Above the Waterline

Sustainability

Recycling • Resources • Lifestyle Learning to adapt in a pandemic – now and in the future

When I retired from Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, nearly six years ago, I began teaching a water resources class every fall to ABOVE THE Instead of teaching a group of ten or so students in a comfortable room with windows along one entire wall and state-of-the-art audio-visual equipment, I will have to somehow engage these graduate students in the School of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Tech, where I earned WATER bright young people through the screen on my home computer, at least for the foreseeable future. my master’s forty years ago. That degree helped launch my career in water policy, culminating LINE My most successful classes, to date, have been those in which 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 fiftySally Bethea is the virtual teaching to help me plus students I have taught, I retired executive direcgrab and keep the attention believe that this has been the tor of Chattahoochee of distracted students? As the case. In truth, I have gotten as Riverkeeper and curCovid-19 pandemic is teaching much, if not more, in return, rent board president of us, the ability to adapt is critical: as the students asked tough Chattahoochee Parks embracing new ways of achieving questions about the changing Conservancy whose goals, both personally and environmental issues that face mission is to build a professionally. our communities and planet. community of support With one small group of They have challenged me to for the Chattahoochee students to co-teach a new (to think more deeply and try to River National Recreme) environmental management communicate 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 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.