Listen: Climate Education Is a New Kind of Liberal Arts

As climate disasters become more frequent and severe, more institutions are investing in programs to address environmental changes and prepare students to engage in green careers.

Clark University plans to launch its School of Climate, Environment and Society this fall, institutionalizing the university’s commitment to climate action and investing in interdisciplinary learning for students interested in the work of sustainability.

In this episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Lou Leonard, the inaugural dean of Clark’s School of Climate, Environment and Society, about the need for this new school and how such education can tackle climate anxiety in young people.

An edited version of the podcast transcript appears below.

Inside Higher Ed: Can you talk a little bit about the new school? How does it tie into institutional priorities?

Clark University

Leo Leonard: The school officially launches next fall. We’ll have our first incoming cohorts for some new degree programs that are specifically linked to the starting of the school, and so we’ll have an undergraduate major in climate, environment [and] society, and a new professionally oriented master’s degree in climate, environment and society.

But the school really is coming together from a place of long-standing commitment and expertise within Clark on these topics. The school will include a core set of departments that have existed for a long time. In fact, one of them is the geography department at Clark, which has been around for over 100 years. And then a department called Sustainability and Social Justice, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary next year.

The Economics Department for the university will also be housed in the new school, which I think is exciting, because it’s one of these fields that is so significant and important for the way we think about, address, understand and really create climate solutions. But it’s a department that, in many universities, would say, “Oh, well, that can’t be in a school of climate, environment and society, because economics is bigger than that.” I think [Clark’s] decision is emblematic of a bigger decision by the university, which is to really go all in on climate action and on the issues that are under this umbrella of climate, environment and society, the way climate change and environmental degradation intersect with human society.

In that sense, it’s not just the launching of a new school. It’s the university saying, “This is one of the things that Clark already does really well. We want to do better, and we want to be known for it in the world.” I think having a school like this demonstrates that the university is making a real, serious commitment to these issues.

Q: I think sometimes sustainability or climate action can be seen as something new or trendy with young people, or a response to things that have happened in the past 20 years. But, as you allude to, some of these departments and majors have existed for 20-plus years. I wonder if you can speak to that element of, not everything within the school is new, but it’s a rehousing and reorganization of programs and majors that are already important to the university.

A: I think that your question applies to this school and the way higher education can think of its role in climate, but it actually also points at the larger question of climate change itself, right?

A lot of times, we think of climate change as something that’s a separate issue. But really what the climate crisis represents, and what issues related to climate impacts—the energy transition, biodiversity conservation—all of these topics existed since before there were humans on this planet, some of them, anyway.

What the layer of climate change brings to these things is often an acceleration of challenges or a way in which we need to think across traditional disciplines when we’re trying to figure out how to respond to some of the challenges that climate change presents for us. Climate is not a wholly new thing in the world or in higher education.

Q: I’m even thinking, like, food systems is something that we traditionally house in a school of agriculture, but there’s definitely climate implications when it comes to that. Or we talked about economics and how business and society functions are completely dependent on climate and the external circumstances that drive those factors.

I also really appreciate the fact that the school includes the “and society,” because there’s that human implication as well, where it’s not just “we’re trying to fix the planet,” but also “we’re trying to impact the world in a more positive way.”

A: That’s right. In some ways, the planet is going to be fine. The planet is a set of geophysical, geochemical processes. And the real question is whether the conditions for stable, predictable human life are going to continue in the same ways that have allowed humans to prosper and to be thinking about leading better and more fulfilling lives.

It’s those conditions that—we’ve been lucky—for the last 20,000 years have been pretty stable, and basically, we’re leaving that period. We’re leaving that period of Goldilocks, stable climate conditions that have allowed human society to focus on other things, including their own prosperity. Now we don’t have the luxury anymore; we have to understand the intersection between human society and what’s changing around us in order to maintain a future where we can prosper and we can live lives of purpose.

Q: Absolutely. That is very scary, though, especially for our young people, who are growing up in a world where this is the reality that they’re facing in their future.

I pulled a few stats. Inside Higher Ed did a survey in 2022 and we found that 81 percent of college students said they were at least somewhat worried about climate change. And then, more recently, Sacred Heart University found more than half of U.S. youth report eco-anxiety, and 74 percent said they agree with the statement “I’m personally worried about climate change.”

When we think about climate, higher education obviously has a role when it comes to resources and research, and helping people understand solutions and the implications of climate change, but also educating young people and helping them prepare for their future and understanding the world around them. I wonder if you can talk about that mission of the school as well as helping students engage in this sort of work.

A: I’m hearing two things here. One is the understandable—and it’s not just something that younger folks are experiencing, but a lot of folks are experiencing—sense of uncertainty, anxiety and fear about what it means to live in a world that’s not as stable in some fundamental ways as what we’re used to.

And the other is “How do we still find purpose, agency and careers that are meaningful for us in that kind of world?”

So if we take the first part of that, I think it is fundamental that we understand and provide students with the tools to address the kind of social, emotional dimensions of the climate crisis present to us. And if you’re going to have a school that focuses on these topics and brings an interdisciplinary perspective to it—which is what the school aspires to do—then that has to include ways for students to name, hold and manage the emotional sides of this.

I think Clark’s really lucky. Clark University is very well-known for its psychology program—Sigmund Freud gave his only lectures in the United States at Clark … Bringing that sort of perspective to the Clark education is something we’ve done forever, and I think a really important part of what the school does going forward is being intentional about that.

But I think the second part of your question is related to the first, which is, can we find a sense of purpose, a sense of agency, a sense of “I have a way to contribute to this”? You know, action metabolizes anxiety, and a sense of purpose allows us to have a ballast during times that are shaky around us—and, quite frankly, the world is shaky right now. So for those people that particularly—and you said, the number is pretty high—care about these issues, building a set of skills competencies, confidence that you can be part of the response going forward … I think that is critical to your emotional well-being in these changing times.

Q: I’ve been reading [Jonathan Haidt’s] The Anxious Generation, and it talks a lot about how social media can be a portal to too much information, where students are always seeing each other and always hearing from each other.

I think, in the same way, climate information can be really overwhelming, where it’s like, “Oh my gosh, the polar bears are dying; what am I supposed to do about it in my dorm room at Clark University?” But there’s also an element of “OK, now I know about it and I get to be equipped with that information.”

I think helping students understand the problems and contribute to solving them, but also like you said, making sure that they are mentally well and capable of handling what that looks like and having that sense of advocacy for themselves and the world around them—that’s a really tough tension for students to live between.

A: The difference between going on to the virtual world, whether it’s social media or the internet more broadly, it’s like you’re putting yourself in front of a fire hose or this waterfall that feels uncontrollable related to the information that’s flying at you.

Those places—social media, the internet in general—do not provide you a way to manage that information flow. But a good education, one that’s grounded in different ways to understand and make sense of the complexity of the world, that is the role a good education, particularly the role that an undergraduate education, has traditionally played. That’s what we do.

So if that’s true, and if the liberal arts education was always supposed to provide that equipment for students to then enter the world with more confidence in understanding it and therefore being able to navigate it in all of its complexity, then, in some ways, the degrees and the programs under the School of Climate, Environment and Society at Clark being interdisciplinary, being experiential, are a kind of a new liberal arts in a way.

It’s a specialized set of equipment that allows you to understand that torrent of information, particularly about climate, environment and its relationship to society. I think it’s in some ways the opposite of just going on social media. It’s being intentional about creating those filters, that equipment, that way to understand and see the world that you need to avoid feeling overwhelmed. It’s not that we’re never going to— We’re still going to feel overwhelmed at times, right? I’ve been in this work my entire life. I’m now in my 50s. I still feel overwhelmed by it at times. That part doesn’t go away. It’s not that it goes away; we just become more able to manage it while we’re contributing to the change that needs to happen.

Q: You’ve mentioned a few times now the interdisciplinary lens of the world. Can you talk about that and the experiential elements, both getting students that hands-on experience but also transcending the traditional majors and disciplines to help students be able to grapple with this issue from a lot of different angles?

A: I’m glad that you paired interdisciplinary with experiential, because those two things need to go together from a pedagogical standpoint, from a learning-how-we-do-the-learning standpoint.

Interdisciplinarity, or transdisciplinarity, says that the world is really complex, and, in fact, some of what has led to the slow and, at best, incomplete—and some would say, woefully inadequate—response to the climate crisis and the even longer biodiversity crisis and the related impacts to communities, environmental justice crisis, is because we haven’t adequately been able to look across those different ways in which to understand the world. Whether it’s economic, physical sciences … policy and governance, the role that the private sector plays, or technology and the issues there.

That’s why, five years ago now, the National Academies of Sciences did a review of education related to sustainability and said, “What is the right formula for pulling together programs that meet this complex need, give students equipment to deal with this complexity and to then contribute to new ways of developing solutions or working across these traditional aspects of society, so we can see new ways to unlock progress on climate change?”

That combination [of interdisciplinary and experiential] is important, because transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary work can be conceptual until you actually get into an applied setting, until you actually start doing projects. Either research projects that are especially designed to be cross- or interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, or you get out into the working world through an internship, through a class project. At Clark we have something called the Global Learning Collaboratives, these places where students can go and engage in projects in other countries, where their work in the classroom starts to make sense, because they’re now doing it in an experiential way, in an applied way.

You need both, otherwise you get lost. It becomes very conceptual. Or if you’re just doing applied work, you don’t have any framework to see how these different aspects or the way the world gets in the way of some of these applied challenges, then you’re not able to do things differently. So you need both.

Q: Another really important facet of climate and society and understanding how sustainability impacts communities is doing community-based learning or service-based learning. How are you considering ways to put students out in the world and engage with communities that are being directly impacted by climate change?

A: There’s a lot that we already have at Clark that’s being brought together under the umbrella of the new school that’s related to this. I spoke a second ago about the Global Learning Collaboratives. This is something that emerged from one of the units that’s going to be part of the new school, and we’re going to build on it going forward. We have projects in Bangladesh and Ethiopia, in Mexico, but also in Worcester [Mass.], in our backyard, in the community that Clark has lived in for almost 150 years.

It is really important that that is what experiential and applied work is: It’s work in communities or with institutions or businesses or others. But I think the community part that you’re pointing out is important to talk about in its own special way, as well as being a part of a broader way to do experiential learning. Because I think, for too long, higher education has—there’s always been exceptions—but I think for too long, too much of the sort of, like, engagement or research that higher ed has done is seeing communities as a subject or a set of data or problems that we in higher education want to understand and bring back into our world and study.

For a long time, we’ve understood that that’s both ethically not appropriate and it doesn’t produce the richest form of learning. The richest form of learning, I think, is co-created. You co-create knowledge. You co-create understanding with communities. When students can be part of that, it actually provides a new way of understanding what it means to be in relationship with communities.

And hopefully that means that students take that forward when they go out into their work, because the same thing could [be applied there]. There’s a similar history within the way nonprofits and advocacy groups engage with communities, or businesses engage with communities. I think if we can model a better way of how to do that within higher ed, then that will have ripple effects into the way students, when they go out into the world, can bring that new approach to their jobs.

Q: I’m glad that you mentioned jobs, because in the same way that students who are interested in federal or research roles right now—which I know there’s an intersection between that and sustainability and climate work—they have a lot of anxiety around this current time and the recent policy changes that we’ve seen, or different priorities from this current administration.

I wonder if you can touch just briefly on how policy is reshaping climate [work] or how policy is reshaping the conversations around climate and the school and the work that you’re all doing helping students think about careers, given the fact that we are seeing a different set of priorities than we did under the previous administration.

A: I’ve been in the environmental sustainability field my whole career. So that’s over 30 years, and I’ve been really working on climate for almost 20. I think sometimes it’s like, “Oh, jeez, old guy,” but there is at least one benefit to being in this work for a long time: You see the peaks and valleys. You see the way these fundamental issues of society transform and change—which is happening no matter what.

The number of people who now say climate change is not happening is much lower than it was 20 years ago, 10 years ago. Politics affects that to some degree, on the margins, but if you look at the trend line, that is less and less the debate, and that was not the case 20 years ago, I’ll tell you that.

In that sense, we’re seeing kind of a positive trend line of understanding that stuff is happening, so society is going to transform, whether we like it or not, because the conditions around us are changing. The question is, how do we respond? I think again, the trend line is, if we step back and look—and I don’t think this is going to change going forward—the need to address this, and the understanding of the need to address this is only going to maintain a positive trend line. Even if, right now, it seems like certain aspects of the climate response have got caught up in the political maw or munching, kind of snarly, world of politics, we shouldn’t be confused and think that that means that these issues are going to go away.

They present a new set of challenges for us, which we should not ignore, either, which is why we need to really think hard about how to create spaces for learning and conversation around these topics that feels less politically charged—not because we want to agree or disagree with a certain political view on these issues, but so that we can bring more people into the conversation. So that we don’t lose time that we desperately need and can’t afford to lose to make progress on these issues.

It’s definitely a challenge for us. It does not, in my view, at all represent a long-term change in the trend. I think that’s why those who care about these issues, whether you’re at the stage of trying to choose an undergraduate program or a grad program, or you’re not in the market for higher ed at all, I would not be discouraged to the point where you change something that feels meaningful to you, that feels like part of your purpose, because we need to listen to that voice, and these issues are going to have growing amounts of room for people to contribute going forward.

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