¶ Intro / Opening
Good morning, and welcome to Essential Ingredients. I'm your host, Justine Reichman. With me today is Laird Christensen, and he is an expert in sustainability. Welcome, Laird.
Hi, thank you so much, Justine. I'm happy to be here.
I'm happy to have you here. It's so exciting to learn from you a little bit about the programs that you're working on, and the impact and sustainability that you're currently having, as well as what you hope for in the future. So for those that are not familiar with you, can you just maybe state your name, your title, and what you do?
Sure. My name is Laird Christensen. I work at Prescott College in Arizona where I direct the Master of Science in resilient and sustainable communities, as well as the Master of Science and Environmental Studies. And these are online programs designed for working professionals to be able to add graduate degrees to their credentials and their experience while they're working and whatever their responsibilities
at home may be. But the way that we make that work for folks is through what we call a bio regional approach to distance education, so that students in the courses that they're taking apply everything that they're learning to the places where they live. So they're really becoming experts in those places, whether they're studying projections of climate change impact, or energy possibilities, or social inequities, or our
food systems. Whatever it may be in those areas, people are focusing everything on their own backyards to make them more connected.
I think it's great to be able to take a tangible approach to use the area that you're in and implement different strategies as a way to build a more sustainable community. As you know, we're focused on food, we're focused on the impact of food, how we can change things, how we can innovate in that space to create greater access to better for you food, both for the impact it has for our future families, the children, our welfare, our health, all those
things. So I'd love to just kick off the conversation before we even dig into the food system, and sustainability, and just understand a little bit about your background.
Yeah. I came to sustainability from a more environmental studies background. I was an environmental activist and a writer for much of my career working in ancient forest defence out in the Pacific
Northwest where I grew up. And it wasn't until I began to see the forests in the places where I was damaged by the impacts of climate change that I realised, oh, part of my work needs to be with people in the cities with people in industry who are having an impact on these wild areas thousand of miles away through their carbon emissions. And so when I had the opportunity to design this, the Master of Science and Resilient Sustainable Communities, I went into it a little grudgingly,
because my focus was really more on environmental studies. But over the years, it's been 10 years now that I've been directing this program. I get so much inspiration from my students who are scattered all over the world. Not just the US, but I've got students in Peru, Italy, South Korea, all over the place. We're sharing with each other in every class what we're learning about our own communities, and just seeing those people doing the good work that they are in their own
places, provides me with fresh inspiration all the time. People are drawn to a particular aspect of creating sustainability or resilience. And I try to assure my students to trust the way that you feel called to, and trust also that there are other people who are going to be called to address some of the other challenges. Because one thing's for sure, there's no shortage of challenges facing us as we try to become more sustainable and resilient.
And I think allowing your programme extends, and because you have access to these folks have access to each other, one another. And they can share this stories and share what's going on for them. It allows people to look at it through different lenses, and equally be able to maybe innovate, be inspired, share different resources or ideas that they have that they may not never have considered.
¶ A Focus on Solutions-Based Learning
Exactly. I give you an example of that. One of the courses students take in this program is called Land Use Planning and Policy. And so for example, if somebody wanted to rip out their front lawn and put a garden in their front lawn, but there were local zoning ordinances prohibiting them from doing that, they would be finding out from other students around the world that, okay, there are other kinds have policies in other places, some of those might serve as models,
might be examples of a more progressive sort of policy. But then they're also learning how to engage with the local processes. How do you go about proposing revisions to existing regulations? So we want to empower students. And actually, that's a shift that we've seen over the 10 years that I've been directing this program, a move towards solutions based learning because climate change can be so heavy and so disempowering that we really found we needed to put the emphasis on the solutions.
Of course, that requires defining some of the problems. Some of the challenges at first, but most of the emphasis in the courses is on the solutions, and what are the skills. What is the knowledge the students will need to actually help bring about those solutions?
Well, I think that's a great way to frame something as well. Because so often, we have problems and we react or respond either in fear, or because we don't have a better answer. And being solution oriented and surrounding yourself with other people that maybe can shed insight or share insight gives us a greater power to better solve the problem at hand.
That place of despair, or what often called climate anxiety really emerged as a problem around the same time as we were going through the pandemic. So folks were in lockdown, they were dealing with feelings of isolation or disconnection anyhow. We really started to see an uptick in people reaching out to me and saying, Laird, I love this programme. But it's just too much for me to deal with all of the different challenges. I'm going to need to take some time
away. So that was about 2022 that we began to see that. So one of the things that I did was to begin offering sort of workshops or trainings through Teach-in and that sort of thing, and Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstones Active Hope, which is just a four step process that leads people from despair to empowerment. And it starts with giving thanks for the things in your life that you are grateful for, because that creates a
sense of personal resilience. And then the second step, which is what really throws people is honoring our pain for the world. And then that doesn't come intuitively, right? The idea that, oh, I'm feeling anger, I'm feeling grief, I'm feeling despair. We don't think about honoring that. But those are really functioning as negative feedback loops telling us something is wrong, and we need to act. It's like the warning bell on the Titanic heading for the iceberg. We need to honor
the fact that that's working. And when we share that with others, and this is one of the things I do in the workshops. As we all use little post-it and talk about, here's what I'm feeling, bringing those fears out into the open makes them a lot less threatening. They don't just fester inside of us. We see that other people have the same kinds of fears. And there's something about creating that sense of community where we're all working from this place. That makes it a little less
disabling. And then the next two steps are moving into, how do we see ourselves through a different framework in terms of other communities that are doing good work, finding inspiration. And finally, how do we take action because there's nothing that empowers us more than taking even a small action, and seeing that it has an impact, it has an effect. And doing so reinforces our willingness to take the next action. So we've
¶ Student Innovation Builds Sustainable Food System
started offering those, we've built the climate solutions into all of our courses. And a programme like this needs to continue to evolve as new challenges arise, the climate despair.
So I know that you work on sustainability. I know that there is another program that focuses on food in particular, as we embark on this conversation, sustainability, and in its entirety is at the root of a lot of this. So you've created this program where they participate from all over the world and they can share stories. So I'd love to hear from you as it relates to specifically food and
sustainability within the food sector. How these students have innovated or created change as a result of your program?
Sure, sure. I would be happy to. And let me frame that by noting that when we first were developing this program back in 2011 or so, we had a tropical storm hit Vermont where I was teaching at the time that wiped out our roads as Tropical Storm Irene. And suddenly, the area that we lived in had no roads coming to it from the east.
Oh, yeah, I was in New York. I got evacuated. I experienced that.
We suddenly realised how vulnerable our food system was because the trucks couldn't get through to the grocery store. Very basic example of that sort of vulnerability. And the opposite of vulnerability is resilience. So we have lots of students who are working on creating more resilient food systems. And some of that has to do with understanding climate models. What kind of changes can we
expect to see not only in heat, but in precipitation. But students also learn about their soil systems, about frost free zones, plant hardiness zones, that sort of thing. So they're really understanding, A, here are the ecological conditions in which local food can be grown. And B, here's how that is likely to change in the coming decades so that people can either figure out things like season extension, if necessary, or
bringing in different food systems. But the idea of a resilient food system, which our students are engaging with is not necessarily that. It's entirely self sufficient, although it probably better be capable of self sufficiency for at least particular periods of time. But we all benefit from the ability to get coffee from Central America, or chocolate, or whatever that may be. So we're not talking about a purist sort of self sufficiency necessarily, but that's where
resilience begins. How do we provide as much of our own needs as possible? So for some students, that means working with schools to help teach them about soil, about plants to get them out into gardens, create school yard gardens, that sort of thing, to create community gardens. We see that quite a bit where students for their capstone in this program create a project and applied project in their own community. And a lot of them are drawn towards community gardens in general, or
creating plans. We have an ecological design course where students are able to actually look very carefully using digital mapping technology and that sort of thing at the possibilities for the region that they live in, or the block that they live on, or the yard that they live in and figure out what could do well here. What's the drainage like here? What's the angle of the sun here as well?
So by doing that, have they shared any significant impacts that they've seen as a result?
it's a great question. And I hope that you'll have a chance to ask that question of the director of the sustainable food systems program because they have a particular emphasis on impact measurement, which isn't as much built into
my program. But certainly, anytime you get a kid who thinks that food comes from the grocery store out there with her hands in the dirt, seeing the worms crawling through the dirt, seeing the seedling start in the classroom and be transplanted out there, the kinds of changes that we're talking about are probably difficult to assess in terms of mere metrics. But that's a lesson that's going to stay with that student.
What are you most hopeful for as you teach these programs and you give people the opportunity to share their insights and their experience?
Well, I guess what I'm most hopeful for is the capacity for people to move as Rob Hopkins from the transition movement says, from what is to what if. The very fact that visualising a more sustainable future, a more resilient future, a more regenerative future, more enjoyable future. That is a necessary step towards actually saying, okay, how can we bring this into being? What are the obstacles? How can we either remove those obstacles, get them out of the way, overflow of
those obstacles and bring this into being. I do have an enormous amount of faith in the capacity of the human imagination to create better circumstances than we find ourselves in personally. Obviously, there are lots of obstructions to that happening, and we could talk more about the political system and how that's not necessarily serving us well right now. But that's another advantage of the regional
approach is by breaking it down to a smaller scale. We begin to engage in our communities at a scale where we can actually have an impact where we can have an effect. And sometimes, if I have students in large urban areas, I'll say, let's zoom in a little bit. Let's focus on your neighbourhood. What do you want
to see happen in your neighbourhood? Because the problem is if you start to deal with larger scales, you start to run into these obstacles and you feel disempowered, and disempowerment is, I think, one of the biggest threats that we have to creating the kind of world that we want to live in and we want future generations to live in.
¶ Creating Systemic Resiliency Through Education and Community Engagement
Is there something like one key thing
Absolutely. So I come out of a local foods movement. I worked in food coops for many years, board of directors, volunteer, whatever, up and down. And I've come to realise, and I mentioned this in the blog post that I wrote for you as well, that there was something really privileged about that and really a sense of exclusivity that I wanted to reject the mainstream food system and engage in something
that felt more authentic. And over time, I came to realise that, wow, that leaves out a lot of people who are still victimised by the mainstream food system as it is who cannot afford to choose organic foods or locally sourced foods. And so the one thing I guess I would like to leave people with is to you'd want to be able to tell folks innovating in this space do this work. We really have to figure out how to make sure that
everybody can benefit from that. And that probably requires different pricing mechanisms, or different subsidies, or whatever it may be. These are problems that have solutions. And once we can define the problems, we can begin to strategize around the solutions. But if our solutions leave out large segments of the population, there's nothing sustainable about that.
As you're supporting these folks to go out and find solutions, people go to, and they do a whole lot of to consider to be mindful of to make sure to incorporate? different things, they have different ways of thinking their narratives are different in their head, is there some tool or resource that you might be able to share that would help those individuals, maybe not in your classroom, but that are trying to have an impact in their own community?
I think so. And the thing that comes most immediately to mind is just empathy for the positions of different stakeholders. So not only the folks that you're trying to help out, but the folks who have some investment in keeping things the way that they are. I worked in, or I led a class around Syrian refugee resettlement and the resistance
of local communities to refugee resettlement. And the most impactful work that we did and that was teaching students to listen without judgement well enough to actually understand the positions that other people were coming from. And in doing that, and in echoing it back and making it clear that those people felt heard, that begin to clear a space in which actual communication could take place, it wasn't just oppositional
anymore. And I think that that's what we need to do. Recognise that there are people who are very much invested in the food systems that exist today. Understand their points of view, understand where they're coming from, show them that we understand that. Also, represent the people who are being left out, or who are suffering, who live in areas where convenient stores are the only place where they can buy food for their family and to be able to share those stories to bring those
stories together. Because if we begin to hear each other's stories, we begin to function as a community in ways that we don't when we have a polarised political atmosphere that comes. As you said earlier, of a place of fear. Feeling threatened, oh, I don't want you to change the system because I'm paying my bills this way, and that sort of thing. But instead, all we're asking if people listen to what this person has to say that's
non threatening, it takes a lot of work. And there are techniques to learn to make that happen in ways that feel safe and make it possible to be vulnerable. And I could tell you more stories, but I think we're limited on time about that. But I think that's the most important step forward to move past the polarisation by engaging with other people in our communities, as human beings, not as enemies or antagonists.
I think personally, I love that sentiment. And I love that idea. But what I initially think is like, wow, it's easier said than done, right? Because I think that to change somebody's behaviour, to change the way they think takes time. It takes trust. And so I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for that because it's not easy to get people to change their minds or change the way they think. People don't always like new things. Some people are constant
learners. They're always looking to do things. And then there's a lot of people that don't like change. So what do you say to
¶ Understanding Different Perspectives to Address Social and Environmental Issues
them?
Well, first of, Jonathan Haidt book, The Righteous Mind, which looks at how different people process information through different moral frameworks. So we can't expect everybody to find the same moral lesson in a set of information that we do that's really helpful to figure out where other people might be coming from. And then I use the process of nonviolent communication to instil in students the listening skills that they need to even begin
that conversation. And in that particular case with the refugee resettlement, we created a website that did nothing other than gather stories from people with different points of view so that they can be heard. So that when people started to have actual conversations about policy or practices, they could say, well, how is that going to feel to this person based on
what we know. So that can happen there. But I do want to say one other thing about that, that we find ourselves in a moment, right now with climate change, occurring at a faster rate than we thought where there is urgent action that needs to be taken. And that is curving our carbon emissions to zero as quickly as we possibly can. Whatever we can do. Political pressure subsidies, different sort of carbon pricing, whatever we need
to do. Stopping pipelines from being built, buying food more locally so that we don't have thousands of miles to bring our organic lettuce from California or wherever it may be. That's really urgent. The other kinds of changes that you're talking about, and that I'm talking about here are longer term changes. This is the work of adaptation. And it may take
generations in some cases. But other places, it begins as soon as we have a conversation with that person down the street who we know may be ideologically opposed to where we are, but we have a conversation about their kids, or that tree over there looks like it's not doing too well or whatever like that. When we can get past depicting each others as enemies, and instead be neighbours, neighbours who disagree are a lot different
than dealing with evil people or something like that. So the adaptation will take a long time, but it can start with the next conversation that we have.
Are there any hard hitting statistics you could state in regards to understanding people's culture around the world and the impact it has on building a more sustainable future with regards to food and climate, etcetera?
Well, I don't know that I have statistics as much other than just to gesture to the Yale programme on climate change communication, which tracks the degree to which people are concerned about climate change, alarmed, dismissive. And every year, we see that dismissive number gets smaller and smaller. Most people by now understand that. Yes, we're starting to feel the impacts of climate change. And it puts us in a situation where we have to figure out how to do
things differently. We're coming to the end of the fossil fuel age, which was stretched out longer than it needs to be. We have to come up with alternatives in terms of energy production, infrastructure, food systems as well. And that creates unparalleled opportunity for us to figure out, well, if we have to recreate this system anyway, how do we do that in a
way that is more sustainable? And I'm going to use the term regenerative here because my students love the term regenerative and actually would prefer that to a term like sustainability. And the metaphor there of being able to actually enrich the soil through the process of agriculture is a wonderful metaphor. It hasn't caught on as widely yet, as I would like it to. But we have the opportunity to create systems that are regenerative, and that are just and you can't
leave the question of justice out of sustainability. Because
¶ Communication Strategies for Creating a Regenerative Future
if large numbers of people feel disempowered,or left out of the process, there's nothing sustainable about that. Another crisis waiting to happen so we have an unparalleled opportunity to think carefully to talk together about, how might our culture? How might our communities look different in 20 years than they do now? And what can we do to bring that into being?
Amazing. I think he just weld it down so that we can give hope and inspiration to those folks trying to create change. And I think for the most part, people
see what's going on. Obviously, there are people that don't. But to be able to provide a lens to look through to better understand, to identify how to have those communications in a respectful way is going to help people collaborate, innovate, and create change for the future that could create that would be beneficial both for health, wellness, and sustainability.
I hope so. And that's really what draws students to our programs is this belief that there's an opportunity now. They want to do work that feels meaningful. It's clear that we're at a pivotal point. And forgive me for sounding dramatic, but a pivotal point in the evolution of human culture. We've had a couple hundred years now of petroleum fueled or fossil fueled industrial growth, which has created expectations that are probably not sustainable in the
long term. They've given us some great things, and none of us want to lose those benefits of industrialization. But we need a post carbon world now that we're moving into. And if the students can make a living, doing work that feels meaningful, helping bring that into being, learning the skills and the knowledge along the way that allow them to be really effective in the work
that they're doing, it just take so much inspiration. And especially in younger generations who have grown up more digitally immersed than I have, who see possibilities and connections that wouldn't necessarily even occur to me. And there's something almost playful. I think about that digital mindset that I think some of the future lies down that path. And some of it lies in old fashioned things, lending libraries for tools for people who want to start a garden but
don't have a shovel or don't have a picker. The transition movement is great for this. I encourage your listeners to check out Transition US if they're in the United States.
You mentioned a couple of different resources, a couple of different books, so I'm going to make sure that we add those into our show notes as resources for folks, as well as any information about your program because it sounds like it's a great resource, potentially for people that are already out in the world doing business that want to understand better. How they can continue to build a more sustainable future through collaboration, through classroom, through their
community. So Laird, thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time.
Well, thanks for having me Justine. That's been fun.