Episode One
In this first episode of Season 1 of CICE: The Podcast, Noa Urbach, a masters student in the International Educational Development program at Teachers College, Columbia University, looks at the past, present, and future of climate activism in higher education institutions. Through interviews with Professor Michael Gerrard and Adjunct Professor Christina Torres, and her own involvement in on-campus climate action, Noa compares climate activism through the three lenses of education, law, and ecology.
Host, co-producer: Noa Urbach
Co-producer: Tracie Jarrard
Media outreach and design: Nicole Ricci
Original music for CICE: The Podcast: Michael Bellamy
A special thanks to the entire CICE: The Podcast team who made this season possible.
CICE: The Podcast is part of Current Issues in Comparative Education, an open-access journal in the field of comparative education. CICE is the oldest open student-led journal in the field. All views expressed in this episode are those of the speakers and do not reflect the views of Teachers College or Columbia University.
Get Involved:
Host:
Noa Urbach is a social entrepreneur, mother of Alex and wife of Ido. She is a first year masters student in International Education studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is also the founder of Helpi, a nonprofit micro-volunteering platform, and Pendulum, a creative changency. Forbes 30under30 shortlist for 2020.
Our guests:
Michael Gerrard is the founder and faculty director of the groundbreaking Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and one of the foremost environmental lawyers in the nation. Before joining the Columbia faculty in 2009, he practiced environmental law in New York City for 30 years. He's an advocate, litigator, teacher and scholar who has pioneered cutting edge legal tools and strategies for addressing climate change. He writes and teaches courses on environmental law, climate change law and energy regulation. He was the chair of the Faculty of Columbia University's renowned Earth Institute from 2015 to 2018.
Christina Torres - Linkedin
Christina Torres is a doctoral student in the science education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She's a 2020 2022 Zankel fellow for the Youth at the Center Project, which aims to engage New York City students in climate science and action. She's also co-president of the Sustainability Task Force, a student organization at Teachers College. She's an adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she teaches an ecology and environmental problems course to students that pursue sustainable fashion. Her research interests focus on utilizing local biodiversity to integrate ecology concepts and sustainable thinking into urban classrooms.
Host, co-producer: Noa Urbach
Co-producer: Tracie Jarrard
Media outreach and design: Nicole Ricci
Original music for CICE: The Podcast: Michael Bellamy
A special thanks to the entire CICE: The Podcast team who made this season possible.
CICE: The Podcast is part of Current Issues in Comparative Education, an open-access journal in the field of comparative education. CICE is the oldest open student-led journal in the field. All views expressed in this episode are those of the speakers and do not reflect the views of Teachers College or Columbia University.
Get Involved:
- The Sustainability Task Force petition - sign today!
- Christina - [email protected]
- Noa - [email protected]
- Center for Sustainable Futures at TC
- Columbia University sustainability plan 2030
- The new Columbia Climate School
- Climate Change Enters the Therapy Room - a piece in the NYT
- First Earth Day Columbia Spectator piece by Michael Gerrard
Host:
Noa Urbach is a social entrepreneur, mother of Alex and wife of Ido. She is a first year masters student in International Education studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is also the founder of Helpi, a nonprofit micro-volunteering platform, and Pendulum, a creative changency. Forbes 30under30 shortlist for 2020.
Our guests:
Michael Gerrard is the founder and faculty director of the groundbreaking Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and one of the foremost environmental lawyers in the nation. Before joining the Columbia faculty in 2009, he practiced environmental law in New York City for 30 years. He's an advocate, litigator, teacher and scholar who has pioneered cutting edge legal tools and strategies for addressing climate change. He writes and teaches courses on environmental law, climate change law and energy regulation. He was the chair of the Faculty of Columbia University's renowned Earth Institute from 2015 to 2018.
Christina Torres - Linkedin
Christina Torres is a doctoral student in the science education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She's a 2020 2022 Zankel fellow for the Youth at the Center Project, which aims to engage New York City students in climate science and action. She's also co-president of the Sustainability Task Force, a student organization at Teachers College. She's an adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she teaches an ecology and environmental problems course to students that pursue sustainable fashion. Her research interests focus on utilizing local biodiversity to integrate ecology concepts and sustainable thinking into urban classrooms.
Episode transcription
Noa Urbach [00:00:08]
Hello and welcome to CICE: The Podcast, a student led podcast out of Teachers College, Columbia University. As students of Comparative and International Education, we started this podcast to connect academic research in the field to the current events they inform and explain.
My name is Noa Urbach. I'm a student in the International Educational Development Program, and I will be your host for this episode.
When I first got to Teachers College just a few months ago, I took a class on climate change education, which left a huge impression on me. I'm a pretty pragmatic person, so while I was involved all my life in social and political activism, in that course, I soon realized that none of those fights will really matter if we don't address climate change. Luckily for me, I shared the class with the two co-presidents of the Teachers College Sustainability Task Force, which is a student activism group focused on sustainability and climate change on our campus. Together with other members of this student organization, I actually spent most of my fall semester collecting signatures for a petition that called our leadership to take action on climate change. We also joined thousands of students and youth on the streets, sounding something like this…
I'll get back to the petition and our action on campus a little bit later in this episode. But my involvement with this group got me curious about the history of climate activism in higher education institutions. I really wanted to figure out what works and what doesn't. Colleges and universities have historically been a place of social and political participation. And Columbia University is a part of this tradition. I came across an article in the Columbia Archives from 1970. It was written by a then undergraduate student who was reporting on the first ever Earth Day. This student reporter later became one of the leading climate lawyers in the world and fortunately stayed close to home and is also a climate law professor at Columbia Law School.
Professor Michael Gerrard is my first guest today.
Michael Gerrard [00:02:38]
It's my pleasure to be with you.
Noa Urbach [00:02:39]
So maybe we can start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your work today, especially how did you get involved in environmental work and specifically climate law?
Michael Gerrard [00:02:50]
I grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, which is a town dominated by the petrochemical industry. So I was surrounded by air pollution and water pollution, which got me interested in environmental issues in the first place. I went to Columbia as an undergraduate. I majored in political science and wrote my senior thesis on the politics of air pollution in West Virginia. After I graduated, I worked for an environmental group for a couple of years and decided that the most interesting environmental work was being done by lawyers. So I entered law school to become an environmental lawyer. I then practiced for 30 years with a couple of law firms in New York City. But in 2005, I began working on a book about climate change and the law. It appeared two years later as first book on the subject. But that educated me on the subject, and it also made me extremely concerned about climate change. And I decided to try to find an opportunity to devote myself to climate change and not just general environmental law. The opportunity unexpectedly arose to join the Columbia Law School faculty to teach environmental law, and I was able to start up what's now called the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. So that's now indeed what I spent most of my time on.
Noa Urbach [00:04:13]
Can you say a little bit more about the Sabin Center and what it is all about?
Michael Gerrard [00:04:19]
So the Sabin Center has three principal missions. One is to develop legal techniques to fight climate change. The second is to educate the next generation of lawyers in the use of those techniques. And the third is to develop legal resources that are used by judges and lawyers and advocates and students all around the world.
Noa Urbach [00:04:42]
And all of this wonderful work by you and students and other faculty members perfectly leads me to the next question I wanted to ask you. How do you see the role of higher education institutions in this greater context of the fight against climate change?
Michael Gerrard [00:05:00]
Well, there are many different roles for higher education. Obviously. The first one is to educate our students and many of our students go on and play very important roles in the fight against climate change and doing everything else. So that's a core function. The research that we do that is done in universities is extremely important. Columbia, of course, has the Lamont-Doherty Laboratory, which is the largest collection of climate scientists in the world. They really do path breaking research and are responsible for many of the discoveries that we have or are one reason we know as much as we do about climate change. Throughout the university and in the law school and the business school and the economics department, elsewhere, we have people doing very important research to develop the information and the theories of what's necessary. Additionally, the university itself is a source of greenhouse gas emissions and needs to do what it can to reduce those emissions to reduce its overall environmental impact. I'm heavily involved in that effort. And Columbia is starting up a new school, the climate school, which is going to be focused on research and education and impact on climate change. The Earth Institute is going to sort of morph into the climate school and it will be greatly expanding. So all these efforts of education and research and service and outward impact are all very important parts of what higher education can do and what Columbia specifically is doing.
Noa Urbach [00:06:46]
What about the fossil fuel divestment movement that had also reached Columbia University?
Michael Gerrard [00:06:54]
So the trustees of the university decided that they will not invest any of the endowment in fossil fuel stocks. It turned out that they weren't doing it anyway because these were, for one thing they're bad investments for lots of reasons. So they didn't have to divest. They chose not to buy any more stock. And in that, student activism was extremely important. There was a Sit-In in Low Library a few years ago and then another Sit-In in Butler Library. And that certainly got the attention of the university administration. I'm not saying this was a direct cause and effect, but that certainly highlighted the issue with people's agendas.
Noa Urbach [00:07:45]
Let's maybe turn to one of the roles that you mentioned that higher education institutions have, and that is climate change education. So can you expand a little bit about what the future curriculum of the Climate School is going to be about?
Michael Gerrard [00:08:00]
So several years ago, the university formed a Sustainable Development major for undergraduates, and it emerged as one of the more popular majors. There are now more than 100 students who enroll in that every year. There are several master's programs on the environmental subjects around the university. One of them, the Climate and Society Program, has been around for several years and it is now part of the Climate School. There are plans to develop more master's programs, some of them with a principal focus on the science, some with a principal focus more on sort of management issues and a whole array. There is a Ph.D. program that's been around a while on in connection with the Earth Institute that has mostly focused on economics. But there is a plan to either expand that or develop a new PhD program, and there are going to be more offerings helped spark by the Climate School all around the university.
Noa Urbach [00:09:20]
As you know, as part of my involvement in Teachers College Student organizing for climate action, I came across a piece that you wrote in the Columbia Spectator reporting on the first Earth Day that took place in 1970. And I would love to hear what you have to say about that event. How did it all start?
Michael Gerrard [00:09:39]
Well, of course, I was an undergraduate. I was on the staff of The Spectator. I had an interest in the environment, so they assigned me to cover Earth Day. That was probably the first thing I ever wrote about the environment. But remember that 1970 was the midst of the Vietnam War, and there was an enormous amount of student activism on campus and everywhere, mostly focused on the Vietnam War. There were also a lot of issues about racial justice, and other issues of the environment was not central to the student focus in 1970. The Earth Day event that was held on the Columbia campus was fairly muted. You know, several hundred people came, but I think they were hoping for several thousand. There were some people who thought that this was just a distraction from the much more important fight against the war in Vietnam. So Earth Day itself on a nationwide basis was enormously important and it really triggered a tremendous amount of political activism and launched or was part of the launch of the great decade of environmental law making that we saw. So on a nationwide basis, it was terribly significant. On Columbia, not quite as Columbia campus, not quite as much.
Noa Urbach [00:11:15]
So you mentioned this before. Students were worried about environmental action taking away attention from what was in their minds the main political issue of the time, which was Vietnam. I'm interested in what you think about this depoliticized view of climate action today. How do students perceive climate action today? Is it different than 1970?
Michael Gerrard [00:11:37]
Yes, in the first place in 1970, climate change itself was not on the radar of the public or of students. And it has gotten immensely worse since then. Had we started phasing out of fossil fuels in 1970, we would be in immensely better shape than we are now. Today, unlike in 1970, people see climate change as an existential threat. It has moved much higher in the priority list of just about everyone who cares about these issues. And there is much greater understanding of how intertwined the climate crisis is with so many of our political and economic and social circumstances. So we now have many who see the fight against climate change as an integral part of their efforts to reform all of society, to address economic and racial and social inequities, and to fundamentally change the economic system. So the political tenor of the climate movement is significantly different today than the political tenor of the environmental movement of 1970. There's also immensely more attention paid to the issue of environmental justice, to the issue that low income communities and communities with large numbers of people of color are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards, have little say in the nature of the hazards that they're exposed to. And that that needs to be another core element of the fight against climate change.
Noa Urbach [00:13:25]
Great. I'm glad we got to that question. So to wrap things up, what would you suggest for students and faculty to do today? How can they make the most impact?
Michael Gerrard [00:13:39]
The most important single factor in the nature of U.S. climate law and policy is who's in office at the federal level. And so electing members of Congress and the President who want to act on climate change is extremely important. The states and cities are also very important. We see a division between the red states and blue states in terms of whether they are promoting or impeding action on climate change. So action in electoral politics is extremely important. Right now, if we had two more Democratic senators, things would be immensely different in terms of what could happen. So getting involved in electoral politics is one very important factor. I think that the kinds of scientific research and other research that is done at the university by faculty with a lot of work, by students is also extremely important. We understand the general contours of the causes and impacts of climate change, but we need to know a lot more. We need to be developing additional technologies to fight the issue. We need to develop new policy solutions. So most of the different disciplines in the university can be deployed to fight climate change. I'm not saying everyone, not Sanskrit perhaps, but there are so many things that need to be done and so many different disciplines need to be deployed in the fight against climate change.
Noa Urbach [00:15:18]
Professor Gerrard, it has been a pleasure speaking to you. Thank you very, very much.
Michael Gerrard [00:15:20]
Thank you.
Noa Urbach [00:15:32]
For my next interview, I want to take what I've learned from Professor Gerrard and the work being done at Columbia University and shed some light on what we're trying to do here at Teachers College. So I reached out to Christina Torres, who, together with Lindsay Gehring, are the co-presidents of the Sustainability Task Force, the student organization I joined.
Noa Urbach [00:16:02]
Christina, I’m so happy that you’re with us today.
Christina Torres [00:16:04]
Thank you so much for having me.
Noa Urbach [00:16:06]
So we spoke with climate lawyer and law professor Michael Gerrard, who mentioned the need for climate change to become a core aspect across disciplines in higher education institutions. And you are a perfect example of this as you have brought discussions and research on sustainability to FIT in your course on ecology and environmental problems in fashion. So can you start by telling us a little bit more about this course? How is climate change relevant to fashion students?
Christina Torres [00:16:36]
I wasn't thinking about the transdisciplinary nature of the movement before I got to FIT, and I realized climate change transcends so many fields, including fashion. We can't think of fashion without thinking about it being one of the major polluters of the world, not just with emission, but all the fast fashion ending up in landfills. What makes this class really unique is we're using ecology as a lens to look at environmental problems. What's really interesting is that it's a debate style course. So throughout the semester, students are using what they're learning about ecology and about environmental problems and connecting that to their major and their disciplines and fields in fashion. So working at FIT really gave me this perspective of how we can really integrate climate and sustainable thinking into all fields because it's not just fashion.
Noa Urbach [00:17:32]
I think it's so important that we remember that we are also, as higher education institutions, preparing these people for their future industries, which will inevitably be very much affected by the climate change and all of its effects. And so maybe you can tell us, how did you get involved in environmental research in the first place?
Christina Torres [00:17:54]
So I have always been a science kid. I have been like essentially living at the American Museum of Natural History ever since I was a child. Science was always in the plan. So entering college at the City College of New York, I just assumed that you major in a science and then you go to medical school because what else do you do with a science degree? I stumbled upon Dr. Amy Berkov, who's a tropical biologist, and she has a partnership with the American Museum of Natural History. So it felt like a no brainer — Wow, wouldn't it be cool to work with someone who does research at the place that I love the most? Through doing this work as an undergraduate student and then a master's student, I started to realize that I really loved the field work and I really loved doing stuff like this, talking about the science. I didn't necessarily love the bench work, so it really forced me to completely reevaluate what I wanted to do in the future, which brought me to the startup world for a little while, looking at science communication and how we can impact how everyday people interact with science. It also then brought me to FIT through that teaching opportunity, which is how I eventually got to TC to look at science education.
Noa Urbach [00:19:13]
So tell us a little bit about your studies at Teachers College and specifically your work in the Sustainability Task Force, which I'm also part of. What is it that this organization is doing and trying to accomplish at Teachers College?
Christina Torres [00:19:26]
So at STF, at the Sustainability Task Force, we're looking to grow a sustainable culture at Teachers College. And I joined the club when I started at Teachers College in fall 2020. In the first year of the club, this is also during the pandemic, we did some virtual events, we did book club events. But going into the 2021 —2022 academic year, we started to really rethink what is STF's role on Teachers College campus? And a lot of these conversations started in Dr. Oren Pizmony-Levy’s class for education and sustainable development, which had a very heavy climate change education focus. So me and Lindsay Gehring, who is my co-president, Noa, Ye, and Suzy and Nick and all of these fantastic people that make up what has been the action oriented lens of STF worked together the entirety of Fall 2021 to figure out how can we make teachers college a more sustainable place? And we created a petition with three major goals: one around divestment from fossil fuels and private prisons. One around education and literacy. Like going back to your first question, how do we get climate change and sustainability into every discipline at Teachers College. and our third demand, our third goal had to do with green infrastructure, bringing the infrastructure on Teachers College campus to be green infrastructure. So we've been working towards these goals since the petition. We've been able to talk with the TC president, provost and an entire meeting of the faculty on these demands. And we're really excited to say that we're finally making actionable steps forward to make TC a more sustainable place.
Noa Urbach [00:21:23]
And Christina, maybe if you can expand a little bit about all three parts of this petition and what STF is trying to accomplish. First, the divestment portion. What does it mean to divest and how is Teachers College different from Columbia University in that? How is climate change related to the three topics that Teachers College is engaged with: education, health and psychology? And lastly, the third part of our petition - green infrastructure - again, how is it different or separate from the Columbia greater context?
Christina Torres [00:22:00]
Great. So I'll start with Divestment. Teachers College has a separate endowment from Columbia University proper, and the lens that we take to how we view sustainability is that all systems that are unfair to certain groups of individuals are by definition unsustainable. So using our endowment as a political statement, which is why we are demanding the divestment of this endowment from the fossil fuel industry and also private prisons. We view this as a really important step forward in cross — movement support, because while climate change and sustainability are transdisciplinary, it also transcends movements. We hope to do something similar to what Columbia University has done, where there is a student board where students actually work to understand how the endowment is invested and they have a say in that investment. To our second demand: literacy and awareness. We know that climate change and sustainability will impact education, psychology and health. We should be working towards preparing students for the future of their fields. From an education perspective, we need to prepare all students — this is not just K-12, not just higher education, but this is also informal learning — for understanding how climate change is going to impact their careers and their daily lives. Making More transdisciplinary content in K-12. This is connecting mathematics with science, with history, with literacy through climate change, which will not only help students understand both climate and the movement, but I believe would create stronger students that are better prepared to see the connections between these classes that they're already in. We also need to understand how it's impacting health and psychology. The climate anxiety is real. There is an excellent piece that just came out in the New York Times about a month ago talking about climate anxiety and how psychology graduate institutions are not currently preparing the next generation of these health care professionals to talk about climate change and climate anxiety with their patients. As the Graduate School of Education, Psychology and Health, we should be at the forefront of that. Mental health is also part of health, but we also need to understand that climate change will fundamentally impact different groups of people differently and in black and brown communities where they are already facing issues due to environmental racism. And we see that already here in New York City, we need to understand from a public health perspective what we need to be doing to face the climate crisis when we already have existing health care injustice in this country. So it's having these types of conversations. It's thinking about how we're connecting education, health and psychology together as an ecosystem at Teachers College. And what tools are we giving our graduate students to be active in working towards solutions in the future. For green infrastructure, our last STF goal as part of this petition, we want to get a professional to help us think about green infrastructure. And while our facilities staff at Teachers College have made already great strides to making our infrastructure ITC greener, we could really benefit from hiring an expert that knows how we can integrate solar panels on campus, to make sure that our energy is coming from renewable sources, how can we integrate more composting onto campus, how can we take a hard look at not just travel to and from campus, but our dining facilities on campus, our office facilities. It's really taking a microscope to TC daily life. So we want TC to hire a facilities professional that would solely be focused on this and work with the current facility staff to make the upgrades that are needed. Now, Columbia University proper is already doing this. They have a 2030 plan and these are the steps that need to be taken this decade to 2030 to reach carbon neutral by 2050. And a core part of their plan are these facility upgrades, and they're working with these subject matter experts. So there's no reason that we shouldn't be doing the same thing and cultivating, writ large a more sustainable campus.
Noa Urbach [00:26:47]
Right on. So just one last question before we wrap up. What can fellow TC students do tomorrow to support this cause?
Christina Torres [00:26:58]
Email me! No… (laughing). Join us! We would love to have you in any capacity. From you bringing up climate and sustainability in your class. To you coming to an STF Club meeting. To you organizing with us. Maybe hosting a workshop to your department on climate and sustainability. There are many ways for you to engage. Some of it is just being present and letting your voice be heard, signing our petition and other ways you can actually get involved in being an advocate for climate and sustainability on our campus.
Noa Urbach [00:27:36]
Right. Simply raise your voice. Let other people know that you care about this issue. That will be the first important step. Christina Torres, thank you so much for joining us today. It has been a pleasure and happy Earth Day.
Christina Torres [00:27:50]
Happy Earth Day, everyone! Thank you so much.
Noa Urbach [00:28:07]
Since we recorded the podcast episode, we actually have a few updates on what our petition has accomplished. For the literacy and awareness: On March 31st, we held a climate Teach-In event on campus with faculty from all three areas of TC: education, health and psychology, on a panel discussion about the changes the U.S. needs to make in the next decade to academically prepare the next generation of graduate students to work within the climate crisis. We are using the momentum from this event with faculty, students and staff to draft a structure of an interdepartmental working group, which we hope to propose to TC administration in the coming months. For the divestment part of our petition, there's currently no word on whether TC will commit to a public statement of divestment from fossil fuels and private prisons. We are very much waiting still to hear on that. And to finish with some good news. To our knowledge, administration has hired a company that is a green infrastructure expert to do a sustainability audit of the campus. If you want to know more about this work and get updates, we're leaving a few links in the description. Thank you so much for listening.
Noa Urbach [00:29:35]
CICE: The Podcast is part of Current Issues in Comparative Education, an open access journal in the field of comparative education. CICE is the oldest open student-led journal in the field. CICE: The Podcast wishes to thank doctoral and masters students who have contributed to this episode. Credits can be found on our website.
Noa Urbach [00:00:08]
Hello and welcome to CICE: The Podcast, a student led podcast out of Teachers College, Columbia University. As students of Comparative and International Education, we started this podcast to connect academic research in the field to the current events they inform and explain.
My name is Noa Urbach. I'm a student in the International Educational Development Program, and I will be your host for this episode.
When I first got to Teachers College just a few months ago, I took a class on climate change education, which left a huge impression on me. I'm a pretty pragmatic person, so while I was involved all my life in social and political activism, in that course, I soon realized that none of those fights will really matter if we don't address climate change. Luckily for me, I shared the class with the two co-presidents of the Teachers College Sustainability Task Force, which is a student activism group focused on sustainability and climate change on our campus. Together with other members of this student organization, I actually spent most of my fall semester collecting signatures for a petition that called our leadership to take action on climate change. We also joined thousands of students and youth on the streets, sounding something like this…
I'll get back to the petition and our action on campus a little bit later in this episode. But my involvement with this group got me curious about the history of climate activism in higher education institutions. I really wanted to figure out what works and what doesn't. Colleges and universities have historically been a place of social and political participation. And Columbia University is a part of this tradition. I came across an article in the Columbia Archives from 1970. It was written by a then undergraduate student who was reporting on the first ever Earth Day. This student reporter later became one of the leading climate lawyers in the world and fortunately stayed close to home and is also a climate law professor at Columbia Law School.
Professor Michael Gerrard is my first guest today.
Michael Gerrard [00:02:38]
It's my pleasure to be with you.
Noa Urbach [00:02:39]
So maybe we can start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your work today, especially how did you get involved in environmental work and specifically climate law?
Michael Gerrard [00:02:50]
I grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, which is a town dominated by the petrochemical industry. So I was surrounded by air pollution and water pollution, which got me interested in environmental issues in the first place. I went to Columbia as an undergraduate. I majored in political science and wrote my senior thesis on the politics of air pollution in West Virginia. After I graduated, I worked for an environmental group for a couple of years and decided that the most interesting environmental work was being done by lawyers. So I entered law school to become an environmental lawyer. I then practiced for 30 years with a couple of law firms in New York City. But in 2005, I began working on a book about climate change and the law. It appeared two years later as first book on the subject. But that educated me on the subject, and it also made me extremely concerned about climate change. And I decided to try to find an opportunity to devote myself to climate change and not just general environmental law. The opportunity unexpectedly arose to join the Columbia Law School faculty to teach environmental law, and I was able to start up what's now called the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. So that's now indeed what I spent most of my time on.
Noa Urbach [00:04:13]
Can you say a little bit more about the Sabin Center and what it is all about?
Michael Gerrard [00:04:19]
So the Sabin Center has three principal missions. One is to develop legal techniques to fight climate change. The second is to educate the next generation of lawyers in the use of those techniques. And the third is to develop legal resources that are used by judges and lawyers and advocates and students all around the world.
Noa Urbach [00:04:42]
And all of this wonderful work by you and students and other faculty members perfectly leads me to the next question I wanted to ask you. How do you see the role of higher education institutions in this greater context of the fight against climate change?
Michael Gerrard [00:05:00]
Well, there are many different roles for higher education. Obviously. The first one is to educate our students and many of our students go on and play very important roles in the fight against climate change and doing everything else. So that's a core function. The research that we do that is done in universities is extremely important. Columbia, of course, has the Lamont-Doherty Laboratory, which is the largest collection of climate scientists in the world. They really do path breaking research and are responsible for many of the discoveries that we have or are one reason we know as much as we do about climate change. Throughout the university and in the law school and the business school and the economics department, elsewhere, we have people doing very important research to develop the information and the theories of what's necessary. Additionally, the university itself is a source of greenhouse gas emissions and needs to do what it can to reduce those emissions to reduce its overall environmental impact. I'm heavily involved in that effort. And Columbia is starting up a new school, the climate school, which is going to be focused on research and education and impact on climate change. The Earth Institute is going to sort of morph into the climate school and it will be greatly expanding. So all these efforts of education and research and service and outward impact are all very important parts of what higher education can do and what Columbia specifically is doing.
Noa Urbach [00:06:46]
What about the fossil fuel divestment movement that had also reached Columbia University?
Michael Gerrard [00:06:54]
So the trustees of the university decided that they will not invest any of the endowment in fossil fuel stocks. It turned out that they weren't doing it anyway because these were, for one thing they're bad investments for lots of reasons. So they didn't have to divest. They chose not to buy any more stock. And in that, student activism was extremely important. There was a Sit-In in Low Library a few years ago and then another Sit-In in Butler Library. And that certainly got the attention of the university administration. I'm not saying this was a direct cause and effect, but that certainly highlighted the issue with people's agendas.
Noa Urbach [00:07:45]
Let's maybe turn to one of the roles that you mentioned that higher education institutions have, and that is climate change education. So can you expand a little bit about what the future curriculum of the Climate School is going to be about?
Michael Gerrard [00:08:00]
So several years ago, the university formed a Sustainable Development major for undergraduates, and it emerged as one of the more popular majors. There are now more than 100 students who enroll in that every year. There are several master's programs on the environmental subjects around the university. One of them, the Climate and Society Program, has been around for several years and it is now part of the Climate School. There are plans to develop more master's programs, some of them with a principal focus on the science, some with a principal focus more on sort of management issues and a whole array. There is a Ph.D. program that's been around a while on in connection with the Earth Institute that has mostly focused on economics. But there is a plan to either expand that or develop a new PhD program, and there are going to be more offerings helped spark by the Climate School all around the university.
Noa Urbach [00:09:20]
As you know, as part of my involvement in Teachers College Student organizing for climate action, I came across a piece that you wrote in the Columbia Spectator reporting on the first Earth Day that took place in 1970. And I would love to hear what you have to say about that event. How did it all start?
Michael Gerrard [00:09:39]
Well, of course, I was an undergraduate. I was on the staff of The Spectator. I had an interest in the environment, so they assigned me to cover Earth Day. That was probably the first thing I ever wrote about the environment. But remember that 1970 was the midst of the Vietnam War, and there was an enormous amount of student activism on campus and everywhere, mostly focused on the Vietnam War. There were also a lot of issues about racial justice, and other issues of the environment was not central to the student focus in 1970. The Earth Day event that was held on the Columbia campus was fairly muted. You know, several hundred people came, but I think they were hoping for several thousand. There were some people who thought that this was just a distraction from the much more important fight against the war in Vietnam. So Earth Day itself on a nationwide basis was enormously important and it really triggered a tremendous amount of political activism and launched or was part of the launch of the great decade of environmental law making that we saw. So on a nationwide basis, it was terribly significant. On Columbia, not quite as Columbia campus, not quite as much.
Noa Urbach [00:11:15]
So you mentioned this before. Students were worried about environmental action taking away attention from what was in their minds the main political issue of the time, which was Vietnam. I'm interested in what you think about this depoliticized view of climate action today. How do students perceive climate action today? Is it different than 1970?
Michael Gerrard [00:11:37]
Yes, in the first place in 1970, climate change itself was not on the radar of the public or of students. And it has gotten immensely worse since then. Had we started phasing out of fossil fuels in 1970, we would be in immensely better shape than we are now. Today, unlike in 1970, people see climate change as an existential threat. It has moved much higher in the priority list of just about everyone who cares about these issues. And there is much greater understanding of how intertwined the climate crisis is with so many of our political and economic and social circumstances. So we now have many who see the fight against climate change as an integral part of their efforts to reform all of society, to address economic and racial and social inequities, and to fundamentally change the economic system. So the political tenor of the climate movement is significantly different today than the political tenor of the environmental movement of 1970. There's also immensely more attention paid to the issue of environmental justice, to the issue that low income communities and communities with large numbers of people of color are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards, have little say in the nature of the hazards that they're exposed to. And that that needs to be another core element of the fight against climate change.
Noa Urbach [00:13:25]
Great. I'm glad we got to that question. So to wrap things up, what would you suggest for students and faculty to do today? How can they make the most impact?
Michael Gerrard [00:13:39]
The most important single factor in the nature of U.S. climate law and policy is who's in office at the federal level. And so electing members of Congress and the President who want to act on climate change is extremely important. The states and cities are also very important. We see a division between the red states and blue states in terms of whether they are promoting or impeding action on climate change. So action in electoral politics is extremely important. Right now, if we had two more Democratic senators, things would be immensely different in terms of what could happen. So getting involved in electoral politics is one very important factor. I think that the kinds of scientific research and other research that is done at the university by faculty with a lot of work, by students is also extremely important. We understand the general contours of the causes and impacts of climate change, but we need to know a lot more. We need to be developing additional technologies to fight the issue. We need to develop new policy solutions. So most of the different disciplines in the university can be deployed to fight climate change. I'm not saying everyone, not Sanskrit perhaps, but there are so many things that need to be done and so many different disciplines need to be deployed in the fight against climate change.
Noa Urbach [00:15:18]
Professor Gerrard, it has been a pleasure speaking to you. Thank you very, very much.
Michael Gerrard [00:15:20]
Thank you.
Noa Urbach [00:15:32]
For my next interview, I want to take what I've learned from Professor Gerrard and the work being done at Columbia University and shed some light on what we're trying to do here at Teachers College. So I reached out to Christina Torres, who, together with Lindsay Gehring, are the co-presidents of the Sustainability Task Force, the student organization I joined.
Noa Urbach [00:16:02]
Christina, I’m so happy that you’re with us today.
Christina Torres [00:16:04]
Thank you so much for having me.
Noa Urbach [00:16:06]
So we spoke with climate lawyer and law professor Michael Gerrard, who mentioned the need for climate change to become a core aspect across disciplines in higher education institutions. And you are a perfect example of this as you have brought discussions and research on sustainability to FIT in your course on ecology and environmental problems in fashion. So can you start by telling us a little bit more about this course? How is climate change relevant to fashion students?
Christina Torres [00:16:36]
I wasn't thinking about the transdisciplinary nature of the movement before I got to FIT, and I realized climate change transcends so many fields, including fashion. We can't think of fashion without thinking about it being one of the major polluters of the world, not just with emission, but all the fast fashion ending up in landfills. What makes this class really unique is we're using ecology as a lens to look at environmental problems. What's really interesting is that it's a debate style course. So throughout the semester, students are using what they're learning about ecology and about environmental problems and connecting that to their major and their disciplines and fields in fashion. So working at FIT really gave me this perspective of how we can really integrate climate and sustainable thinking into all fields because it's not just fashion.
Noa Urbach [00:17:32]
I think it's so important that we remember that we are also, as higher education institutions, preparing these people for their future industries, which will inevitably be very much affected by the climate change and all of its effects. And so maybe you can tell us, how did you get involved in environmental research in the first place?
Christina Torres [00:17:54]
So I have always been a science kid. I have been like essentially living at the American Museum of Natural History ever since I was a child. Science was always in the plan. So entering college at the City College of New York, I just assumed that you major in a science and then you go to medical school because what else do you do with a science degree? I stumbled upon Dr. Amy Berkov, who's a tropical biologist, and she has a partnership with the American Museum of Natural History. So it felt like a no brainer — Wow, wouldn't it be cool to work with someone who does research at the place that I love the most? Through doing this work as an undergraduate student and then a master's student, I started to realize that I really loved the field work and I really loved doing stuff like this, talking about the science. I didn't necessarily love the bench work, so it really forced me to completely reevaluate what I wanted to do in the future, which brought me to the startup world for a little while, looking at science communication and how we can impact how everyday people interact with science. It also then brought me to FIT through that teaching opportunity, which is how I eventually got to TC to look at science education.
Noa Urbach [00:19:13]
So tell us a little bit about your studies at Teachers College and specifically your work in the Sustainability Task Force, which I'm also part of. What is it that this organization is doing and trying to accomplish at Teachers College?
Christina Torres [00:19:26]
So at STF, at the Sustainability Task Force, we're looking to grow a sustainable culture at Teachers College. And I joined the club when I started at Teachers College in fall 2020. In the first year of the club, this is also during the pandemic, we did some virtual events, we did book club events. But going into the 2021 —2022 academic year, we started to really rethink what is STF's role on Teachers College campus? And a lot of these conversations started in Dr. Oren Pizmony-Levy’s class for education and sustainable development, which had a very heavy climate change education focus. So me and Lindsay Gehring, who is my co-president, Noa, Ye, and Suzy and Nick and all of these fantastic people that make up what has been the action oriented lens of STF worked together the entirety of Fall 2021 to figure out how can we make teachers college a more sustainable place? And we created a petition with three major goals: one around divestment from fossil fuels and private prisons. One around education and literacy. Like going back to your first question, how do we get climate change and sustainability into every discipline at Teachers College. and our third demand, our third goal had to do with green infrastructure, bringing the infrastructure on Teachers College campus to be green infrastructure. So we've been working towards these goals since the petition. We've been able to talk with the TC president, provost and an entire meeting of the faculty on these demands. And we're really excited to say that we're finally making actionable steps forward to make TC a more sustainable place.
Noa Urbach [00:21:23]
And Christina, maybe if you can expand a little bit about all three parts of this petition and what STF is trying to accomplish. First, the divestment portion. What does it mean to divest and how is Teachers College different from Columbia University in that? How is climate change related to the three topics that Teachers College is engaged with: education, health and psychology? And lastly, the third part of our petition - green infrastructure - again, how is it different or separate from the Columbia greater context?
Christina Torres [00:22:00]
Great. So I'll start with Divestment. Teachers College has a separate endowment from Columbia University proper, and the lens that we take to how we view sustainability is that all systems that are unfair to certain groups of individuals are by definition unsustainable. So using our endowment as a political statement, which is why we are demanding the divestment of this endowment from the fossil fuel industry and also private prisons. We view this as a really important step forward in cross — movement support, because while climate change and sustainability are transdisciplinary, it also transcends movements. We hope to do something similar to what Columbia University has done, where there is a student board where students actually work to understand how the endowment is invested and they have a say in that investment. To our second demand: literacy and awareness. We know that climate change and sustainability will impact education, psychology and health. We should be working towards preparing students for the future of their fields. From an education perspective, we need to prepare all students — this is not just K-12, not just higher education, but this is also informal learning — for understanding how climate change is going to impact their careers and their daily lives. Making More transdisciplinary content in K-12. This is connecting mathematics with science, with history, with literacy through climate change, which will not only help students understand both climate and the movement, but I believe would create stronger students that are better prepared to see the connections between these classes that they're already in. We also need to understand how it's impacting health and psychology. The climate anxiety is real. There is an excellent piece that just came out in the New York Times about a month ago talking about climate anxiety and how psychology graduate institutions are not currently preparing the next generation of these health care professionals to talk about climate change and climate anxiety with their patients. As the Graduate School of Education, Psychology and Health, we should be at the forefront of that. Mental health is also part of health, but we also need to understand that climate change will fundamentally impact different groups of people differently and in black and brown communities where they are already facing issues due to environmental racism. And we see that already here in New York City, we need to understand from a public health perspective what we need to be doing to face the climate crisis when we already have existing health care injustice in this country. So it's having these types of conversations. It's thinking about how we're connecting education, health and psychology together as an ecosystem at Teachers College. And what tools are we giving our graduate students to be active in working towards solutions in the future. For green infrastructure, our last STF goal as part of this petition, we want to get a professional to help us think about green infrastructure. And while our facilities staff at Teachers College have made already great strides to making our infrastructure ITC greener, we could really benefit from hiring an expert that knows how we can integrate solar panels on campus, to make sure that our energy is coming from renewable sources, how can we integrate more composting onto campus, how can we take a hard look at not just travel to and from campus, but our dining facilities on campus, our office facilities. It's really taking a microscope to TC daily life. So we want TC to hire a facilities professional that would solely be focused on this and work with the current facility staff to make the upgrades that are needed. Now, Columbia University proper is already doing this. They have a 2030 plan and these are the steps that need to be taken this decade to 2030 to reach carbon neutral by 2050. And a core part of their plan are these facility upgrades, and they're working with these subject matter experts. So there's no reason that we shouldn't be doing the same thing and cultivating, writ large a more sustainable campus.
Noa Urbach [00:26:47]
Right on. So just one last question before we wrap up. What can fellow TC students do tomorrow to support this cause?
Christina Torres [00:26:58]
Email me! No… (laughing). Join us! We would love to have you in any capacity. From you bringing up climate and sustainability in your class. To you coming to an STF Club meeting. To you organizing with us. Maybe hosting a workshop to your department on climate and sustainability. There are many ways for you to engage. Some of it is just being present and letting your voice be heard, signing our petition and other ways you can actually get involved in being an advocate for climate and sustainability on our campus.
Noa Urbach [00:27:36]
Right. Simply raise your voice. Let other people know that you care about this issue. That will be the first important step. Christina Torres, thank you so much for joining us today. It has been a pleasure and happy Earth Day.
Christina Torres [00:27:50]
Happy Earth Day, everyone! Thank you so much.
Noa Urbach [00:28:07]
Since we recorded the podcast episode, we actually have a few updates on what our petition has accomplished. For the literacy and awareness: On March 31st, we held a climate Teach-In event on campus with faculty from all three areas of TC: education, health and psychology, on a panel discussion about the changes the U.S. needs to make in the next decade to academically prepare the next generation of graduate students to work within the climate crisis. We are using the momentum from this event with faculty, students and staff to draft a structure of an interdepartmental working group, which we hope to propose to TC administration in the coming months. For the divestment part of our petition, there's currently no word on whether TC will commit to a public statement of divestment from fossil fuels and private prisons. We are very much waiting still to hear on that. And to finish with some good news. To our knowledge, administration has hired a company that is a green infrastructure expert to do a sustainability audit of the campus. If you want to know more about this work and get updates, we're leaving a few links in the description. Thank you so much for listening.
Noa Urbach [00:29:35]
CICE: The Podcast is part of Current Issues in Comparative Education, an open access journal in the field of comparative education. CICE is the oldest open student-led journal in the field. CICE: The Podcast wishes to thank doctoral and masters students who have contributed to this episode. Credits can be found on our website.