 I have the top of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to a very special edition of the Future Trends Forum. I'm glad to see you all here today. Today's session is all about the launch for my new book, University is on Fire, Higher Education in Climate Crisis. That book appears this week. It has just hit stores as of Tuesday. It's officially in print. Some of you have gotten copies. I already have a stack of copies. I'm going to read a bit from this coming up. What I'd like to do is, first of all, just acknowledge everybody who helped make this happen. And I'd like to then introduce the book, talk a bit about it, read you a bit from it, give away a couple of free copies, and also I'd like to really, really hear your questions and thoughts. This is, as you know, if you're not new to the forum, this is a very supportive place. This is where it is all about your conversation. So any questions you might have about the book itself, what's in it, how it was made, but also about the ideas. How higher education and the climate crisis will intersect over the next 75 years. This is the hour for your thoughts and your questions about that topic. So to begin with, I can just tell you a bit about how this book came about, because it's an unusual book in some ways. If you don't know me, I'm a futurist. My focus is on the future of higher education. And for the past roughly 20 years, I've been focusing on helping college and universities understand and think more creatively and strategically about where they're headed. That previous book, Academia Next, was an analysis of the next generation of American higher education. And after that was done, and it was very successful and a very interesting book and a lot of fun to write and all kinds of stuff around that. But after that was done, I was working on ideas for a new book. And I thought, okay, let's get big. Let's think about the whole planet of higher education. All roughly 20,000 universities and colleges. And let's think about farther out. Let's think about what could happen with academia internationally up to the year 2100. So I was bracing. That was exciting to think about. And as I started sketching and researching and poking around and outlining and researching more and asking people things, what aspects stood out to me? In the futurist field, it's considered almost mental practice not to mention climate change. If you're looking ahead, trying to understand what might happen, we have to think about global warming and how it impacts everything in human civilization and the world. And I found in higher education, there wasn't a lot of discussion about this. It wasn't showing up in scholarly literature. It wasn't showing up in popular literature. There wasn't a lot of talk about this in presentations on academic Twitter. There was a little blip about this in 2008, a little bit more in 2012, that was about it. So I pressed on this and thought, okay, maybe there's something going on here. And the more I researched, the more I poked and prodded, the deeper and more complicated the problem got and the stranger it got in many ways. I found that the climate crisis just ramified across so many different levels of higher education that it was, once I saw that, it was impossible to unsee that. And I started seeing climate change working throughout higher education. And I also found there is so many ways for higher education to respond and to anticipate and to act proactively in response to the global warming crisis. So meanwhile, as I was writing this, the global warming became worse and worse, obviously. And also activism grew and grew. And I started looking for parallels between popular uprisings like extinction and rebellion. Legislative moves like the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, obviously the continued IPCC reports and the COP meeting and thought, I think there's a lot of inspiration here that we can draw on as we try to think about how higher education could respond. And that's how the book came about. Johns Hopkins University Press, a big shout out to them, it was extremely helpful. My dear friend and editor, Greg Britton, was just superb and their whole team has been great. So just a whole wave of applause for Johns Hopkins. I just love them to death. I think they did a great job. What I'd like to do right now is just walk you through the book a little bit. And then I want to read a bit of it. And as I do, I want to hear some of your thoughts and some of your questions. Sarah tells me that she's looking at page 23 right now. That's good, that's good. I hope I haven't predicted another pandemic that'll come true. Matthew asks if I'm gonna make you uncomfortable. I'm afraid so. This is a challenging book. I try to infuse as much optimism as possible. One chapter of particular best and worst cases takes you through the entire range of where things can go. Carl, thank you. Thank you for the kind words. So really, really quickly, the way this work, and by the way, I should just put this in the chat. If you'd like to learn more about the book, of course, to buy a copy, let me just put it in the chat, our little homepage for the book, but also I'm gonna put in the chat a discount code. So if you enter H-T-W-N, that'll give you a chunk of change off of the cost right now. Elena, I'm so glad to hear that you're doing that right now, I'd love to hear more if you want. Can I bring you on stage or ask you more questions about it? Let me know in the chat. So the way this works is, in fact, let me give you a graphic, because this graphic will help you take a look through this a little bit. And my thanks to Ruben Puertadura and Tom Haynes for helping me create this graphic. Its clarity is their fault and any weirdness or ugliness is entirely mine. Each chapter of the book takes on a different piece of this infographic. The first is beginning with the physical campus. And I start by talking about campuses that are under physical danger from climate change. So roughly 30% of the human race lives on ocean shores or close to them. So campuses all around the world from Florida to New York City, from the Mediterranean coast to the shores of India and Bangladesh. There are universities and colleges that are in danger of being flooded or being just drowned underneath the waves. And in the time frame we're talking about is one to 60 years. So this is very short range, some of this will take longer to come about. In fact, in Indonesia, the capital Jakarta, they moved the capital of the nation out of Jakarta because Jakarta city is at sea level and is already in danger of flooding. There are at least one university there one mile away from the shore. But we can think about the opposite. Climate change is often described as giving you too much or too little water at the right place. There are a good number of campuses around the world that are on the edge of deserts or on the edge of really, really seriously dry lands which are likely to become more dry, more airy and possibly have lots of dust being a problem. We also have campuses that are in danger of fire. Hence one of the reasons for the title of my book are campuses that are surrounded by very dry forests and are likely just to be caught up. Now these are just immediate, immediate dangers. There's also secondary dangers. As the climate warms and as it changes, you get changes to forests and to flora of all kinds. You get changes to animals, which means your campus will over time physically look different as the ground is literally a change. But it also means that we are seeing changes to other fields, mostly cell biology and epidemiology. So we're likely to see new viruses and new diseases move in and out of areas. We're also likely to see changes in local economy. Agriculture, for example, becomes very different once it's one, two, three degrees. Some are very different. All of these are ways that change the life of the campus. At the top of that, humanity responds to this. I mean, we're already thinking in different ways. We have climate denialists. We have green parties. We have national policies that try to encourage people to move away from water's edge. Or in the US, we have national policies which encourage people to live on the edge of oceans. We also have policies that will shape how we elect power supplies and so on. All of these are forces impinging on the campus. And there's still more. There is also what we do with our buildings. How do we renovate them? How do we build new buildings that are carbon neutral or carbon negative? Do we, for example, cite new sources of renewable power on our physical campuses? Do we put in wind turbines or solar cells depending on where we are? When we offshore our campus electrical power, like most of us do, where do we source it from? A Berea College in Kentucky, for example, recently bought shares of a couple of hydropower stations off campus just down the road so they could use hydropower to power them, which is great. I mean, how many of you work at campuses where the electrical power comes from burning coal or burning gas? Something to find out. And then on campus, how else do we change other things too? Do we add more trees? Which is something almost everybody likes, but it can be done badly. Do we also change how we support cars? Do we get rid of fossil fuel burning cars on campus, starting with the ones that our campuses own? And so what? I mean, this goes into food supplies, this goes into ag programs, so all of that, all of that. It's just that one chapter on the campus grounds. That's a whole book worth of ideas. Then we talk about research and how research changes. That is, we're seeing more and more research across the disciplines. I was talking with a former forum guest this morning, Derek Brough, who was asking about interdisciplinarity. And this is quite true. There were many interdisciplinary ways to work. For example, if someone in the chat could just volunteer me a city, give me a random city name, just toss it in there. Okay, Wichita. So if you're trying to look at Wichita, Kansas, and how it might be impacted by the climate change, you have to involve a wide range of disciplines. You need urban studies, local history, in order to understand Wichita, where it is, how it functions. You also need to use a bevy of natural sciences, meteorology, hydrology, earth science, obviously, to understand the transformation of natural forces around it. And then how people there will react. You might need psychology, you might need sociology. And then to go back to the sciences again, engineering, if you're going to build a barrier or a wall, change shape of buildings, and so on. That's just the beginning. I mean, climate change is in many ways one of the most deeply interdisciplinary fields, and so many disciplines are getting involved across the social sciences. I've seen sociology, religion, history, anthropology, who evolved. And the humanities, I'm seeing more and more people being involved in that as well. So it may be that we see more and more research being done, more research being produced, and this changes how we support and conduct research on campus. There's also a danger with this, which is how materials that we research might themselves become endangered by the climate crisis. For example, there was a, in Mexico, there was a wonderful archive that's talking about shutting down or moving because the temperature and humidity combination is so high there that it can't support the combination of air conditioning with the humidifiers in order to keep things running. Think about natural scientists who are studying, for example, forests or undersea developments. And as those change, because of climate change, how can they keep doing this? There's also the political problem. There are so many political challenges to this, of the risk of being doxed, of being harassed, of being opposed, all of this is there. But let me pause for a second. I'm throwing a ton of stuff out at you. In terms of the physical campus grounds and in terms of the research enterprise of higher ed, how do these, what questions do you have about how those change in the climate crisis? Tom Haynes asks a good question and we flash this on the stage so you all can see it. As always, Tom, that's a good question. If you had to pick, do you think climates, could you and universities are more likely to be impacted by climate change or more likely to impact the mitigation of climate change? This is an interesting idea. This is a very interesting question. If I understand it, if I understand it, Tom, right now it's the former. Right now there isn't a lot of institutional level engagement with the climate crisis. And we can talk about that a bit. If interest grows, and I hope to spark some of that, and if the crisis worsens and people react to it, then maybe we'll catch up. Maybe we will see more and more campuses, more and more academics taking more steps. That's a good question. It's a very good question. Thank you. Matjia mentions that their university has a customs mastery degree in climate action. Matjia, I'm coming to that next. I'm coming to that next. Lisa asked a really good question that I haven't mentioned so far. She asked about universities led by climate deniers. It's interesting. I haven't seen a lot of active climate denial on campuses. What I see instead is people deciding not to be active or not to be interested, which is a different thing. There are some climate deniers and they can get some great publicity, but I really haven't seen a lot of them. I did talk to the president of one university, and she told me that she didn't think her students would be interested, and nor would her faculty or staff be interested. I asked her what they were interested in, and she said the students want bigger cars. So it's not quite climate denial, but in some ways it is. So that might be one example. Good question. Sheen Lee Wong, and I owe you an email. Sheen Lee Wong, I promise I'll get back to it. She asks, what does it mean when an organization is carbon neutral? Is it everyone working there carbon neutral as well? A good question, good question. So carbon neutral means that the thing we're talking about, whatever it is, is not emitting more carbon into the world, nor is it producing carbon. That it's basically just neutral in that sense. Everyone working there, the carbon neutral, no. You can balance this in different ways. So you can have, for example, carbon sequestration technology, drawing down carbon at the same time you have something emitting carbon. So it can be uneven. Depending on the entity we're talking about, Sheen Lee, then it's what the overall impact is. Good question, good question. Tom offers the idea of climate delusions, which is very good. And then Chris Mackey asks a great question. Let me put this up here. How Western do you want this conversation to be your stay? Dynamics free campuses can be very different in EEDE nations, where campuses are younger, less sunk costy and more fragile. I want this to be a global conversation, Chris. The US bears outsize influence in part because we have about a fifth to a quarter of global higher education. We have a lot of influence through our reaching, our teaching, and of course influence through soft power of the American culture around the world. But in my book, I try to cover every continent. And I want to make sure that we think of this. So for example, in Chinese higher education, the Chinese government is very strongly pushing for the whole society to burn less carbon. Well, at the same time, they have several projects which do burn more coal, which is unfortunate. But universities are part of that. And so they're caught up in that very authoritarian government. And this is very different in Europe, where a lot of European universities, for example, have to go with European Commission guidelines, unless of course we're talking about Britain. And in a lot of the developing world, there have been some really interesting projects. Quite a few African universities have seen research where researchers take a look at what the campus is actually doing. You have measures covering the footprint, taking a look at environmental dynamics around it, trying to measure that and feed that into planning. So yes, I want this to be as global and global as possible. Good question, Chris. Thank you. Now Lisa says, but to navigate successfully into the future, we need to be not carbon neutral, but carbon negative. Any examples of that? Well, we have projects to make us carbon negative, that is to withdraw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So just a quick note, I don't have time today to go into great detail about the science of climate change. There's luckily tons of ways that you can learn about that. Maybe we can talk about that and give you some suggestions if you like. But a key thing here is all the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide is the big one. Now, methane, stronger carbon dioxide, it's much stronger. We just don't emit as much of it. And it's also shorter lived. So when we talk about carbon, that's just our main focus. We have to keep my method as well. Right now, there are some pilot projects around the world. Iceland has been a leader in this, developing devices that can suck down carbon from the atmosphere. There are a lot of problems with this in early days. It's a very energy intensive project. So there's a question about, when will it actually be, will it be sustainable? And then there's also the question of what do you do with the carbon? There are a few different plans, bearing it underground, stashing it at the bottom of the sea, turning it into physical objects. I'm wondering how many campuses will start wanting to develop or offer their own carbon sequestration devices? I'll read about this a little bit. Good question, good question. Don Lubach, I hope I pronounced that right, Don, correct me if I'm wrong, has an interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary team. Good for you, good for you. I'm so glad to hear that. Data, hello. I'll be talking to you in about an hour, I think if I'm right. Sheila says that you're on page 93 of the University of Arizona Firing, can't put it down. Sheila, you've made my day. That is terrific. Thank you. Tell people about that. I'd love to hear that. We have a couple more questions there, more than a couple. We have a bunch of questions that are flooding in. So one of them comes from, oh gosh, some of these I have to get to, I have to set up for. And in fact, yeah, all of these I want to, yeah, your questions, I need to say a couple of words about some of the chapters to come. So, I've talked about research where we have more research activity, more research into climate change happening across the board. And so we should expect that to occur in teaching as well, to have more people teaching more and more about climate. And again, this should be across the board where we can have as sort of as formerly. So more programs like the one that you've mentioned of all, but also individual classes, also content within classes. So if I got to teach my romantic poets class again, for example, which I love doing, I would spend a bit more time on Percy Shelley's revolted Islam poem because the center of it is a detailed description of environmental catastrophe, which is now very, very interesting to look at, for example. But we should also expect some other issues as well. How do you do interdisciplinary teaching? How do you support that? We have a lot of novels for it, but it's still difficult to do. And there's also other challenges too. How do we change pedagogy? My dear friend Trent Batson says that one of the things we have to think about is how we change assessment. If, for example, we think that hyper-individualized society, hyper-individualized capitalism help get us into this mess, perhaps socially we need to be a little less hyper-individualized. Well, if that's true, a series of ifs there, but if that's true, then how does that change assessment? Should we, for example, through assessment, teach students to be more communally focused? So reduce the amount of assessment they get on an individual basis, individual assignments, more group work, perhaps more organization work. That's another way of thinking about this. I'm a big fan of gaming simulations, and those are great ways of teaching climate. So pedagogy needs to change as well. This is a great place for inquiry-based learning, project-based learning. But we also have some dangers. I mean, for example, what happens is more and more students come to us with climate trauma. Students have gone through a terrible flood of fire and disaster or they're climate refugees. How do we support them? How do we honor them and their experience? But at the same time, we'll also support them without being cruel. Now, all of this is talking about academia kind of internally, but we have all kinds of interesting relations outside. So I have a chapter on town-gown relations, that is how a campus communicates and interfaces with local community. And that can be very productive, but also be several frictions. But then how does academia change with the world? How do we engage with the entire situation? That is, do we enter into the lists? Do we campaign with governments? Do we take public intellectual positions that are trying to convince more and more people to do more and more about the climate crisis? If we believe the climate crisis is the great challenge facing human civilization for the next 100 years and beyond, how much of higher education should we mobilize in this effort? Do we, for example, send more and more students to do service learning in climate causes, working on sea walls or perhaps helping re-plant farms that are changing? Do we participate in giant leagues of academics? Perhaps we create our own kind of academic peace corps to go and help people cope with climate change. Do we just try to reorganize human civilization with all of our influence, with all of our research and all of our teaching, all the millions of students that come through our doors? And we try to basically rebuild civilization for a better time to help us survive and maybe thrive in the Anthropocene. So I have a simple cheesy graph for you to think about in this sense. It has four quadrants for how a given academic unit might answer those questions. And on the top is the idea that the unit, any unit could be a college, university, a system, a department, a program. And on the top, the idea is to conserve. You have a great unit, a great department, a great division, a great campus, and you want to protect it. And that's going to be your focus. You want to preserve and conserve that. I don't mean conservative in terms of ideology, I just mean conservation against the future. So that's one stance. I think it's a pretty popular one. We have on the left quadrant the idea of adapting and that is that the climate crisis is changing the world and it's also changing higher education. So we need to adapt and cope in response. And this is in part where you may get more degrees or changes to assessment. On the right, we get adaptation becoming mitigation. As we try to fight the crisis, we try and do something to minimize its damage. So here, this might be where we plant more and more trees or draw down carbon. This might be where we make a key point of serving less and less meat and animal products and our dining clothes. This might be where we stop flying faculty around the world instead, try to do more virtually or to reduce our carbon footprint. And below that, at the very bottom, and this is one of the biggest things that I find, it's hard for people to talk about, is it possible moving your campus, migrating it? And that migration might be physical. So if you were to say on the edge of a desert, there's an Egyptian University on the edge of the Sahara, for example, planning on just moving it to a better place, move from New York City to the Catskills, move from Miami to the Adirondacks, move from the Indian Ocean coastline inland as far as you can. The other migration is online, bricks and mortar, the whole enterprise, the physical enterprise of libraries and arenas, dormitories and classrooms and office buildings and cars and grounds. All of this so far is a carbon producer and a little of methane production too. Do we decide to minimize all of that by shifting more online? So those four quadrants, I think, give you a sense of strategic possibilities. And that's a lot of what the book covers. Now I can bring up some more of these great questions that you all have asked. So here is one from John Hollenbeck. John, I hope you're getting a touch of spring up there. John says, can you point me to a project of the, sorry, can you point to a project of the magnitude of climate change where academia has made a meaningful difference? Sure, if you're talking about history, I would point to World War I and the Civil War in the United States where we contributed a huge amount of human capital. A lot of soldiers, a lot of support people. In World War II, I would point to the Soviet Union in the United States to a degree of Britain and Germany where academia contributed to the rapid breathtaking research and development work. In fact, one of the great documents of digital history is the one written by Advan of our Bush. It came out after World War II ended, called As We May Think, where he uses that experience of an academic industrial military complex to try to imagine where information goes next. I think those are the biggest areas where you can see academia having historically made that kind of giant push. That's not enough, but perhaps the war metaphor is important enough and we can talk about that if you like. We have another question here. Whoops, let me bring this up on stage. This is from Richard Sebastian. Hello, Richard. Do you see difference in the approach to addressing climate change among different types of institutions? Community colleges, sort of like college universities for a year? What a great question, Richard. Terrific question. Yes, absolutely. Research universities, according to their name, will tend to devote more resources towards research. So let me include R&D. In my book, I interview a professor who's developing a just fantastically honking huge wind turbine where the size actually makes a difference and becomes more and more efficient. And for example, the community colleges, in contrast, are much more closely aligned to getting their students jobs. So this is where you might see green jobs. And by green jobs, I don't just mean jobs that are coming into their, coming into life as we expand the green economy. Such as think, for example, about solar panel installation, wind turbine maintenance, that kind of thing. But also current jobs that we need to have a lot more people in. Electrical engineering is just a howling need right now, for example. And on top of this, a lot of businesses that I talked to, including Amazon, have said they want college graduates who can just help them with this transition. They want a climate specialist and climate manager and climate consultant on board. So I think community colleges are likely to do that. Liberal arts colleges, I think are more likely to be really advanced in terms of pedagogy. I mean, this is where you should be able to see more in the way of creative pedagogy, inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, a lot of tracking individual student progress. I think we have one or two people here from Dickinson College, a shout out to them. Their sustainability project is off the charts. They've done things like add students, research the town that they live in. Their town's carbon footprint, present that to the town's leaders in order to guide the town's policy. They've also done many other things as well. They've integrated climate sustainability into their graduate requirements. They have a farm which is partially run by students who then sell and cook foods from that farm to students in town. And there's a lot more I'd be happy to bring some up on stage. I think there was really a very good cutting edge that way. And then thinking about religious institutions. I mean, the intersection between religion and climate change is fascinating. Do you, for example, if you're at an institution where a lot of Catholic universities are seeing themselves as social justice oriented, do you then, does that make a way of thinking about climate justice and trying to address the ways that the current climate crisis is really born unevenly and unfairly on those who've done the least to contribute to it? If you're talking about, say, a military academy, do they bear in mind the intersections of climate change and the military? The U.S. military is probably the second most progressive thinker in the U.S. government about climate change. They're constantly worried about climate change as a conflict multipliers or forced multiplier. They're working energetically on trying to reduce their use of carbon and emission of carbon. So a military academy, think West Point, would have to do more of this. So it's a great question. I'm just touching, I'm just skimming the surface here. There's a lot more to it, but it's a great question. Roxanne, hello, Roxanne. My dear Roxanne has a great question here. And this is the abyss gaze, Warren Ellis. He talked about in the intro, is this happening? And to what extent do you see this paralyzing universities and are there ways to mitigate this? So first of all, thank you for the question. Warren Ellis is a great writer, he's written novels, screenplays, a lot of comic books. Very funny guy, very much a futurist. And in one of his short novels called Normal, he comes up with the idea of futurists suffering from abyss gaze. People who look into the dark possibilities of the future so deeply that it drives them around the bend. And they set up a kind of mental recovery center for futurists and believe me, I have thought about going to such a place, writing this book. One of the chapters here, the best case, the worst case scenario is chapter. This is chapter six. The best case, it was the most optimistic I could think of and that shows me up. In part, I think about the huge inspiration that the crisis may give rise to human ingenuity and innovation. The worst case though, I don't think any college administrators have been talking about this. And it has to do with the degradation of civilization, the decline of standards of living, the rise of disasters, decreases in lifespan, increases in sickness, decreases of human population. The end of that chapter goes to a very, very dark place, the darkest I've ever been as a professional futurist. I think faculty and staff often fall short of that and they're more paralyzed by the multiple possibilities of action as well as the other demands on their time. Very, very good question. And the chat has just been exploding and I think I've missed a few of these. The Vivian enforcement, hello Vivian. There's lots of climate change with the jobs and post-sex need to educate for these types of opportunities. Here are 13 positions advertised indeed for Canada. Very good, nice one, thank you. And we have Gregory Shuckman, hello Greg. And he asks this, what are the strongest motivators in sentence for colleges and universities to be actively engaged in mitigating climate change? Great question, there are a bunch of them. And the first one is what the title hits. And on the first page of the book actually, I talk about immediate physical threats to campuses and how that is the first motivation or incentive. And that's going to be uneven, that's not going to apply to everybody. I guess about 30 in a population is close to sea lines or close to seashore, for example. But that's one. Second has to do with students. If you look at polling in the United States and Europe, and I'm not sure about elsewhere in the world, the polling usually finds that people under 25, people under 30 are far more interested in climate change than their elders. So if you want to connect with traditional age students and early young adults, then climate is one way to do that. The way I like to put people, put those two people is to think that Greta Thunberg is college age. If you look back a few months ago, where there's European events where people threw food and European works of art or dry-tensioned climate change, some of those activists were college students. So that population I think is going to be much more receptive to this and also might be more angry at the things that we don't do. So if we, for example, serve a lot of steak in our cafeterias, well, students give us pushback. If your research university has professors with petroleum engineering, will they be protested or hounded out as criminals against nature or criminals against humanity? On top of this, I think we have, there's a kind of social responsibility here and that we are producing or helping produce generations of students who will go out into the world to become everybody, to become national leaders, to become scientists, to become inventors, to become workers at all stages of our economy. And we're trying to prepare them for a world. Well, the world is changing. It's changing very quickly and the world of 1990 is not going to be a good guide for this any longer. So I think we have the responsibility to prepare them for that world that is reshaped by the Anthropocene. And beyond that, I think we can make the case that if this is such a dire crisis, we have an ethical responsibility to act. One more incentive will come from outside. If local communities, say a city or a county or local governments or larger governments, nations, provinces, the Bar-Mill, as well as nonprofits and businesses start giving incentives and business incentives to universities and colleges to act. So when, you know, how many campuses are lobbying for in the U.S. for money from the IRA? Tf. short induction night, the terrible name. I mentioned before campuses in China having to respond to the Chinese government. We need to look for those as well. That's a quick sketch. I've got a few more in the book, Greg, but that's a great, great question. Joey King, our good friend, former colleague, still colleague, good writer, brilliant consultant, the great president says, is the residential college model at odds with the climate crisis? For example, moving students to and from campus worldwide is quite costly from the standpoint of carbon release. It is, this is a problem. Now, most students worldwide tend to go to universities or colleges that are close to them. The American dream idea of moving multiple states away is a bit unusual. What does happen? And even if you do commute, you're still emitting carbon and you would emit less if you stayed home and you were online through Shindig or through your LMS or whatever. I think, first of all, this is a threat to our highest carbon travel. So to faculty who fly around the world for conferences and research, seeing the staff for students who also do the same, be it for spring break or for athletic events, I think that's first up that we have to think about very hard. And there's a lot of pushback to this. But I think the residential model we have to think very carefully about. Perhaps we move and we don't move for four years. We don't fly back home again or drive back home or trade back home again. I mean, quite possibly overall, we'll see humanity travel a lot less until we're able to grow out more public transit and more low carbon alternatives such as blimps and zeppelins. Good question, Joey. Karen Costa, hello Karen. And I appreciate your sacrifice for the ball game. Karen asked me another good question. I would love for you to speak about the connection between student, faculty, mental health and climate education. How can we get executive leaders to make this connection and invest in this work? Great question, fantastic question. And Colorado College may have the answer. I'm gonna be there next week. Colorado College is really committed to climate action. And they've done quite a few things, but one thing comes to mind. Many of their students report having mental distress in different ways, which I'm sure many of you here have experienced around the world as well. But what they've done is they've set up a whole bunch of projects for students to do. One of them is a kind of off campus eco village where students live and work on climate change. But they also teach K through 12 students about the climate crisis. And they report that they feel better afterwards, that they feel they've done something. And if we can generalize from that, I mentioned the students at Dickinson College going out and measuring their community's carbon footprint. How about a student who goes to a dam and analyzes that for an engineering project and were to strengthen it or rebuild it? How about a student who gets to help design an economic model for post capitalist or post neoliberal settlement? I think there are a lot of ways or actually climate action that we can provide facility. I think that can really, really help. At the same time, the climate crisis is taking a toll on student mental health. I mentioned before, the generational differences. Students are much more worried about this. There's a slogan from a poster that I've seen before that I mentioned in the book that just haunts me all the time that I use in presentations. It's always a younger person holding a sign of law from the sign says, you will die of old age. We will die of climate change. So a student who thinks that, who believes that, for whom that belief shapes their life and they come to your campus, how do you support them? I mean, giving them mindfulness exercises, okay, that's a start. But what can they do at your campus that is your campus uniquely? What curricula, what research, what activities can you provide? What can they do in the world? Great question, Karen. Great, great question. And we have one from Michael Higgins. Ah, Michael Higgins is what? Okay, I need to pause before I flash this on the screen. In the acknowledgements, I thank all of you. I thank the future transform because for the years, not only do you help keep me sane, but you help me think through this grand topic in great detail. And I really appreciate that. I thank you in the acknowledgements and I thank you now. You are altogether a collective of incredible intellectual horsepower and also a great deal of creativity and a great deal of empathy and that means so much to me. I couldn't have done this without you and I wanna thank you. And the reason Michael stirred me in this is because Michael has become my guru in thinking about campus physical planning. Michael Higgins is just a great, great person about this wonderful thinker and I'm just honored to be able to work with him and to learn from him. So Michael asks this, considering chapter seven, what can be done? 35% of US institutions will be carbon neutral by 2050. The next 30% pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050 but have not taken the steps to get there yet. So, and I suspect Michael, you'd like to say more. If you wanna join me on stage, click the raised hand or you could type in more to continue that. But I can say a bit more about this right now. 2050 is a long time away and the IPCC has said before that the 2020s are really the size of decade. I think this is something we need to be acting on yesterday 10 years ago, 20 years ago. And so now it really is the time to be working on this. I don't see a lot of campuses really acting even by 2050. So here, let me bring Michael up on stage. Hello, sir. Here it is. All right. Great to see you. I stayed up for a couple of days reading it. And- Thank you. No, no. I'm sorry. You know, as you pointed out, chapter six gets really dark. So I recommend everybody to be prepared to do something after they read the end of chapter six that take a walk, enjoy the sunshine, do something else, enjoy life. Because it's, as Brian said, pretty dark. So, Brian, to just make it brief so we can talk about it. In chapter seven, you say what can be done? And the fact of the matter is, as you point out, I've been put around of all the colleges and universities and the world is fairly large. And as much as, you know, some countries and certainly some major corporations would be the comparable that you provide. What can be done is campuses can reduce their carbon footprint is zero. And that comes in three components. Component number one is the energy that the campus uses that's used on the campus. The second is the energy that's used because the campus exists there. For example, electrical generation that takes place offsite would be in category two. And category three covers transportation, commuting on all those other categories. And there are rubrics by which it's possible to calculate those. So a whole bunch of campuses made commitments to be carbon neutral by 2050. I've done a survey of more than, right now I've got data on 120 institutions. I don't name names, but I've looked at these institutions in detail. And on the basis of that research, I can say that about 30 to 35% of the institutions across the country, this is US, are gonna be carbon neutral by 2050. In other words, they've honored their work, their words, they've walked their talk. Another 30% have said that they're going to be doing it but have not taken sufficient action to be able to do that. And the remaining 35%, I call the nearly nevers, have no climate action plan. They do across the board fairly consistent levels of what I would call greenwashing. That is they have words about sustainability but the only things that you can actually find have to do with recycling and community gardens, and community gardens, student gardening projects, that sort of thing. Not significant, can't move any, can't change their carbon footprint by virtue of that. And so what I encourage folks, everybody on this call and any place else in academia is to do the evaluation of their own institution. I've got the criteria on my website, campusmatters.net. You do your own evaluation and then you become a change agent within the context of your institution. The unfortunate thing is that most, well, the average academic will find that they're at an institution that has not taken proactive steps. That's my pitch. Oh, it's a great pitch and that's great work. I wanna share this. And thank you so much for this book. It is scary and wonderful at the same time. Thank you for saying that, that means a lot to me. Thank you, Michael. And I think we need to share your research when you're ready to, because this is important stuff to share. Thank you, Michael. Can I keep you up on stage for a couple of minutes? Sure. So everyone, check out Campus Matters and try to find a way to do this. And of course, we can also just grab people from Dickens and College get the students ready because they've already been practicing this. We had a question in the chat about saving the chat. So I would be happy to save the chat and share it. If anybody has any objections, please let us know in the chat or DM me, but I'd be happy to do that. Of course, I can optimize it when I publish it. We have another question that comes in and this is from Lisa Stevens. Hello, Lisa. And Jessica, really good question from a different point of view, which is how much do you think a general decline in civility discussion versus opinion is contributing to our current climate challenge? It depends on the country, Lisa, but looking at Brazil, looking at Turkey, looking at Britain, looking at the U.S., I would say yes to an extent. The polarized politics are so vicious and so intense that it's really hard to get an orange-wise and also can be very difficult to persuade people who were locked in. I think that the politics around the climate crisis are very, very complex and can really slide the few different ways, but it may also be that we see the worsening climate crisis contributing the other way to making more and more civility harder and harder to accomplish. I hope in the other side, we have a kind of shuttering realization that this is happening and we bend to it, but I'm afraid that's gonna be very difficult in some societies. Michael, in the chat, some people have just echoed your greenwashing theme. Sheila mentions greenwashing in white-stream higher education systems, which is a really, really good point. So we'll save it chat, unless anyone asks. Michael, actually, let me give you a break. I just hauled you up on stage. Let me let you rest. Thank you. Thank you. I do. And I'm gonna, I'll put- Sorry, sorry. I just clicked right over him. I'm sorry, Michael. Didn't mean, I didn't mean to do that. You're just, you were just talking and I just grabbed you. Sorry, you, I didn't mean to cut you off, Michael. Sorry. That's fine. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. A question came up in the chat, which Wesson discovered. I wanna thank Chris Jones for asking this, which is a really, really good meta question. Chris asks was what's missing in the book? Was there anything that was peripheral but a driving force or anything that has emerged since you launched? Yeah. COVID-19 was a huge one. And I've actually published or written a couple of, a lot of blog posts, but at least one article, thinking about what the experience of the pandemic meant for climate change. The great philosopher of science, Bruno LaTorre, the late philosophers that we should think about climate, COVID is a kind of dress rehearsal for the pandemic. He ultimately decided against that and said that wasn't really a good analogy. But it's a really interesting way of thinking about how humanity responded to this complex crisis and a science-based crisis as well. So that's one that I say a little bit about and it would be happy to say more about too. Another thing that has happened since we launched is just on the one hand, a sudden surge in developed world commitments to climate change. Again, the inflation reduction after the United States is a huge one and the European Union is trying to accomplish something similar themselves. But the reverse is also true. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has really in many ways knocked climate off the radar. It sucked up a lot of the political oxygen, but also it, well, threw some people into trying to build more renewable energy. It also made fossil fuels more valuable, which encouraged their wealth and so that's become, that's been a very, very challenging. And since this launched, I think there's also some of the interesting questions around AI, that is the current bleeding AI model that we've seen so far of large language realms. Among other things, it uses a ton of carbon. They have to crunch a gigantic amount of data in order to come up with predictive models. And so there's been some quiet pushback, say, well, maybe do we need to do this? The great activist, great writer, Bill McKinnon has a really interesting piece this week where he says that, you know, maybe we should pause AI right now. Maybe it's just not worth doing because that climate pressure is, we don't need that now. So we might see that kind of argument happen. That's the problem when you write a book is that you immediately peg it to the stream of time and time moves on and it becomes a historical document very, very quickly. Good question, good question. We have another question coming up. I actually, I think that was it, that was it. I did want to go to the chat to see if anybody else had anything more to add. Chris says things are more post-normal or complexity, chaos and complexity with good and bad and neutral. I think so, I think so. There have been some interesting terminology which I discussed in the book. There's the idea of climate change as a hyper-object that is something that is so huge and so intertwined with life that it's cognitively difficult to wrap our arms around and to grapple with. The wonderful economic historian Adam Tews has been calling, has been using the term polycrisis to describe our time. That is multiple crises and also the crises intersect and make things worse. So I think all of those, those two things are definitely happening. Vanessa asks a great question, a greener computing. So this is a real question that we don't have a good consensus answer on this. So do we, for example, use more IT on campuses because we want to, as Joey King pointed out, we want to reduce our carbon footprint and have less residential education and more online education. Do we want to use more digital experience to replace for face-to-face travel, that kind of thing. So that's all one possible side. The other side is that technology uses carbon dioxide and the life cycle of a given device, a phone, a tablet, a laptop, a desktop, a server that emits carbon dioxide. And the more computationally intensive projects use even more. Like I mentioned, AI, dataset crunching, but also thinking about Bitcoin mining. So I think the other possibilities will get pressure for campuses to use less computation and that pressure can come in a few different ways. And it may be that we see both play out across higher education, different institutions, or even getting conflicting signals in the same institution. So that's, I mean, it's a great question Vanessa. I'm working on an article about this. I hope I can get it out soon because it's something which keeps niggling at me. There's a lot of discussion around it. So I promise I would do two other things. One is I would give away a couple of copies of the book and another is I would read a little bit from it. So let me just quickly generate a random number here and the random number I've got is three and I attach that and that comes up with Matthew Plurid. Matthew, do you have a copy of the book? Let me know. And if not, I will send you a free one. I hope he hasn't fainted in shock. And then we roll the random number generator one more time and see who we get. And this points me at the magic number of 22 and that in turn leads me over to Carl Eho. Hello, Carl, do you have a copy? Let me know if you don't, I will send you one. I'll just need your info. Ah, Matthew, you bought it. Ah, well, thank you. Thank you, I'm glad you did. And Carl, send me your address so I can ship you a copy. And if we have on this redundant, I will get one more number up here. No sound effect, I'm afraid, but at least we get the randomness of it. And this one is Ron Friedman. I will send you a copy, Ron, if you could send me your physical address. I will ship you a hardcover copy signed and inscribed for you with a date. I'm glad to hear it, Carl, I'm glad to hear it, Ron. Sorry, I called you Carl Friedman, it's Ron Friedman. Now the thing I wanted to read you, and I'm happy to do that. I'm just so happy to be read. I wanted to read to you from the last page of the book. This is the chapter where I ask people to think about what could come next. Let's say for those that academia could play a vital role in helping the rest of the world become better informed, wiser, and more resilient. That might not be a gentle process. Higher education might have to coerce, cajole, persuade, and sometimes shock the global system into resilience through our social connections, intellectual firepower, and our ability to nurture. Yet it is too late now for colleges and universities to begin preparations for a far off danger. The crisis is already upon us. We're advancing ruthlessly into the Anthropocene. Fires now burn on academia's horizon. It is up to us to choose if those would be the flames of destruction or the lights of illumination. And with that, I'm gonna wrap up this session because it is the top of the hour and we all have lives to go back to. Thank you all so much for your support. Thank you to Johns Hopkins for making this book work. Thank you for all of your great questions. We're gonna save the chat and we're gonna post this online as we use the recordings live. It's been a real pleasure. I do need to show you the last couple of slides just to talk about where things are headed next. We have a whole bunch of events coming up. So just go to forum.futureeducation.us to see more of those. If you wanna keep talking about this, please hit us up on Twitter or Mastodon or LinkedIn or wherever. Just use the hashtag FTTE and make sure you at me wherever you go. You can look back into our previous sections on the climate crisis. We have a whole bunch of those on the forum page. And above all, thank you all for thinking together. This is a huge, huge struggle that we're involved in. Glad to be doing it with all of you. Please everybody, be safe, keep working, take care of yourselves and we'll see you next time online. Bye bye.