When I started this blog I really hoped that I would post at least once or twice a month — but life, of course, took over. As it does.

Anyway, right now I’m involved in a few things that all feel like they have many moving parts, and I admit they are taking more time away from my writing than I’m really happy with. But one of those things, in particular, feels really important to me: I’m serving on a bargaining-support committee for my union on the issue of climate justice. Which is probably about all I should say about that at this point, except that it’s been a really rich conversation with colleagues from different locations and roles on campus, and has been another moment of reminding me how special a place a university is, for all its imperfections.

Which brings me to this: I have spent a lot of time lately chafing against — even despairing about — a particular problem that for right now I’m going to call the life-as-usual tendency. I suppose one might call it the power of inertia, but it’s really more the power of momentum: the momentum of the quotidian. In terms of both climate change and other kinds of political crises — we know that we are in crisis, but for lots of us, our regular daily lives don’t disappear or even take up less space because of the existence of the crisis. Which means that it can feel really hard for us to engage the crisis meaningfully, or in ways that feel meaningful. But the crisis doesn’t go away, and neither does our awareness of it. And the cognitive dissonance can become almost unbearable.

Now, to be in this position is a kind of privilege, of course. There are lots of folks for whom the climate crisis has sailed right in and utterly disrupted their quotidian lives. It may seem, here in the relatively placid northeast US, that those folks are far away, but in fact many of them live among us (families displaced from Puerto Rico in the aftermath of IrMaria, for example). And as the crisis escalates, it will come closer and closer to us all. The problem is that this is our window: our last ten years in which to take action that might substantially affect the crisis, and mitigate some of the worst of its outcomes. We need to be acting now, and for that action to be effective, it needs to be undertaken by those of us who are still privileged enough to be coasting along on the power of momentum, necessarily distracted by keeping up with our quotidian realities. And trying to manage the ever-increasing sense of unease, the cognitive dissonance between what we know we should be attending to (even if we don’t quite know how we might attend to it) and what we in fact spend our daily time and energy doing.

Back to the university as special place. For our students, the university is a big part of what defines their life-as-usual. And we have it in our power (don’t we?) to shape it into a space where they can engage with the climate crisis — where learning, thinking, imagining, planning (and yes, grieving and raging) about this enormous reality can be part of the substance of their daily lives, built into the quotidian routine to which they have to attend in any case. Of course, not all of our students think about or experience the reality of climate crisis in the way I have described; they may not all be suffering from cognitive dissonance and the despair that goes with it. But we are, or hold ourselves to be, an institution that holds knowledge in the highest regard — and the best available knowledge tells us quite clearly that climate change is real, is caused by human activity, and must be addressed as a matter of the utmost urgency. Not to communicate this to our students — not to act as if this is true — is a profound abdication of our commitments to them.

The more I think about it, the more this seems to me a huge honor and a huge responsibility that the university has. We may not be able to radically and rapidly change the political contexts in which national and international climate action happens (or doesn’t). But we can do this, and it seems to me that we should: we can change the microcosm that is our campus in ways that allow our students to engage climate crisis and the work of climate justice, rather than continuing a business-as-usual stance that implies it is something for someone else to deal with. If nothing else, by doing so we might alleviate some of that cognitive dissonance — for them and for ourselves.