the forefront of a growing movement to integrate environmental curriculum into the education system, equipping students with the knowledge they need to help solve some of the largest environmental issues of our time. 

The state of environmental education in the United States can be described as either nonexistent or woefully inadequate. Radhika Iyengar, director of education for the center of sustainable development at Columbia University, said that most students are having to seek out information on their own through the internet and social media. There is no federal push to teach environmental education, and only a handful of states like New Jersey and Connecticut have made strides in incorporating the curriculum in K-12 schools. When climate change is taught, it is often through a side project or a single lesson. 

“This is just the tip of the iceberg that we’re touching,” said Iyengar. “We’re just now trying to integrate climate education when the climate is falling apart, and the earth is falling apart.” 

The predominant model of engaging students in environmental work has also overwhelmingly focused on the existential problems at hand. Sarah Jaquette Ray, a professor and chair of environmental studies at Cal Poly Humboldt and author of “A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety,” describes the typical style of teaching about the environment — the kind Lenier encountered in high school — as the “scare to care model.” 

“The vast majority of environmental, climate and sustainability educators got Ph.D.s under the assumption that nobody cared or knew enough about the environment and needed to get more educated about it, in order for us to fix this problem,” she said. “Like, if we tell them how horrible it is, if we give them a litany of problems, they will know what to do to go out and fix them.”

But instead it was having the opposite impact, Ray said. “The barrage of problems, the doom and gloom, in general … is having the effect increasingly of leaving people more apathetic, more desiring to numb out [and] more likely to be in denial.”

It is contributing to a growing feeling of despair about the environment among young people. A 2021 survey of 10,000 youth from across the world found that many are suffering from what is known as eco-anxiety, or a sort of existential dread about the state of the planet. Nearly 60 percent of respondents said they were very or extremely worried about climate change. 

Students are going to school seeking answers. Lenier’s class provides them.

The course itself not only centers solutions but justice too. What drives Lenier is the people being impacted by climate change and the sometimes faulty response to it. She draws a distinction between capitalism, green capitalism (think Elon Musk and Tesla) and radical environmentalism — the latter being the version she focuses on in class. One that not only upholds care for the planet, but care for the people living on it too. “I care about human rights, first and foremost,” she said. 

The course starts with the history of consumption and chronicles the country’s waste streams, pointing out that most of what Americans consume ends up in landfills. This “linear economy” means that resources are extracted, consumed and then disposed of, leading to a rapidly degrading planet and conflict over its finite resources. 

But Lenier doesn’t stop there. Her class offers an alternative to the status quo, by explaining the possibilities found within a “circular economy,” one in which things don’t lose their value in a landfill, but instead are recirculated as new items, or are in continuous use, without being viewed as disposable. 

Repairing clothing instead of throwing it away, or resoling shoes could be an aspect of the circular economy, versus the fast fashion Americans have become accustomed to replacing at the smallest tear, or hole.

It’s just one example Lenier offers as a window into how an alternative, regenerative future could take shape, one that prioritizes caring for the earth and helps students imagine how they might fit into making it a reality. 

“It’s really about getting people excited about what a better world can look like,” Lenier said. 

The class offers practical ways that students can take steps in their own lives to limit their consumption, by offering alternatives to daily disposables like paper towels and plastic bags or providing examples of how to engage in the circular economy in small ways, like composting. 

This method of focusing on individuals’ actions does face criticism from some environmental activists, who say it detracts from the focus on industry players like oil producers which are responsible for a majority of carbon emissions.

Lenier sees the argument as a cop-out. “Americans, or people of privilege globally, are so willing and able to just absolve themselves of any accountability,” she said. “But if you can see your power as a person in the Global North, it would be transformative.”

Lenier is also advocating for systemic change too. Her class delves into the topics of decarbonization and degrowth — an argument for shrinking the economy — though she thinks individuals, particularly in the U.S., should take responsibility for the harm they are causing to the rest of the world. 

Ray said a focus on providing people a blueprint of what they can do in their own lives to limit their impact on the planet has been shown to alter the way they behave. 

“It has a psychological effect of making people get more engaged,” she said. “It gives them a model of what they might be able to do in their own community. … So there’s sort of multiple psychological buttons that solutions push when [students are] in classes.”

In some regards, American students are just now catching up to their peers in other countries in simply recognizing that climate change is real. This was something that struck Lovisa Lagercrantz, one of the co-facilitators of the Berkeley class, when she first moved to the states from Sweden when she was 15. 

“I felt like my discussions with my peers at school lunches were like, ‘Oh, do you believe in climate change?’ … like it is not something to be believed in,” she said. “The framework in Scandinavia was so far past that. Like it wasn’t a question to be taught, it was a fact. And that was something we were taught in school growing up.”

Ray said there has been an ongoing shift among young people in their awareness of these issues. “Increasingly, the climate is an emotional thing,” she said. “It is intimate, it is a form of trauma, it is a form of fear. It is an emotional topic for many students.” 

The climate youth strikes, led by Greta Thunberg in 2018, helped bring the climate crisis to the forefront of students’ minds. But Iyengar also sees this activism as a reflection of societal failure to address the problem to begin with. “We have pushed our students to a last resort,” she said. 

Anu Thirunarayanan, another of the current co-facilitators, began teaching the class after they became drained by that kind of activism. 

“I think a lot of environmentalists burn out, in a sense, because they see so many of the negative aspects of what climate problems or environmental problems look like. And they are forced to deal with the underbelly,” they said. “And it’s hard to find hope in that.”

They found out about Lenier’s class through a student club, called the Students of Color Environmental Collective, and decided they wanted to shift gears to education and organizing instead of being active in campus rallies. 

As a co-facilitator, Thirunarayanan has added to the course curriculum, creating a module focused on environmental justice. This collaboration and student-led approach is what drew them to teaching the class to begin with, and it differed from most faculty-led courses in an important way.

“The identity of our faculty, a large portion of them are White and most of them are men. And I think the fact that this class has been entirely taught by women and nonbinary students, and at least around half of us have been people of color, I think, adds that additional intersectional identity to how the course is taught,” they said. 

Now, Thirunarayanan and Lagercrantz are helping Lenier turn the class into an exportable curriculum that could be taught at other universities and high schools through her recently launched nonprofit, Sustainable and Just Future. Her tagline? “Youth-led environmental education for the revolution.” 

For Lenier the goal is simple: educate as many millions of people as possible to tackle the problem of climate change. 

While still in the early stages of getting funding and figuring out how to run the nonprofit full time, already she is fielding hundreds of inquiries from students at other universities who are seeking to bring the program to their schools. She has plans to develop a digital version of the course offerings, and eventually would like to see the course integrated into K-12 education across the country. 

It’s about more than providing solutions, in Lenier’s eyes, it’s about empowering students from across disciplines to “dig into their community” and find the ways in which their skill sets can contribute to solving one of the biggest challenges of our time. 

“If we start raising people who have the earth as a priority and also a knowledge of how these systems impact them, and their role in it, and instead of churning out hundreds of thousands more people with business degrees … we churn out people who are empathetic and curious about the world and looking to make it a better place, genuinely,” she said, “I think that is revolutionary.”


Jessica Kutz wrote this article for The 19th.


get more stories like this via email

A new study raised red flags about respiratory health in Pennsylvania, particularly for those living near oil and gas activity.

The study by GeoHealth said nationwide, oil and gas venting and flaring exacerbate asthma in 73,000 children, including nearly 12,000 in Pennsylvania.

Jackson Zeiler, public health analyst for the Environmental Health Project, said energy developers do flaring and venting on a regular basis to remove excess gas. He explained the study looked at the potential health risks associated with the practice.

"There's adverse birth outcomes, there's cancer outcomes," Zeiler pointed out. "Volatile Organic Compounds are a big part of these emissions, which have a whole host of health effects, including respiratory health issues, different neurological effects like headaches and dizziness for people who are working in those facilities, and people who live really close by."

Zeiler noted flaring also contributes to an increased risk of hospitalizations, emergency room visits, worsening asthma and even premature death. But the energy industry said flaring is needed to minimize pressure at well sites, for testing and other reasons.

The study used satellite images and gas-imaging techniques to visualize emissions. Zeiler added companies are required to report their emissions to regulatory authorities and the data is compiled into a National Emissions Inventory through various sensors.

"They looked at the National Emissions Inventory numbers and compared it to the actual imaging that they looked at," Zeiler emphasized. "They found that the imaging saw way more emissions than was accounted for in the National Emissions Inventory. They're able to conclude that companies are underreporting, essentially, what they're flaring and what they're emitting."

He suggested Pennsylvanians could work with lawmakers on stricter reporting guidelines and transparency requirements for oil and gas operators. He also recommended advocating for greater setback distances between well sites and residential areas to minimize exposure.


get more stories like this via email

Balancing the needs of the many with those who have traditionally reaped benefits from public lands is behind a new rule issued Thursday by the Bureau of Land Management.

A quarter-million acres of public lands, including 13 million in New Mexico, now fall under the Public Lands Rule. The BLM is charged with managing multiple uses but has historically prioritized extraction, such as oil and gas drilling, along with cattle grazing, over conservation and outdoor recreation.

Jesse Duebel, executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, believes the new rule is more fair-minded.

"I really feel like this new rule doesn't minimize those other things," Duebel asserted. "The other uses are still going to be allowed to continue but now, decisions are going to be made with conservation in the forefront. And of course, conservation by definition, is the 'wise use' of our natural resources."

The rule requires BLM managers to prioritize designating more "Areas of Critical Environmental Concern" in their land use planning. Right now the number is small, but they help protect cultural sites and wildlife habitat.

The rule also allows BLM managers to issue conservation leases to nonprofit and community organizations, including tribal communities, for landscape restoration work on public lands.

Keegan King, executive director of the Native Land Institute, believes in the face of climate change, the long-term health of public lands must be a priority.

"I'm a conservationist but I'm also a hunter, and it's important that we protect these places for a variety of different uses," King explained. "There are ranchers and other people that utilize federal lands and it's important that all of it is maintained for future generations."

According to the Commerce Department's 2022 Bureau of Economic Analysis data, outdoor recreation generated $2.4 billion in added value for New Mexico and created almost 28,000 jobs.

During the BLM's public process on the issue, more than 90% of comments were in favor of elevating conservation for a more balanced approach to public land management.

Support for this reporting was provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts.


get more stories like this via email

By Max Graham for Grist.
Broadcast version by Alex Gonzalez for Arizona News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Below the red-tile roofs of the Catalina Foothills, an affluent area on the north end of Tucson, Arizona, lies a blanket of desert green: spiky cacti, sword-shaped yucca leaves, and the spindly limbs of palo verde and mesquite trees. Head south into the city, and the vegetation thins. Trees are especially scarce on the south side of town, where shops and schools and housing complexes sprawl across a land encrusted in concrete. 

On hot summer days, you don’t just see but feel the difference. Tucson’s shadeless neighborhoods, which are predominantly low-income and Latino, soak up the heat. They swelter at summer temperatures that eclipse the city average by 8 degrees Fahrenheit and the Catalina Foothills by 12 degrees. That disparity can be deadly in a city that experienced 40 straight days above 100 degrees last year — heat that’s sure to get worse with climate change. 

The good news is there’s a simple way to cool things down: Plant trees. “You’re easily 10 degrees cooler stepping under the shade of a tree,” said Brad Lancaster, an urban forester in Tucson. “It’s dramatically cooler.”

A movement is underway to populate the city’s street corners and vacant lots with groves of trees. Tucson’s city government, which has pledged to plant 1 million trees by 2030, recently got $5 million from the Biden administration to spur the effort — a portion of the $1 billion that the U.S. Forest Service committed last fall to urban and small-scale forestry projects across the United States, aiming to make communities more resilient to climate change and extreme heat. 

But in Tucson and many other cities, tree-planting initiatives can tackle a lot more than scorching temperatures. What if Tucson’s million new trees — and the rest of the country’s — didn’t just keep sidewalks cool? What if they helped feed people, too?

That’s what Brandon Merchant hopes will happen on the shadeless south side of Tucson, a city where about one-fifth of the population lives more than a mile from a grocery store. He’s working on a project to plant velvet mesquite trees that thrive in the dry Sonoran Desert and have been used for centuries as a food source. The mesquite trees’ seed pods can be ground into a sweet, protein-rich flour used to make bread, cookies, and pancakes. Merchant, who works at the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, sees cultivating mesquite around the city and surrounding areas as an opportunity to ease both heat and hunger. The outcome could be a network of “food forests,” community spaces where volunteers tend fruit trees and other edible plants for neighbors to forage. 

“Thinking about the root causes of hunger and the root causes of health issues, there are all these things that tie together: lack of green spaces, lack of biodiversity,” Merchant said. (The food bank received half a million dollars from the Biden administration through the Inflation Reduction Act.)

Merchant’s initiative fits into a national trend of combining forestry — and Forest Service funding — with efforts to feed people. Volunteers, school teachers, and urban farmers in cities across the country are planting fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and other edible plants in public spaces to create shade, provide access to green space, and supply neighbors with free and healthy food. These food forests, forest gardens, and edible parks have sprouted up at churches, schools, empty lots, and street corners in numerous cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Seattle, and Miami. 

“It’s definitely growing in popularity,” said Cara Rockwell, who researches agroforestry and sustainable food systems at Florida International University. “Food security is one of the huge benefits.” 

There are also numerous environmental benefits: Trees improve air quality, suck carbon from the atmosphere, and create habitat for wildlife, said Mikaela Schmitt-Harsh, an urban forestry expert at James Madison University in Virginia. “I think food forests are gaining popularity alongside other urban green space efforts, community gardens, green rooftops,” she added. “All of those efforts, I think, are moving us in a positive direction.”

Researchers say food forests are unlikely to produce enough food to feed everyone in need of it. But Schmitt-Harsh said they could help supplement diets, especially in neighborhoods that are far from grocery stores. “A lot has to go into the planning of where the food forest is, when the fruits are harvestable, and whether the harvestable fruits are equitably distributed.”

She pointed to the Philadelphia Orchard Project as an emblem of success. That nonprofit has partnered with schools, churches, public recreation centers, and urban farms to oversee some 68 community orchards across the city. Their network of orchards and food forests generated more than 11,000 pounds of fresh produce last year, according to Phil Forsyth, co-executive director of the nonprofit.

Some of the sites in Philadelphia have only three or four trees. Others have over 100, said Kim Jordan, the organization’s other executive director. “We’re doing a variety of fruit and nut trees, berry bushes and vines, pollinator plants, ground cover, perennial vegetables — a whole range of things,” Jordan said. 

The community food bank in Tucson started its project in 2021, when it bought six shade huts to shelter saplings. Each hut can house dozens of baby trees, which are grown in bags and irrigated until they become sturdy enough to be planted in the ground. Over the past three years, Merchant has partnered with a high school, a community farm, and the Tohono O’odham tribal nation to nurse, plant, and maintain the trees. So far they’ve only put a few dozen saplings in the ground, and Merchant aims to ramp up efforts with a few hundred more plantings this year. His initial goal, which he described as “lofty and ambitious,” is to plant 20,000 trees by 2030.

The food bank is also organizing workshops on growing, pruning, and harvesting, as well as courses on cooking with mesquite flour. And they’ve hosted community events, where people bring seed pods to pound into flour — a process that requires a big hammer mill that isn’t easy to use on your own, Merchant said. Those events feature a mesquite-pancake cook-off, using the fresh flour.

Merchant is drawing on a model of tree-planting that Lancaster, the urban forester, has been pioneering for 30 years in a downtown neighborhood called Dunbar Spring. That area was once as barren as much of southern Tucson, but a group of volunteers led by Lancaster — who started planting velvet mesquite and other native trees in 1996 — has built up an impressive canopy. Over three decades, neighborhood foresters have transformed Dunbar Spring’s bald curbsides into lush forests of mesquite, hackberry, cholla and prickly pear cactus, and more — all plants that have edible parts.

“There are over 400 native food plants in the Sonoran Desert, so we tapped into that,” Lancaster said. “That’s what we focused our planting on.” 

The Dunbar Spring food forest is now what Lancaster calls a “living pantry.” He told Grist that up to a quarter of the food he eats — and half of what he feeds his Nigerian dwarf goats — is harvested from plants in the neighborhood’s forest. “Those percentages could be much more if I were putting more time into the harvests.” The more than 1,700 trees and shrubs planted by Lancaster’s group have also stored a ton of water — a precious commodity in the Sonoran Desert — by slurping up an estimated 1 million gallons of rainwater that otherwise would have flowed off the pavement into storm drains.

Another well-established food forest skirts the Old West Church in Boston, where volunteers have spent a decade transforming a city lawn into a grove of apple, pear, and cherry trees hovering over vegetable, pollinator, and herb gardens. Their produce — ranging from tomatoes and eggplants to winter melons — gets donated to Women’s Lunch Place, a local shelter for women without permanent housing, according to Karen Spiller, a professor of sustainable food systems at the University of New Hampshire and a member of Old West Church who helps with the project. 

“It’s open for harvest at any time,” Spiller said. “It’s not, ‘Leave a dollar, and pick an apple.’ You can pick your apple, and eat your apple.”

Merchant wants to apply the same ethic in Tucson: mesquite pods for all to pick — and free pancakes after a day staying cool in the shade.


Max Graham wrote this article for Grist.


get more stories like this via email