Tackling "the Challenge of Our Century"

Forging a career to save our environment and to promote climate justice is to lead a life of purpose. Middlebury professor Jonathan Isham delivered that message during a Circle Talk on Tuesday, April 24, urging students to aggressively tackle climate change to protect all people—especially the world’s most vulnerable populations—from its harm.

“To take on climate justice is to play a role in the challenge of our century,” he told Groton students.

Professor Isham shared stories of several entrepreneurs who are making a difference (and in some cases, a fortune) with green initiatives: Nicole Poindexter, founder of Black Star Energy, which addresses climate justice by bringing microgrids to Ghana; Billy Parish and Wahleah Johns, whose company, Mosaic, provides financing for solar panels; Alloysius Attah, who is bringing digital technology (and drone-collected data) to farmers through Farmerline; and Pier LaFarge, who founded SparkFund to help institutions finance change toward renewable energy.

“These folks are pursuing climate justice,” Prof. Isham said. “I hope some of you see yourselves in them.”

Prof. Isham had opened his talk by asking: would you rather live in 1884, when Groton School was founded, or today? He followed up with various statistics—on poverty, life expectancy, literacy, and more—that made the 1800s look dismal indeed.

With one statistic, however, the social entrepreneurship expert cast a pall on our collective future: carbon dioxide emissions per capita, as well as its comparison to a nation’s Gross Domestic Product. Both have risen in tandem, along with average temperatures, which have climbed precipitously since about 1980.

“We’ve never seen anything like this on the planet,” he said, comparing runaway use of fossil fuels in developed countries with a person who racks up debt on a credit card with no plans to pay it off.

Prof. Isham recalled that in the late 1990s, experts were predicting the effects of climate change that we are seeing today, but estimated that they would begin at the end of this century. “Boy were we wrong!” he said.

There is good news, however—news he said he could not have shared even five years ago: the cost of renewable energy is dropping, and solar energy is now cost-effective. Producing energy with wind and solar costs much less than producing it with coal, he said, urging students to “accelerate this wonderful trend toward renewables.”

Dr. Isham, whose classes at Middlebury College cover topics such as environmental policy, environmental economics, and social change, likened the coming renewable energy “revolution” to the civil rights movement. He quoted Diane Nash, a civil rights activist and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who has said, according to Dr. Isham, “When we were doing all that work for justice, we didn’t know you, but we loved you.”

The professor carries her message. “That idea is what I’m teaching now,” he said. “…to really transform society, we need to go back to the first principles of how people interact. That’s love.”

A life dedicated to efforts to improve climate change, he said, “is to be reminded of what love is. You’re doing it in the name of people you don’t know.”

“That,” he concluded, “is a pretty good way to have a life of meaning and purpose.”
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