Civic Environmental Engagement

In the two years I’ve been writing this column, I’ve tried to minimize the chances that it might come off as just a repository for spewed sermons, and tried to focus more on the reporting responsibilities associated with editorial work. However, this is my last column in this wonderful paper, and I’ll be graduating soon; if I said I didn’t feel entitled to some room to wax twenty-something, I wouldn’t quite be speaking frankly. It troubles me that lately I feel I’ve been neglecting the ES side of me.

I transferred to Middlebury for the Environmental Studies program. I didn’t know this place existed until I read a book by Schumann Distinguished Scholar Bill McKibben for a course at another institution. I came here thinking I wanted to do environmental law, and that’s not the case anymore. I’ve spent both my summers in Middlebury working in the Sustainability Integration Office, and most of my closest friends here are ES majors. Yet for a lot of this semester, I had a hard time identifying as an Environmental Studies student at Middlebury even though this was the most ES-heavy semester I’ve had in three years here. The think the problem was preoccupation with another part of my life — one I had always seen as a compliment to my ES work, but had come to take over pretty much most of my time and energy.

There came a point however, where I came to realize that I had lost sight of what had meant most to me about my involvement with the ES program here and what brought me to Middlebury: the community. If there’s one thing that might count as something like the backbone of this school’s character, it’s our Environmental Studies program, and that’s precisely because of the extent to which the people who constituted to the good of community, and service to it. There’s a sense in which I think it’s simply the nature of the discipline — being concerned for the environment at least in some minimal way entails being concerned for something or someone outside the self. But the fact that Hillcrest is home to an ES program and not an ES department might at least lend support to an alternative explanation; does the interdisciplinarity give a way to argue that it could be the simple strength of our own community here that makes it dynamic? There’s probably some truth in both.

I’ve come to learn quite a bit about the world from the ES path I took — frustration usually only came from learning something about the way in which we’ve struggled to find solutions to environmental problems, or when decision-making fails. But the program succeeds in all the ways it does because it’s internalized its mission, to offer practical knowledge used to find solutions to practical problems. I don’t mean to say I took that for granted in some of my time here, but it often wasn’t always at the forefront of my own vision. Every now and then, I think we forget about how pressing of a matter it is that those actions get fixed. I know I have.

The whole point of a liberal arts education with a focus on the environment is to see the cause and effects of our actions, and how those actions can do less harm or mitigate any bit of it or maybe even do some good. Middlebury’s got some big decisions to make judgment calls on in the coming years. Whether it’s divestment, local food, local hydrocarbons, carbon neutrality or whatever other new problems the College finds itself in two, three, four, five years from now, it will have an opportunity to make a decision that can do some good for some community somewhere. I won’t have the chance to spend any more time working on solutions to these specific problems, but maybe there’s the chance out there in the real world to affect some real structural, institutional change (or maybe I’ll just have my wallet hold on to potential donations). In any case, I know its easy for an entity to get caught up in its own workings, but sometimes the community can clear some questions up for the self.

And sometimes, the commands the community makes force some more good out us. The College would do well to look to the people who care the most about that community for advice every now and then. The most beautiful part about this place is its ability to continually attract so many passionate young individuals committed to making change in the world. There’s little doubt in my mind that there will always be members of this community to do all it whatever it may take to make that happen — they’ll certainly have people to learn from.