I was excited to begin my tenure as president of Carleton the same summer the College announced the closing of the steam plant and our transition to geothermal energy. I viewed Carleton’s historic strength and great potential in sustainability and environmental education as a secret weapon to mobilize, one that could prove the relevance and value of a broad-based liberal arts education for addressing the world’s most urgent challenges. Sustainability has been a strong focus since that time, beginning with the campus and Board discussions that led to our decision to divest from direct investment in fossil fuels in 2022, and continuing through the announcement this fall of the Sustainable Futures framework.
Our efforts to understand our relationship to nature and the environment are always evolving. Over my lifetime, I have seen the transition from simple warnings about individual littering and pollution evolve into the growth of a robust environmental movement geared towards systemic change. I have also watched the emerging scientific recognition of the dangers of “global warming” be broadened into the concept of “climate change”—and then split into the opposing characterizations “climate crisis” and “climate hoax.” Efforts to focus popular understanding of the magnitude of environmental challenges have ranged from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, and Michael Mann’s The New Climate War.
Part of that relationship is of course personal. I grew up in a family that loved hiking and the outdoors, and many summers were spent criss-crossing the country in a green pop-top camper from our home in Pennsylvania to our favorite Western national parks. When I took my own children to those same parks decades later, I recognized how fortunate we were to be able to share a common experience of those special places. It was an early reminder of something I feel far more urgently now, the responsibility we have to the generations that follow and the looming threat of incalculable loss.
As a young professor and scholar, I took a strong interest in literary representations of landscape, and how they intersect with other cultural representations of nature. I appeared on the first Modern Language Association (MLA) conference panel to be labeled with the new term “ecocriticism,” and the full-length version of my paper “The Uses of Landscape: The Picturesque Aesthetic and the National Park System,” anthologized in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996), remains one of my most-cited publications. At Middlebury, I taught Visions of Nature, a core humanities course in the Environmental Studies Program, and was actively engaged in developing their ES program as professor and provost.
It has been fascinating to continue to follow some of the work being done in environmental science through the career of my daughter, Laramie Jensen ’15, who after getting a chemistry degree at Carleton pursued a PhD in oceanography and is currently a postdoc at the University of Washington. She studies micronutrient trace metals in the Arctic, collecting water samples during arduous, weeks-long cruises in order to chart the changing supply and distribution of these micronutrients, a key sign of ecosystem health in the Arctic Ocean. Because so much climate-related work is government-funded, she and her colleagues are deeply concerned about the possibility of changing politics leading to reduced research opportunities.
Our Sustainable Futures framework is exciting to me because it is about environmental education in the broadest sense—about using our campus, our classrooms, the Arb, and our local community, as an endless laboratory for study. At the same time, it insists on a reciprocal obligation: that any subject of study is most valuable when it has a positive impact on our lives, surroundings, and communities. As I think about the challenges that coming generations of students are likely to face as the world grapples with the increasing effects of climate change, I am proud that Carleton is preparing our students to be well-informed citizens and leaders.
—Alison Byerly