“Watching these incremental but persistent increases in CO2 year-to-year is much like watching a train barrel down the track towards you in slow motion. It’s terrifying,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison climate scientist Andrea Dutton. “If we stay on the track with a plan to jump out of the way at the last minute, we may die of heat stroke out on the tracks before it even gets to us.”
from “Sky High: Carbon dioxide levels in air spike past milestone” by Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer, 6/3/22 (source KATU.com)
We are creatures of habit. We have ways of being in the world, ways that we want to be in the world, and ways that we expect the world to be so that we can be and do the things we want. Nearly everyone operates on this basis. With this foundation, it should come as no surprise when I say we find it extraordinarily hard to change. This is true whether we are trying to change our ways of being, of wanting, or of expecting the world to be. And it is especially true if the change appears to involve a loss of some sort. Even when confronted with something as potentially catastrophic as climate change, we tend to stand on the track as long as we can, telling ourselves, “The train isn’t here yet. Right now I can enjoy the view. Later, when it goes close, I’ll jump. But only if I have to. Maybe someone on the train will see me and stop the train first.”
Why is change so difficult? Does my recognition of the problem make it any easier for me to change my own habits? And have I had any success inspiring others to change theirs? Here are two stories for your consideration.
A personal story. Right now, it’s Saturday afternoon. I started my day with a cup of tea, Earl Grey + Lavender, a longtime personal favorite. It seems like a harmless habit, but I should add that a few years ago my doctor recommended that I reduce my caffeine intake. “Doc,” I replied, “I’m not a coffee drinker. I drink 3 cups of tea a day, and tea has very little caffeine.” He persisted, “Based on test results and what you have told me, you need more sleep, less stress, and less caffeine.” So I grudgingly limited myself to one cup of semi-decaffeinated Earl Grey+ and drank green tea for the other 2 of my 3 daily cups. But I did not give up tea.
I can’t easily explain why this habit is so hard to break. I know I am not alone. But the funny thing is, aside from some personal snootiness about tea flavors, I don’t know that much about tea. I think my tea leaves, whether black or green, come to me from somewhere in Asia (China? Japan? India?). They travel halfway around the world before they steep in my tea cup. What a remarkable world that can bring me tea from ten thousand miles away without any real understanding on my part! I doubt that I will ever give up drinking tea until a doctor forces me to do so. Moving on…
A college story. Today is also just four days before the Summer Solstice, that special day each year when the sun reaches its highest point above the Portland horizon and doesn’t set until well after 9 p.m.. For several years I have been walking or bicycling to a spot where I can watch the solstice sun set in the northwestern sky, and that is not my only annual ritual. My work schedule for the past 30+ years has also been dictated by our planet’s orbit around the Sun. Students always appeared on campus in late August when the days were still fairly long and warm. Classes would begin in summer-like weather, but the Sun’s path would inevitably move lower and lower in the sky, while the days became shorter, colder, and wetter. By the time Winter Break arrived, the Sun’s path was so low, and clouds were so abundant, that only a rare sunbeam would touch my eyes. But, eventually the days would grow longer again, seniors would defend their theses and graduate, and summer would return.
The timing of these annual cycles of students and classes, and their connection to, one could even say their “dependence” on, the Sun’s ever-changing path across the sky, are no accident. The annual cycle has repeated itself over 100 times in the life of Reed College. And, I don’t think I exaggerate when I say that working in higher education begins to feel like part of the planet’s natural cycle. Our work follows the rhythm of the Sun and we expect it will continue like this for a long time to come.
Nevertheless, things do change. Early in my career when I met Reed alumni who had attended the college back in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, most of them revealed that they had grown up in Oregon! This always amazed me. During during my 30+ years at the college, I met only a small number of Oregonian students (a typical entering class contains only 20-30 Oregonians). Reed College attracted students from all across the nation, and from all parts of the world.
But some changes are easy for a college to make, and others are not. In 2011 the college’s Sustainability committee was looking at data regarding the college’s carbon footprint. We mainly focused on the standard items, how much electricity and fossil fuel were consumed by college operations, and how to reduce that. However, some outside reading had gotten me thinking about another part of the college’s footprint: travel. Not just commuting to work (although that would be included), but all forms of travel financially supported by the college. With that in mind, I asked the college’s Institutional Research office if they could provide me with any information about college-related travel that fell outside the daily commute, and the answer they gave me blew my mind. It turned out that travel had never been looked at this way before, and it was by far the largest part of the college’s carbon footprint.
What kind of “travel” could swamp all of the other contributions to the college’s carbon footprint? There is no simple answer. If we put commuting to work to one side, the other forms of college-support “travel” included such diverse things as faculty traveling to do research and attend conferences. admissions staff traveling to meet potential students, and students traveling between their family’s homes and Portland. The college might not pay for every trip, but it set aside funds to support travel in all of the above categories. To take one category: student travel was built into the college’s calculation of the student’s financial need, and it was assumed that a student would make at least 4 trips between home and college each year: home to college in August, college to home in December, home to college in January, and college to home again in May.
Because so many more students traveled (mostly at their own expense, I imagine) than did faculty or staff, I asked Institutional Research to focus on that. This still left us with many mysteries. No one kept track of all of student trips. Where did students go? What forms of transportation did they use? No one knew.
So we started small. Institutional Research took the data it could get easily, the zip code of Reed College and the home zip codes of our “domestic” 2008-2009 students and plugged all these zip codes into an online distance calculator. When they added up total “straight line” distances between Reed and the students’ home zip codes, the total came to 1,564,748.7 miles. Mind you, this would be the distance traveled by these students if they made just one trip per year and traveled in a perfectly straight line from home to Portland, but the college actually (and reasonably) expected each students to make 4 trips. Assuming 4 trips, the total travel distance for our “domestic” students rose to 6,258,994.8 miles. And this was only part of the college’s non-commuting “travel” footprint. Adding in college-supported travel by international students, faculty, and staff, would make the travel footprint even larger. And, if we also included the miles traveled by visitors – potential students, seminar speakers, family members – travel’s footprint would be larger still. Travel has become an integral part of our operations. It is been built into our annual cycle. And it has dominated the college’s carbon footprint for many years.
At this point, the Sustainability committee found itself stuck. The information about the magnitude of “domestic” student travel, and the fact that this was an underestimate of the total travel footprint, was shared with the powers-that-be, but it was never shared with the larger college community. To the best of my knowledge, the committee never received a response about this aspect of college operations, and 11 years later it is hard to see if anything has been done to reduce travel’s contribution to the college’s carbon footprint.
As the AP Science article says, CO2 levels in the atmosphere are higher than ever, and climate scientists are asking, when will people act to prevent a potential climate catastrophe? Will we continue standing on the railroad tracks sipping tea and watching planes fly overhead because that is what we have become used to doing? Or will we take up the challenge of change, and make the uncomfortable, but necessary, changes in our ways of being, our wants, and our expectations, that will be needed if we are to avoid the worst aspects of climate change?
Climate change is everyone’s problem.
