Insurance companies have begun to pull out of entire states. Homeowners in Florida, Louisiana and California have found themselves uninsurable through no fault of their own. Climate-related disasters meant that the actuarial math no longer worked, and the people pricing this risk were not environmental scientists, but insurance analysts and financial modelers — people who might be sitting next to you in Econ class.
We, the members of the Student Government Association (SGA) Environmental Sustainability Committee, want to challenge the assumption that sustainability belongs to one corner of campus. Sustainability is not a specialty: It is the defining context of the world we will be adults in.
We understand that our curriculum is already demanding, the job market is already stressful, and environmentalism can feel like another obligation. It is easy to pay lip service to environmental concerns without feeling like they are directly relevant to what we want to do with our lives. The problem, we believe, is not that students in non-climate-related majors don’t care about climate change. The problem is that nobody has connected the dots in a way that made it feel real. So, let us try for a moment.
Global demand for green skills has increased by 40% since 2015, but only 13% of the global workforce currently possesses the skills needed to meet that demand. In the United States alone, there were more than four million climate-related jobs in 2024, with clean energy job creation outpacing overall U.S. job growth more than threefold. Rather than a sector unto itself, this represents a transformation spread across existing industries. According to EU-funded research, employers in more than 80% of countries anticipate that climate adaptation and mitigation will transform their businesses within the next five years. Advanced manufacturing is decarbonizing, agriculture is reckoning with drought and soil loss, and finance is working to price climate risk into everything from mortgages to municipal bonds, just to name a few sectors. A report by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that a 1° C increase in global temperature reduces world GDP by 12%. This statistic is an environmental statistic, but also an economic, public health and political science statistic.
What frustrates us is the tendency to treat this as a problem for one department to solve. Environmental Studies courses at Middlebury are excellent and prepare students well for careers that directly address environmental challenges. They cannot prepare students who will never take a course that begins with ENVS A. A liberal arts education is supposed to do the opposite of siloing: we are supposed to graduate with the ability to think across disciplines and see how history, economics, ethics, and ecology are all talking to each other at once. The climate crisis is the perfect subject for this kind of thinking. It is a scientific problem that cannot be solved without policy, a policy problem that cannot be solved without public will and a question of public will that cannot be answered without education.
Our ask is not that every Midd student becomes an environmental scientist. In fact, several members of our committee are pursuing majors which don’t require us to set foot in BiHall for the entire duration of our college career. It is essential that every student encounters the environmental dimensions of the field they are entering. A law student who understands climate liability will be a more effective attorney. A computer science student who understands the carbon footprint of data centers will build more responsibility. A medical student who understands how rising temperatures affect patients will be a more competent clinician. Our education should prepare us not just for our first job, but for the world that we will inhabit over the course of our lives.
Each of us will graduate into a world that has already warmed by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This is not intended to fuel climate doomerism — we don’t want you to finish this op-ed feeling like the climate crisis is insurmountable, and there’s nothing you can do. On the contrary, the fact that this problem is everywhere is also evidence that solutions can and must come from everywhere.
Please reach out to the Student Government Environmental Sustainability Committee if you want to help us change the cultural apathy towards the climate crisis: sgaes@middlebury.edu, or if you have suggestions for how sustainability can be more meaningfully integrated into your academic experience.
Editor’s note: The SGA Environmental Sustainability Committee is composed of Emma Ackerman ’28, Nikita Beresovski ’28, Julian Galindo Macias ’27, Sophia Galuppo ’26.5, Giles Heilman ’28, John Masiello ’27, Maya Millner ’26.5, AJ Slocum ’26.5, and Kathaline Villavicencio ’28. Slocum is an opinions editor for The Campus.
