Bryan Alexander

One of the great questions of our time is: shall we continue to grow?

I’m referring to our civilization and its massive, complex footprint, which we can measure in many ways.  Will we keep growing our economy, making more goods, services, and money?  Will we keep growing our total population?  And will we decide to keep growing in areas where growth is very difficult?

I’ve been mulling over these questions for years and have a book proposal to fire off shortly, but today I wanted to share one example for discussion.  It’s about the American state of Arizona and how economic and population growth, a/k/a development, is running smack into the natural barrier of not enough water.

(Note: this is a quick post written in haste, as I race between addressing a number of issues and crises.  I’m going to touch too quickly and with too much generalization on giant, complex topics.  I’ve written about them before and will say more later.)

It’s well known that Arizona is very arid. Big chunks of it are desert. Yet for years people keep moving into the state, putting up buildings, expanding towns and cities, developing and developing on the very knife edge of sustainability.  This is well known, I think.

Now the state might have hit a hard limit to its growth curve.  In January the state government ordered a halt to development around Phoenix, due to water limitations.  More recently the New York Times noted in a powerful piece that Arizona, like many American states, is overpumping its groundwater.  Yet more people want to move to the state and development is hungry.  What is to be done?

I think of this as a microcosm of our civilization as we look ahead.  There are logistical and practical details, but also a kind of strategy or ideology in play. Are we going to keep revving up growth or will we try some other approach?

All of this came to me, around 2400 miles to the least, as I listened to a very well done Times podcast about a proposed plan for Arizona’s water crisis.  I recommend listening to the whole thing, but the gist is a spectacular idea: building a giant water desalination plant in a Mexican city on the edge of the Sea of Cortez, then pumping the de-salted water far north to Arizona.

The project immediately divided people.  On the pro-growth side the arguments are familiar: we (Arizonans) need to make space for newcomers.  We’re also a state that invents grandly, so this plant+pipeline fits in our tradition.  I would add: it’s consistent with innovation-happy American culture as well.

On the other side, the podcast points out some big problems.  First, it would be huge expensive.  Second, there’s a lot of politics to wrangle, from international diplomacy down to persuading multiple urban and rural folks to go along.  Third, disposing of what would be a giant and growing mountain of salt is a huge burden, one most likely slotted to Mexicans to deal with.  Fourth, the proposed pipeline would stomp on a range of sensitive environments from the sea to consumers.

For me, these are partly echoes of old western debates between development and its opponents, but now with a climate crisis dimension. If human industry is heating the planet, should we respond with more industry or less?  Should we turn to our tested wellsprings of creativity and implementation, or instead haul back on the reins and just… stop?

“But Bryan,” some of you might ask, “What does this have to do with higher education?  That’s what your writing is about, right?”

I see academia all over that great divide right now.  On the development side, we have helped civilization warm the world, as we’ve done our share of educating people in a wide range of pro-development fields from mechanical engineering to business.  We’ve also done generations of research along these lines.  And in the United States we have more or less privatized higher ed’s finances, driving most colleges and universities to reach frantically for dollars wherever they could.  We *need* growth to generate enough of an economy for us to draw upon.

Yet we’re also somewhat on the anti-growth side.  Academic researchers have been stalwarts in researching the climate crisis and calling for humanity to respond.  Some academics have studied and developed ideas around anti-growth political economy, such as degrowth or donut economics. Some academics also teach along these lines.

I’m not sure how many academics want to apply post-growth thinking to their institution’s operations. In the USA we’ve depended on ever-growing enrollment (and hence dollars) for two generations.  Since enrollment stopped and receded, we still raise our budgets and continue to beat the advancement drum.   Yet I’ve heard some campus degrowth talk from individual faculty and staff, who think their institution has enrolled too many students.  And the occasional campus leader has publicly stated they will accept smaller student bodies (I have a post on West Virginia coming up).

How far will the latter grow?  I’m not sure, at this point.  Many academics tell me the solution to their problems involves the spending of a lot more money, often at the state or federal level. I don’t see Americans in general rejecting consumerism, nor have I seen most academics wanting to reduce their professional footprint.  Perhaps anti-development will remain a minority opinion for the foreseeable future.

I wonder how this might play out with Arizonan colleges and universities.  Who will commit to supporting the plant and pipeline publicly?  Which departments will try to work with the project, such as civil engineering?  And who will oppose the idea, and from which sites within the state’s academic ecosystem?

I think the debate is there, both in the state and elsewhere, if only in a nascent stage.  We can see it in the divisions over Arizona’s grand lunge for more water, and perhaps echoes of that within the entire academic world.

More on this to come.

(photo by Quinn Dombrowski)

How might academia respond to the climate crisis?

One way is for colleges and universities to teach more content and classes on the topic. This is a path individual faculty who are passionate about global warming can follow, to the extent they have the autonomy to redesign their classes or to create new ones.  At a larger scale, academic leaders, from department chairs to academic deans and presidents, can help support the infusion of climate into curricula, or the creation of entirely new climate-themes programs, such as certificates, degrees, or interdisciplinary courses of study.

…but on the other hand, maybe some academics won’t have the choice to do so, because the decision will be made for them, from outside of academia.

I’m thinking of a recent development. The Indian government decided that all of that nation’s universities will now require students to take global warming classes in order to graduate.  As University World News put it,

All students at India’s universities will have to study subjects such as environmental education and climate change in order to graduate, starting from the about-to-begin 2023 to 2024 academic year, according to guidelines from the University Grants Commission (UGC), the country’s higher education apex body.

The UGC also published curricular guidelines about such coursework earlier this year.

There are more interesting details in Shuriah Niazi’s account.  This requirement covers all students studying all topics, “including general engineering, medical, architecture, pharmacy, management, among others.”

The required classes are also not based in one single discipline:

the new environment education curriculum will be multidisciplinary and encompass areas such as climate change, sustainable development, conservation and management of biological resources and biodiversity, pollution, sanitation, waste management, and forest and wildlife protection.

(This matches my call for climate change to be the new liberal arts, in the American context.)

The reason for doing this is immediate disasters striking the nation:

Many academics have noted that as India has witnessed extreme weather events in the past few years, including huge loss to life and property, extreme heat waves, unprecedented floods and excess rainfall, landslides, glacier bursts etc, believed to be triggered by climate change and environmental imbalance, the environment as a subject has become of prime importance.

(There is also a professional group for Indian academics teaching the climate crisis.  Hello, TACC!)

This is an important move for global higher education, as I think it represents the first nation to mandate climate crisis classwork for all postsecondary students.  Some nations have encouraged such classwork’s development to various degrees, but not required such, as far as I can tell.  Some individual campuses require such work – indeed, University of Barcelona students struck to compel their administration to issue that mandate.  Yet at the level of all post-secondary education for a country, I think India might have broken new ground.

Will others follow suit?  I’m not sure of the geopolitics here.  Perhaps other BRICS countries will be inspired.  Maybe some individual nations hit hard by climate, or clearly threatened by global warming, will consider such a move.  I imagine national leaderships seeking to build up green job capacity may find this a useful policy tool.

I don’t know what this means for academic freedom and autonomy in India’s colleges and universities.  UGC does have the power to issue such policies.  Is this an unusual step in practice?  How does it connect with prime minister Modi’s policies*?  I am not sure, and would like to learn more.

It might be that years from now we’ll see mandatory climate classes across the world.  Alternatively, such mandates might become superfluous as student demand soars, and wise academic institutions meet it.

*Please don’t interpret this post as an endorsement either of Modi or his leadership.

(thanks to Vivian Forssman for the main link)

Yesterday I wrote about two Canadian campuses endangered by fires. Climate change played some role in intensifying those conflagrations.

Today I offer a related story.  This post will be relatively brief, as I’m with my wife, back in a hospital again.

Let me note a group of American colleges and universities threatened by another type of extreme weather.  These are institutions in southern California, in the way of tropical cyclone/hurricane (now post-tropical cyclone) Hilary.

“The Weather Prediction Center’s updated Excessive Rainfall Outlook for August 19–22, regarding Hurricane Hilary”

How are those institutions responding? At Inside Higher Ed Doug Lederman notes some examples:

Palomar College, a two-year institution north of San Diego, said that “due to a state of emergency,” it had canceled classes at all of its locations on Monday. Sunday afternoon, California State University, Los Angeles, updated its social media pages to say that it, too, would cancel classes and ask employees to work from home Monday.

Sunday night, the San Diego Community College District said all of its campuses and facilities would be closed today, due to the “lingering effects” of the storm.

San Diego State University said in a communiqué to students and employees that it would shift to virtual instruction and telework for “all employees who are able to do so.”

At the same time, “[o]ther institutions, including Pasadena City College and MiraCosta College, were still planning to operate normally Monday as of late Sunday.”

Hilary also crashed through Mexico, killing at least one person.  I haven’t been able to find any news about impacts on that nation’s universities.

A hurricane striking California is very strange.  The last one was apparently in the 1930s.  Hilary is evidently the result of the strengthening El Nino.

Hurricanes hitting the American southeast and east coast are, alas, not at all unusual.  Apparently a series are forming up in the Caribbean.

To what extent can we understand this extreme weather as the result of climate change?  It seems to be too early to tell.  One scientific group, World Weather Attribution, is still researching and deliberating.  Other opinions vary. Which tells us a few things:

1. To be cautious about too rapidly blaming dangerous weather on the climate crisis.
2. To learn about how we respond to these storms and fires, regardless of their causes, so that we can apply the results to future incidents.
3. To remember that the number and strength of such events is going to increase over time.

All best wishes for the safety of people in Hilary’s path.

How might academics respond to the unfolding climate crisis?

Today I’d like to share two developments which can help us think through that question.

The first comes from Canada, where two campuses (so far) have been under evacuation orders due to out of control fires.  The University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus), an institution with more than 11,000 students, announced a total evacuation yesterday as fires roared nearby.

British Columbia is now under a state of emergency. You can see the status of fires across the province from this governmental website:

The UBCO main page now features this very concise announcement: “A fire is burning near UBC Okanagan Campus. Evacuate.”

At the same time, farther to the north, Aurora College of Yelloknife (their website keeps giving me errors; anyone else getting this?) is delaying the start of fall classes because of fires, which have prompted evacuation in the area.  The College’s Facebook account said this, two days ago:

Due to the evacuation of Yellowknife, Ndilo and Dettah, Aurora College’s Yellowknife North Slave Campus will be closed until further notice. We will re-assess the closure as updates are received from city officials and emergency organizations.

According to one local site, the delay is:

to provide more time for emergency personnel and affected communities to deal with impacts of the fires. In addition to the delay, the college says some of communications have been compromised by the fires, including some telephone lines, email and website infrastructure, and are forced to share most information through various social media platforms.

The second development took place in a Montana court, where teenagers sued that state for failing to do enough to protect their environment from climate change.  A judge agreed, although state officials disagreed.

Why do these stories matter?

To begin with, the Canadian fire stories offer examples of climate change-worsened weather physically impacting campuses, both the grounds and the academic population.  These incidents are very much for what I described in my recent book, titled in a very much on the nose way for today Universities on Fire.  Unless we are very lucky as a species, we need to plan on experiencing more such extreme weather events in higher education.

The Montana case offers an instance of a major aspect of how Americans value the climate crisis.  Note that it was teenagers (with adult help) who brought the suit.  This is very consistent with polling indicating that age strongly shapes climate view – i.e., the younger one is, the more likely they are to be concerned.  We saw this in a recent Pew survey, which offered findings like this:

This impacts higher education directly.  Incoming traditional-age undergraduates are more likely than campus faculty and staff to be concerned about climate (compare the ages 18-29 to 65+, above). This may appear in terms of class and course of study selection, then evolve into research interests as they age up into faculty and staff positions.  We may also see activism among students, taking place on or off campus, as I’ve been forecasting. Suing a state government is no small thing, and points the way to a generation of academic politics.

Let me add a caveat – an obvious one, I think, but worth mentioning – that these two developments are playing out, and will play out, unevenly across the total higher education ecosystem.  Not all campuses are very exposed to fires. Not all colleges and universities will enroll students (then faculty and staff) who are energized by the climate crisis in sufficient numbers to be significant.  Enough will, though, for academics to be mindful, to plan, and to act.