Sustainability Recycling • Resources • Lifestyle
Learning to adapt in a pandemic – now and in the future
W
hen I retired from Instead of teaching a group of ten Chattahoochee or so students in a comfortable Riverkeeper, room with windows along one nearly six years entire wall and state-of-the-art ago, I began teaching a water audio-visual equipment, I will resources class every fall to have to somehow engage these graduate students in the School bright young people through the of City and Regional Planning screen on my home computer, at Georgia Tech, where I earned at least for the foreseeable future. my master’s forty years ago. That My most successful classes, to degree helped launch my career date, have been those in which in water policy, culminating the students’ energy and my in a satisfying, twenty-year responses created a feed-back position leading the only loop of sorts, keeping all of us nonprofit advocacy organization focused on a particular topic. focused solely on protecting the How will I be able to do this Chattahoochee River. effectively, when we must One of my goals has been communicate at a distance? to pass on some of the “realHow will I read non-verbal world” lessons that I learned over cues from the students that, in the years to my planning and the past, have helped guide my engineering students, hoping lectures and our discussions? these lessons may prove useful. By Sally Bethea Are there best practices of For at least some of the fiftyvirtual teaching to help me Sally Bethea is the plus students I have taught, I retired executive direc- grab and keep the attention believe that this has been the of distracted students? As the tor of Chattahoochee case. In truth, I have gotten as Covid-19 pandemic is teaching Riverkeeper and curmuch, if not more, in return, rent board president of us, the ability to adapt is critical: as the students asked tough embracing new ways of achieving Chattahoochee Parks questions about the changing goals, both personally and Conservancy whose environmental issues that face professionally. mission is to build a our communities and planet. With one small group of community of support They have challenged me to students to co-teach a new (to for the Chattahoochee think more deeply and try to me) environmental management River National Recrecommunicate more clearly; their ation Area. class this fall, I know that my enthusiasm and desire to make challenges will be insignificant the world a better place has never compared to those facing failed to sustain me, as I worked to make teachers in schools across the country my lectures as interactive and interesting as who must manage many more classes and possible. students: teaching and grappling with issues The fall of 2020 will be very different. related to the pandemic, including unsafe
ABOVE THE WATER LINE
working conditions, along with life’s other uncertainties. I’ve been thinking a lot about my younger son, Robert, who teaches English at a large school in San Diego; I’m confident that his creativity, resourcefulness and ability to deal with changing circumstances will help him get through these difficult times. But I still worry about both of us – and all teachers. Changing circumstances. Adaptation. Do we demand that our lives and activities remain as close to “normal” (whatever that is) as possible, defiantly refusing to acknowledge the change that is obviously taking place around us? Some predict that future pandemics will be more frequent and spread more rapidly, unless we stop the widespread destruction of our environment: rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture, intensive farming, mining, the exploitation of wild species and more. The current pandemic is not likely a one-off. Do we find ways to thrive, not just survive, by embracing reliable scientific knowledge, by electing and supporting leaders unafraid of making hard decisions, and by investing as heavily as necessary in pandemic mitigation and adaptation? This type of quandary has, of course, been taking place on the planetary level for decades with climate change. The majority of the people in our country are finally demanding that climate action be taken now. Will Big Oil and Wall Street listen and voluntarily adapt to change their ways – or find themselves forced to alter their business-as-usual approach? At the end of July, Canada’s last intact ice shelf – the 4,000-year-old Milne Ice Shelf – collapsed, breaking into huge
“iceberg islands.” The melting was caused by hotter air above and warmer water below, according to a glaciologist who said, “Without a doubt, it’s climate change.” Last year, fifteen extreme weather disasters caused at least a billion dollars in damage each and seven of them cost much more: California wildfires ($25 billion), Typhoon Hagibis in Japan ($15 billion), and flooding in the American Midwest ($12.5 billion) – all events exacerbated by climate change, according to scientists. In 2018, Georgia Tech launched its Global Change Program, designed to coordinate and grow education and research activities that create positive change: solutions and economic opportunities at the intersection of global change, climate change and energy. Planning and engineering students at the university are readying themselves with information and strategies to help communities grapple with the impacts of climate change that are already observed – and those that will come. The students will need all the tools in the proverbial toolbox to help communities thrive and embrace changing circumstances, be they related to pandemics, global warming or other issues. My hope is to inspire them to seek new ways to build their toolboxes – to be resilient and resourceful in the face of uncomfortable and, in many cases, frightening change. To do that, I will first need to overcome my own trepidation about online teaching. Instead of complaining about how hard and different it will be, I’ve decided to learn about any creative approaches that will make remote learning as meaningful and satisfying as possible for all participants. I am learning to adapt. Sally Bethea’s first water resources planning class at Georgia Tech in 2015.
22 September 2020 |
At l a n t a I N t o w n Pa p e r. c o m
