My Favorite Lecture: Coming of Age at the End of the World

My Favorite Lecture from KHSU

Imagine you’re an environmental studies professor. Every semester you're faced with a roomful of idealistic students. You then have to present to them the grim forecast that climate scientists expect. These students may have known the planet faces challenges - but this is bad. And that, says Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray , is where things might go sideways. "They become fatalists in the face of no easy solutions," says the environmental studies professor. "We turn them into sad, hopeless, powerless students who can barely come to class, much less graduate and save the world." So how do you teach climate change without inducing so much eco-grief that your students are immobilized? "We don't take students' emotional engagement with the material seriously enough, and that's my proposal to you today," she told a standing-room only audience at the Plaza View Room in Arcata, California. And her classroom agrees. One of Ray's students wrote, "These are real-world issues, that trigger real-world