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Description
In November 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) issued a report entitled "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity." Written by UCS Chair Henry Kendall and signed by 1,700 of the world's leading scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates in the sciences, the report's admonition was conveyed in the strongest terms:
Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about. (1)
As Ross Gelbspan has documented, warnings issued by the UCS and similar groups were met with a well-funded and orchestrated corporate campaign of fake science, scaremongering, and political smearing that effectively killed off efforts to address human beings' collision course with the planet's natural limits. (2) Nine years after the UCS issued its stark alarm, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) unequivocally confirmed UCS claims concerning the unsustainability of contemporary industrial civilization's growing levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon emissions have continued to rise notwithstanding both the IPCC's report and the "World Scientists' Warning." The world, and, in particular, wealthy industrialized nations such as the United States, must reverse course dramatically if cataclysmic environmental collapse is to be avoided. Measures such as the Kyoto Protocol (1997), which essentially seek to cap emissions at unsustainable levels, fail to address the coming crisis adequately. Indeed, recent estimates conclude that developed countries will have to cut their emissions by at least 70 percent over the next thirty years if temperatures are to be kept from rising above the danger point of two degrees centigrade in excess of pre-industrial levels. (3) This is clearly a massive task, one that will require a dramatic reorientation of both the material and ideological underpinnings of developed and industrializing countries.
As those responsible for training the scientists, entrepreneurs, and opinion-makers of tomorrow, educators in general and institutions of higher learning in particular have a critical role to play in this race to save the planet for habitation by human beings and other species. Despite its important role as our society's primary site of credentialization and putative moral pillar of our culture, academia has been disappointingly lethargic and tepid in its response to the global climate crisis. As James Gustave Speth lamented recently, in spite of the gravity of climate change, "there is no march on Washington; students are not in the streets; consumers are not rejecting destructive lifestyles; Congress is not passing far-reaching legislation ..." (4) Over the last several years, however, a student environmental movement has grown up that promises to inject a heightened sense of urgency into academia's discussion of environmental issues and thereby to fuel a much-needed renaissance of the environmental movement in the United States. (5) This essay profiles several of the most prominent student environmental initiatives of recent years, highlighting the organizing success of groups such as Energy Action and the California Student Sustainability Coalition while also interrogating the limits of their campaigns. Despite their shortcomings, grassroots student initiatives are one of the most hopeful developments during a period when global climate change, resource wars, and the many other forms of contemporary ecological degradation that are robbing young people of their collective future are being challenged by all too few voices.
Events such as the melting of the polar ice cap and the destruction wrought by... |
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