Jonathan Isham presents students with new contexts for the climate crisis

Jonathan Isham talks with St. Andrew's Environmental Stewards.

On Thursday afternoon Jonathan Isham, Luce Professor of International Environmental Economics at Middlebury College, addressed students at the weekly School meeting. Dr. Isham currently serves on
advisory boards for Focus the Nation, Climate Counts, and the Vermont Governor’s Commission on Climate Change. He is also a volunteer leader for Vice President Gore’s Climate Project and an advisor to the Presidential Climate Action Project. He holds an AB in social anthropology from Harvard University, and MA in international studies from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD in economics from the University of Maryland. He co-edited the recently released book Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement, an assemblage of “the voices of top scholars and inspiring young leaders” reflecting on strategies for and responses to our environmental situation.

Isham began with a clear point: “Shifting from fossil fuels to clean energy is what this century is about. We know we have a deadline to do this, but we don’t know what that deadline is.” Despite the fearsomeness of this reality, the speaker managed to stress the positive and exciting aspects of the challenge rather than elaborating on its insurmountability.

“The good news is, there is an accumulating climate movement that is trying to make a difference,” said Isham. “People are having this conversation [about how to address global warming] all over the world.” He commended St. Andrew’s as exemplifying the thought, action and engagement that the environmental movement is attracting: “By having a Focus the Nation here, you have personified what this movement is about.”

He went on to explain that the environmental movement has particular and profound implications for the liberal arts, precisely because it is a movement that calls for the “group and network based learning” that liberal arts institutions promise and aspire to. Commenting on the like-spiritedness of St. Andrew’s and Middlebury College, he said “I see that our struggles are your struggles. Institutions like ours need to be at the forefront of this movement. We have an opportunity to teach in new ways that enable you all to lead this movement.” Environments like St. Andrew’s and Middlebury are especially to participation in a communal movement by the porosity of their classrooms and their cultivation of progressive learning styles. Isham referred to the exciting possibilities of “open source learning,” based on a belief in the wisdom that can be created by students as they demand opportunities to generate knowledge that matters now.

The climate crisis, said Isham, is not simply an “environmental problem,” but is “tied to the great social movements of the past.” The “environmental cause,” moreover, encompasses and is inextricable from the causes of social justice and indigenous and local rights, as illustrated by the situation is Tibet, and by Katrina, both instances which bring to our attention what can happen to the most vulnerable among us in the extreme conditions that global warming creates. Also, insofar as the global crisis is a self-destructive drama, a failure to correct it amounts to a kind of human rights violation against posterity.

The environmental movement can be compared, Isham argued, with abolitionism and other grassroots rights movements in that it seeks to “force people to reimagine what an economy is”: “At the time of abolitionism, energy from the bodies of slaves powered the global economy, just as oil from the middle east now powers it . . . our energy has cruel elements that we all need to bear witness to.”

Like the grassroots movements of the past, Isham continued, the environmental movement requires provocation – the disturbance of complacency - for fuel, and he quoted an injunction from Congressman John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights movement: “You have to cause trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.” Isham followed this with a quote from an Ignition essay by John Passacantando: “The trouble we need to cause in the 21st century is about global warming.”

This “trouble,” Isham explained, does not equal a pursuit of sustained conflict, or the identification of enemies. “It’s easy to blame oil companies,” said Isham, and referred to the hero of another great rights movement: “Wouldn’t it have been easy for Mandela to seek retribution? But, picking up on Ghandi’s legacy, he created the ‘Truth and Reconciliation meetings’; he chose to face the truth.”

Instead of seeking out a blamable party, and thus allying our environmental advocacy with hate, Isham insisted the only effective “prime mover” in this cause was love. “We must love something so deeply before we can defend it.” Acknowledging that love of “the earth” was an emotion too abstract to cultivate, and suggested that the kind of love that must fuel the environmental movement needs to be real, tangible love, not for the abstract “earth,” but for all the moments, sights, sounds, feelings and connections that our life on it makes possible.”

After showing a montage of film clips depicting various environmental activism groups, forums, rallies and events, he addressed St. Andrew’s students: “We can do this, if we harness the energy you just saw. You should be asking yourselves how.”

The speaker signs copies of Ignition for students and faculty after the lecture.