A Call for Student Awarness of Community Problems

To the Editors:

This article is written in response to the lack of action demonstrated by many people at Oberlin College to climate change issues. With our increasing lack of drinking water, lack of land, and rising cases of insect-borne diseases, climate change should weigh heavily on our minds. In the future, it will affect the things listed above, but also biodiversity, agriculture, and communities. We have groups on campus that have started to take the lead in fighting for efficiency in buildings such as OPIRG or raising awareness on these issues such as Climate Justice, but these are just a minority of people who have taken action. We have and have had the opportunity to change Oberlin (our college, workplace, etc.), so as to become a leader in efficiency, and an example that it can be done. It is important for us to start to understand why people lack the motivation to act on certain issues that have many implications for our future in order to start moving towards a more active student body. The writing that proceeds is an attempt at understanding the passiveness of the student body on climate change issues.
Students at Oberlin are busy people. There is barely enough time to study, hang out with friends, exercise, or participate in other activities. The truth is that we do the things that are important to us and we prioritize. Those things that we do not get to do are things that we do not have time for. The issue of climate change, for many of us, falls into this category. It is something that has not affected us directly yet, but is something that will affect us all in the future. We are a culture that does not react unless forced to and many think that this is what will happen – it will take a crisis for us to deal with this imminent problem.
In some cases our lack of motivation to take action is a form of denial. Many accept that there is a problem, but deny the responsibilities that they have in a solution. We start blaming the college, the government, the state, etc., but do not take action ourselves. Many probably just do not know how to deal with a complex problem such as this. It is an issue that overlaps most subjects – biology, geology, agriculture, social sciences, policy, etc. It is a hard issue to think about since it is so multi-faceted. Also, it is hard to take leadership in a cause because we want to be supported and validated in such decisions, but with a large amount of opposition it is hard to take that first step.
There is also a problem with the way information is delivered to the public. The problems include getting way too much information and being overwhelmed by it, not getting enough information and being left in the dark, or getting information that is not credible. Many articles have been written and interviews have been done with skeptics, such as Pat Michaels and Robert Balling Jr. Both are professors who have been supported many times by energy companies, and set out to criticize the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the source for the most credible information on climate change. This skeptic media that has been circulated has made at least part of the public perceive climate change research not as something many scientists agree upon, but something of scientific uncertainty.
With all that being said, I hope that this will be of help in some way in making the student body a more active participant in climate change issues. I, myself, am not going to offer a way that people might become more active because I believe that people should act because they truly care. On their own, people should think about how climate change issues affect them today (with the war in Iraq being a war over resources, the increase in deaths due to heat, the increase in cases of lyme’s disease and West Nile) and how climate change will affect them in the future. If the public is not aware of these effects, or not reminded of these effects, this is one thing that should keep being addressed by groups like climate justice, but also the institution we attend, the media, and other sources of knowledge. People should decide for themselves what their role in this issue is and decide how best they can help push climate neutrality at Oberlin or lower carbon dioxide emissions when they leave Oberlin.

–Kim Jennings
College senior