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(02/24/16 8:59pm)
I face lingering disappointment after re-reading Katrina Drury’s piece “I’m Only Human,” published on Feb. 18. On the other side of the fold, a column over, Laurie Patton offers timely, levelheaded comments on the much-discussed Texas Supreme Court case, which questions the role of race in college admission procedures. In concluding remarks, President Patton calls for compassion and more “worthwhile” discourse on issues of race and identity: “Let us recommit ourselves to the spirit of understanding,” she says.
I commend Drury for adding her thoughts to the years-long campus debates on diversity, privilege and power, though I am skeptical, therein, of her efforts to reach for a “spirit of understanding.” Core to her piece is her belief that school-wide expectations surrounding political correctness and “microaggression” are a kind of white censorship and thus hold no social merit. “I don’t care about being politically correct,” Drury writes, on these expectations, “and if people don’t like my opinion, so be it... I hate having to censor every word I utter and monitor every action I make just to avoid offending someone and being branded as a racist...”
Drury’s display of hatred is worrying. She disregards and demonizes the everyday troubles of minority students, which, since my first weeks at the College, have been aired widely to me and in this paper. Her central arguments — “we have developed thin skin,” “we have the luxury to whine about people hurting our feelings” and “why can’t we all just be human and love each other” — are homespun at best. In my six semesters collaborating with Middlebury students, I have never read more uncomplicated claims or insensitive language. And what’s unsettling here is Drury’s tone in casting her assertions: it is divisive and untactful.
As Drury’s peer, I am irked. As a Middlebury student, I am discouraged by my college. As an organizer for the environment, I feel a duty to emphasize the importance of empathy. In my eight years of mobilizing around a cause, I have learned that respect and understanding is critical. There’s tact — an art form — in making a point, even to contenders; subversiveness is not part of that dance.
If all else, Drury, your words have sounded an alarm in this community; I give you that. They bear testimony that a fully-realized diversity, equity and inclusiveness at today’s Middlebury College remains a pipe dream. All things considered as a school in this milieu we are still in a stage of diagnosis, much less care or prevention.
(04/08/15 11:09pm)
Circa-2002 environmentalism begged for more bikers, lower thermostats and less polystyrene. The jets of today’s movement make a braver thunder: they hinge on justice. A decade ago, your shopping-mall forays, half-hour showers and globe-trotting airfare was under scrutiny, but now are your ears, which scarcely register the running snow-melt and decline to hear the ongoing environmental organizing lobby.
Climate organizers are a countervailing strain, but they are winning. With the grit of Othello’s Iago, they are netting legislators who practice and preach a flawed, globalizing logic. They are demanding that industrialists take responsibility for subjecting their emissions and self-interest to those who are less fortunate — the indefensible Desdamonas of the world who are not tooled for cooperation, response or rebellion. They are calling on those “up in corporate” to descend from their towers, their dry archipelago of city blocks, and have a more equated glance (at sea level) of the wet, waning coasts. The implications, microplastics, and methane plumes of a warmed world bubble beneath.
Extreme climate has burned onto our era’s memory, and in the hotness, we walk a wobbly wire with infirm grip. The third world is dipping, and let me be clear: the first world is next for remotion. “How does that make you feel?” asks the shrink. Inspired or impotent? Really, what does it take to fulfill a transcontinental vision for rational, wholesome, productive urban centers, an industrial growth free of wastes, petroleum addiction and never-saturating sprawl? The worn adage that sustainable development undermines healthy economies squashed, a new troupe of players — social scientists, landscape architects and lawmakers — is necessary to completely reimagine our human presence. The alternative, if one exists, knocks the death knell.
With the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set to expire this year, engineers of the new system must be wont to the weighty cultural responsibility they carry. In cultivating healthy, sustained growth, regional cultural values, heritage and precedence must reign supreme. Global climate organizing orbits the frontline: the indigenous, out front, disproportionately bear the brunt of “shocks” to the system caused by climate chaos. In the aftereffects, their domains are not a tabula rasa for the West. Locals need to drive the global urban planning conversation; they are to define their post-transition modes of life and labor.
The abrasions of the private sector are smoothed by collective commitment to “goodness.” Environmentalists are no longer fey particles in a crowd, but a human ribbon crouched en masse on the boulder-field, marching to make history. A politics of sound bite and short-range gain is under fire; the glare permeates, nowhere a shadow. From our urban-most cores and out toward the jerkwaters, a growing number of people understands that our cities and settlements foster a reflex of wanting and grasping by which to live. This reflex is the purest form of suffocation. It is our poison pill.
True human resilience does not stem from artist’s metaphor or sticking veneers over the same flailing, dam-dig-drill industrial model. In its realization, our kind’s ecology and psychology must legitimize a capacity to endure, adapt and maintain a dynamic stability in the face of uncertain, unruly environments. We need to prepare for new values, habits and expectations – uplift, not show contempt for, our generation’s organizers, the livewires of the millennial environmentalism who are ensuring a just transition. Significant estrangement and repentance to “enmesh” us by midcentury, what we will gain is so much more than what we will give up – “out of her own goodness.”
(03/19/15 12:04am)
Terracotta hexagons tessellate the floors at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington D.C., where I intern. Soles pat, dignified, across them as agents flood in and out of the aisles office to office, a loose collared dance. My desk, flush with the copier, features an Escher print, a portrait of my parents and soft stones I collected on California’s coast. I doze watching swarms of foot traffic in the corridor, which evokes a Southwest terminal moments after deplaning. One of the pebbles warms in my fist.
The internship started Monday, but my mentor is out West for the next two weeks. I do not have a badge for building clearance yet – they say two weeks, though the office veterans add six – and my computer setup has been tortoise-pace. I am the youngest in the building, probably on the whole block.
I am here in search of meaningful work. Two years into college and back from the honeymoon, disenchantment set in. The outcomes for my Middlebury 60-hour work week were letters and numbers, not social reform or justice. In the age of the climate refugee and Black Lives Matter, thousands were sounding the alarm, and meanwhile, I was unresponsive, a bovine bumming around greens under snow, spouting facts like broadsheet and nightly holed up in a dusty inglenook of Axinn.
Last fall, I met with Dean Hanson, asked for temporary leave and so started my gap semester, a season released from routine, hypothetical coursework and doused in rough-and-tumble “real” life. I was interested in enhancing lives, not proceeding with mine.
My time away did, however, start inward at a Buddhist monastery in the orchards north of Escondido, California. I lived under the rules and regimes of practicing monks of the olden Thai forest tradition. As a layman for one month, I attended morning and evening chants, prepared meals, swept paths and hiked to the groves down in the foothills to collect fruits – avocadoes, oranges, kumquats – to trade in town. The experience nursed my inner self. I read, wrote and meditated insatiably. I found sustentative calm, millennia-old wellsprings of wisdom, and more distilled notions of what I hope to accomplish this year, decade and century.
Days after leaving Metta Forest, I was back East, attending the weekly roundtable brief for EPA’s Climate-Ready Water Utilities (CRWU) Initiative, the office in which I now sit. CRWU is a program within the Water Securities Division that develops climate change risk assessment tools and strategies for water utility infrastructure operators. Picture an extreme weather remediation panel, though specific to the water sector, scaled nationwide and tailored by U.S. region. So far as glimpsed by the intern, there seems to be an overwhelming amount of impactful work conducted here. The CRWU Initiative’s efforts directly protect water treatment and transport infrastructure around the country, for decades and for millions.
In the thick of my semester away from Middlebury, I see clearer. Not in the sense of waning astigmatism or wearing prescription lenses, but in the sense of understanding. I can hear a procession of gridiron coming-together: intelligibility. So inexorable are our bounds today from college to employment that my generation’s youths – particularly, those of the nation’s college elite – are losing sight of themselves. College-age millennials are wearing blinders, and as I have come to discover, it has meant stepping away from schoolwork to lower them, take another look and gain finer resolution. That mental image we sustain of how we are supposed to go through our education should not, and cannot, blind us. College “conditioning” can wait. It is time to know – precisely and concisely – what we are doing in college in the first place. As the globe gains weight, its temperature rises slowly and sprawl persists on the scale of continents, I cannot proceed listlessly, without genuine purpose or anchorage. In the light of the heat, this is my time to reassess. I welcome you to join me.
What our Connected Generation understands and a warmed world portends do not agree. There is a mountain range of evidence without manifesto and we are complacent, afraid to ask fresh or difficult questions – to look diagnostically at the old – because we do not want to see what we will find. Do not trivialize the importance of introspection. Evaluate and reevaluate. Critically review the armature of your plan. Consider time away, and take a closer look: it is the only way to create a climate tolerant of and furnished for reform. The view is not all bad.
(09/24/14 8:36pm)
Over 160 energized Middlebury students, alumni and faculty descended upon the streets of New York on Sunday, joining 311,000 others at the People’s Climate March, a historic climate rally that wound a three-mile, six-hour course through Manhattan.
Hundreds of thousands of people both in New York City and at over 2,800 sites in 150 countries marched with polychrome floats, banners, pickets, placards, and blow horns, marshaling attention to the looming threat of climate change. More than 1,500 U.S. organizations, including schools, labor organizations, businesses, and faith groups, helped plan the protest, which espoused the tagline, “To change everything, we need everyone.”
The single largest demonstration of the climate movement to date, the march preceded the United Nations Climate Summit on Sept. 23, which was called to order by Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. Dubbed a “political action forum,” the gathering at the U.N. Headquarters in New York will generate a precise framework for forthcoming climate talks in Lima in December and Paris in 2015, during which an international pact on CO2 emissions reductions will be discussed.
“The U.N. has outlined the stakes in the climate fight,” Greta Neubauer ’14.5 said at the march. “Today, people filled the streets and demonstrated that we will accept inaction no longer. The U.N. needs to take serious steps to address the causes of the climate crisis, and it needs to take the lead from the people most impacted. They will lead the path to a just transition.”
The Climate Summit also followed last month’s release of a major report on climate published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report states that human-produced emissions will significantly increase the risk of “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts” to the environment in the decades ahead. These environmental impacts (e.g., flooding, heat waves, reduced grain production, and thawing snowpack in the poles) are likely to escalate unless greenhouse gases are regulated with uniform benchmarks set by national governments, according to the report.
“At this point, the urgency of climate change is well documented, so now, it’s time to act,” said Laura Xiao ’17, who helped lead the organizing team at the College for the march. “The march on Sunday was for the record books, and we’re eager to see how this momentum and excitement will boost the Middlebury Climate Campaign this year.”
Led by Xiao and others in Sunday Night Group (SNG), Middlebury’s enduring environmental activism umbrella campaign, began planning for the march over the summer.
“We were on conference calls in mid-July, already thinking about buses, vans, lodging, recruitment, fundraising, and grant writing for the march,” Xiao said. “First, we focused our efforts on the College’s newest students, the members of the Class of 2018.”
Michael Shrader ’18 from Bristol, Va. was one of the first to reach out about interest in the march and recruitment at the College. “Since my interests lie primarily in environmentalism and politics, I was ready to get started as soon as I made it to campus,” Shrader said. “The final result in New York was greater than anyone could have anticipated, and the voice of the climate movement was surely heard.”
Boston-area resident Ethan Reilly ’17, who joined Shrader and the rest of the Middlebury contingent at the march Sunday, was inspired by the throngs of marchers snaking through the city.
“The feeling of solidarity was just unbelievable,” Reilly said. “Seeing a crowd so large and diverse affirmed for me that anthropogenic climate change is an issue that people everywhere take very seriously. I am confident the march sent a resounding message to the U.N. going into the summit Tuesday.”
Moving into the third week of classes, students of SNG are hopeful that those who brought the noise in Manhattan will channel their enthusiasm through initiatives back on campus. “This is one of the most exciting moments in the climate movement in my four years here,” Hannah Bristol ’14.5 said. “The march was beautiful and showed how diverse and intersectional this movement is. I can’t wait to see how that energy transfers back to campus.”