Our Shared Storm tells the overlapping stories of four characters as they play out in five different future scenarios. Each of the five parts of the book takes place in the year 2054 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Conference of the Parties—better known as the COP—as a superstorm approaches. The characters’ roles, motivations, and actions differ, though, as a result of how their worlds have dealt or failed to deal with the effects of climate change.

There’s Diya, whose job is different in each story, but who is consistently a power player within the world of climate negotiations. There’s Luis, a Buenos Aires local who exists around the periphery of the conference, from being a driver in one story to a kidnapper in another. There’s Saga, a climate activist (and in one story, a pop star) whose level of pessimism—and comfort—in dealing with government delegates oscillates from part to part. And then there’s Noah, whom Hudson described as his “personal id,” a mid-level U.S. delegate (or, in the same story as pop star Saga, an exploitative entrepreneur) who has limited control over his country’s commitments but who does what he can to grease the diplomatic wheels.

“I got this idea of these four characters and figured out how to sort of remix them each time,” Hudson said. “It’s really fun to do [that], to take your characters and rethink who they are in all these different ways. One thing you can do then is try to find these moments of opportunity and figure out where your characters swerve, and then figure out what that says about the different worlds.”

In a blurb for Our Shared Storm, the celebrated science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson wrote that Hudson succeeded in finding creative ways to explore those swerves and the worlds that led to them.

“Hudson has found a way,” Robinson wrote, “to strike together the various facets of our climate future, sparking stories that are by turns ingenious, energetic, provocative, and soulful.”

Negotiating the Future

The book’s futures are based on a set of climate-modeling scenarios called the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, or SSPs, which were developed by climate experts in the 2010s and used in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report in 2021. The scenarios range from “Sustainability,” in which aggressive climate goals are met and a more utopian future takes shape, to “Middle of the Road,” a continuation of current trends of inequality and consumption, to three more dire possibilities—“Regional Rivalry,” “Inequality,” and “Fossil-Fueled Development”—each of which would bring its own variety of high-level threats.

Hudson came across the SSP framework after starting the master’s degree program in sustainability at Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation in 2017 and realized that it laid out scenarios for the future much in the same way that so much speculative fiction does, and in this case, with the explicit backing of scientific research.

“As soon as I read about [the SSPs], I was like, ‘Oh, these are science fiction stories,’” he recalled.

After visiting the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, which houses the SSP database, and meeting with scholars there to talk further about their research, Hudson realized that by writing five futures set in the same time and place with the same characters, he could eliminate variables and make it a kind of experiment.

“Originally,” he said, “a big part of the way I framed it as a master’s thesis was, ‘I’m going to do practice-based research to analyze my own experience writing these stories and figure out just how hard or easy it is to create literature based on scientific models and rigorous ideas about the climate.’”

Then, in December 2018, a member of his thesis committee at ASU, Sonja Klinsky, arranged for him to be part of the university’s observer delegation at COP24 in Katowice, Poland. Attending the conference, and thinking about the storytelling possibilities of a hypothetical climate event affecting that kind of event, helped him flesh out the book’s structure.

“When I talked with IIASA, we had thought, ‘How does each scenario handle a climate shock?’” Hudson said. “What could show how, [if]a superstorm hits, each scenario handles it differently based on the investments they’ve made?”

In the book, the storm is very strong and causes damage in each scenario, but local and global communities’ ability to deal with that damage—and the levels of suffering and violence that go with it—vary widely.

An Intellectual Journey and a Speculative Movement

Hudson grew up in St. Louis and moved to New York City to enroll at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where he majored in political science with a minor in creative writing. He also was the opinions editor for the The Observer, the award-winning student newspaper at the Lincoln Center campus.

“The Observer, doing the opinions page, writing a column—all those things definitely were steps on my intellectual journey … of being really keen on stories about arguments,” Hudson said. “And I think discovering that I liked talking to people about their writing was a big discovery that happened there.”

After graduating in 2009, he spent a year working as a journalist in India, where he had studied abroad as a Fordham undergrad, and when he got back to the States, he became a reporter at the St. Louis edition of Patch. From there, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he did freelance writing and political and nonprofit consulting.

In 2015, Hudson wrote an essay called “On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk,” which laid out the practical implications of an aesthetic movement that portrays a utopian future in which solar energy is harnessed creatively to build beautiful, sustainable cities and communities. Like the dystopian cyberpunk genre before it, solarpunk is more than just an art movement—it was meant to portray real possibilities for how the world might look in the future.

When trying to define the term in the essay, Hudson wrote, “Let’s tentatively call it a speculative movement: a collaborative effort to imagine and design a world of prosperity, peace, sustainability, and beauty, achievable with what we have from where we are.”

Hudson met, around that time, another writer and futurist thinker, Adam Flynn, who in 2014 had written an essay on solarpunk. The two co-wrote a short story, “Sunshine State,” that won the first Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest sponsored by ASU’s Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative. Seeing the work that was taking place there led Hudson to apply to the university’s sustainability master’s program, from which he graduated in 2020. In addition to his work as a fiction writer, Hudson has stayed on as a fellow at the Center for Science and the Imagination’s Imaginary College, which partners with individuals and groups “advancing [the] mission of fresh, creative, and ambitious thinking about the future.” The college counts Robinson among its resident philosophers, along with other notable writers like Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling.

And while Our Shared Storm began as his master’s thesis, with its publication by Fordham University Press, Hudson hopes that it can help a wider audience see that we still have options for what our climate future will look like.

Science Fiction as an Impetus to Action

While Hudson does believe that speculative fiction can help people imagine a brighter future, he said stories alone can’t save the world.

“I think they’re a necessary, if not sufficient, part of the process, [and] we need a huge tidal wave of mobilization that includes a huge amount of culture making. We’re going to need art. We’re going to need music. We’re going to need TV shows that do for solar panels what TV and movies did for cars back in the ’50s and ’60s, [making] car culture cool. We’re going to have to do that for these technologies of sustainability.”

But without massive organizing and political action, Hudson believes, “we could figure out how to communicate this to the public in a really effective way and still lose.”

Our Shared Storm touches on the conflicts that often arise when people and communities want to effect change—is it easier to accomplish goals through established political systems or through grassroots work that doesn’t rely upon state action?

Hudson has described solarpunk as a countercultural movement. “It should not be about the people in power,” he said recently. “It should be about the people who are not in power, who are sort of challenging those systems.” But after witnessing firsthand—and writing about—the geopolitical mechanisms that dominate spaces such as the annual COP meetings, he has come to appreciate the need to work within traditional political and diplomatic systems.

“I think learning how the institutions work—the national, local, and state governments that are trying to implement the treaties—and then kind of inserting yourself into those processes can be really powerful,” he said. “The stories are there to help people understand these dynamics and institutions, and help them get a little smarter about policy, get a little more strategic about where they put their efforts, [so they’re] not going to get taken for a ride.”

In Our Shared Storm’s most optimistic story, a strong labor movement is key to influencing government policy, and while he acknowledged that there is no one easy solution, Hudson believes that the working class uniting—and pushing for things like a Green New Deal through general strikes—has the potential to positively shape the path ahead.

So, with the scenarios laid out, and with some ideas about the actions necessary to avoid the worst-case ones, what kind of climate future does Hudson see us moving toward? That kind of prognosticating, he insisted, is not part of his project.

“What I was interested in was how we’re shaped by opportunities and material conditions,” Hudson said, harking back to his characters’ changing circumstances and swerving fates.

“All these things that I think end up shaping our lives—those were kind of the pivot points that I wanted [to show readers]. The point being that climate and the investments we make to deal with it are going to be a big factor in shaping those pivot points for billions of people.”

Castaldo, who resides in New York’s Hudson Valley, has been interested in nature—and writing about it—since she was a child, but it wasn’t until she was a student at Marymount College that she homed in on ecology. During her senior year, her interests converged: All at once, she served as president of the science club, editor of the literary magazine, and an intern at Audubon Magazine. Since then, she’s published more than two dozen books, written countless articles, worked as an environmental educator, and won some awards, to boot. She’s also a certified National Geographic Educator.

In When the World Runs Dry, amid the heartbreaking anecdotes from Flint, Michigan, and the alarm bells about Earth’s rising sea levels, Castaldo offers readers ages 10 to 18 years old not only potential solutions but hope.

Your interest in nature and the planet began very early on, but when did you know that you wanted to pursue that interest professionally?
Before I entered Marymount, I really thought of becoming a veterinarian; I came in initially as a biology major with that in mind. I ended up finding out early on that that was not the path I wanted to pursue, but instead I wanted to pursue more of ecology and animal behavior—and my ecology class at Marymount was instrumental in solidifying that.

What’s your favorite part of the writing process?
I am definitely a research junkie. I love every aspect of it. It’s like a scavenger hunt. I’m able to just explore things that I’m fascinated in during the research phase. So, when I get the OK to do any of my books and I begin that phase of research, whether it’s spending time in a library, digging out old books in a science library, or traveling, that is the part that I really enjoy the most. And of course, research brings you down a path. It gives you offshoots of things to write about, and discoveries that you didn’t know when you set out to research a topic.

To date, which research destination has had the greatest impact on you?
There’ve been so many for many different reasons. When the World Runs Dry involved a lot of research to areas where folks were having serious water issues—a lot of crises. One of those was a visit to Flint, Michigan, and it was very, very difficult to see the environmental injustice that occurs and to experience in a very, very, very minor way what these people are going through. It’s eye-opening. It changed the way I look at communities and environmental justice, and I think that will stay with me forever.

I think that anytime we travel outside of our own experience, it opens us up to a deeper understanding for the world around us. When I was working on a book called The Story of Seeds, which is another young adult book that came out in 2016, I was able to travel to Russia and spend time in St. Petersburg. And of course, right now, facing the war news every day in Ukraine, I can’t get that out of my head. What I learned in that trip, which was very instrumental in my thinking going forward, was that scientists have a different sense of boundaries, of country borders, than I think the rest of us. Scientists don’t put up [the same] walls, and maybe we can learn from that.

So, there’ve been things like those experiences, those research stories, that have really opened my eyes to the world climate, so to speak.

Your books largely fall into the young adult and middle-grade ranges. Why kids? What drew you to this audience?
Writing for kids is a gift. Kids remember the books that they read. They’re impressionable at that age. They are a challenge to write to, as well. You have to be really, really careful about what you write for kids in that it must be accurate. You can’t put anything over them. They’re smart, and they deserve books that tell them what’s going on out there. And then, what I try to do in my books for kids is, I want to not only inform my readers, but I want to inspire them to action. I want to empower them. I want to write for kids to let them know that they have a voice, and I want them to be able to know that their voice matters. I think that’s a different goal than writing for adults.

We’re leaving the world to kids, and we need to give them the tools that they need to move forward—to be competent, well-versed citizens. I love the kids that are fighting for the planet right now. I feel like they’re our future, and they need books that are going to help them. I’m hoping that my books do that.

How do you go about conveying such complex, layered issues in a way that’s digestible for the kids? One of the things that struck me when I was reading When the World Runs Dry was that you didn’t “dumb down” the topic. How do you balance presenting the info in a way that this audience can understand, but also in a way that’s challenging?
Yeah, it is challenging to do that. And sometimes it takes me a few passes to get it right, and good editors to help me along with that, as well. I think that kids today are a little bit more versed than they were when I started writing. I remember writing a book in 2008 that was called Keeping Our Earth Green, and that book was about all the different issues that we face around the planet. At that time, I had to describe to kids what climate change was and put it in very understandable terms. But since then, there’s so much out there now that kids really understand.

What I tried to do with When the World Runs Dry was to give them real-life examples of different water issues that they could really dig into and understand; flesh out a little bit of what they were hearing on the news already. And knowing, of course, that my readers are going to represent a wide age group, so trying to balance that a little bit, and providing resource matter that helps them get more information if they need it.

The book does a really good job of humanizing the topic, as well. Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of people who have been negatively impacted by the water crisis, so how did you choose the subjects that you highlighted in the book?
I wanted to show the diversity of people involved, to show kids that it pretty much didn’t matter who or where you were, that there are water issues that could impact you wherever you lived. And to also get a variety of places. Unfortunately, there’s so much in the news that it was a matter of picking and choosing what were the best examples of those different aspects. I wanted them also to see that it wasn’t just happening in the United States. We may not be experiencing the same level of crisis here in the United States, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening in Australia or South Africa.

While I wasn’t able to travel to all of those areas, I did travel quite a bit for this book, and I wanted my reader to come along with me for that exploration and see the variety of climate, the variety of people, the variety of country, and how each area and each group of people were being impacted. I really do wish there were less places to choose from. It was a matter of which ones to leave out more than which ones to put in.

How did you remain hopeful as you worked on this book?
I believe that we all have to have hope about our planet. How else could we go on? You can’t strive to make a difference if you don’t have hope. If you don’t think that there can be change, there won’t be change. But, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t times in this book when I was writing it that it was just overwhelmingly sad to hear about people who were displaced, people having health issues; the young woman that I dedicated the book to passed away after I interviewed her. [Jassmine McBride died in February 2019. Then just 30 years old, McBride was the 13th official victim of Flint’s outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease, a respiratory condition caused by soil- and water-dwelling bacterium.]  She still stays with me, and I can’t help but be upset and saddened by so much of that.

It was a difficult book to write, but I think that it’s always better to have the knowledge. One of the things that I tried to do was include as many young people as possible in the book—there’s obviously always room for more—to let my young readers know that there are other teens out there that are doing amazing things by raising their voices or inventing things, [like Mari Copeny’s #WednesdaysForWater Twitter initiative or Gitanjali Rao’s handheld water-testing device].  Those are the aspects that bring me hope. Those are the points to the story that take it to that next level, that provide us with the action, the energy, we need to light that spark underneath us to do something.

Your next book hits shelves in August. What’s it about?
The Wolves and Moose of Isle Royale is a story of ecosystem restoration. When I was in college at Marymount, I had a fabulous ecology teacher who taught us about this wolf and moose predator-prey relationship on Isle Royale, a fascinating little island that’s in Lake Superior and [part of the National Parks System].  It’s the oldest predator-prey study that’s happened in the world. The wolf population has dwindled so much that the moose population has soared, creating this huge imbalance in the island ecosystem, so the scientists decided that they were going to reintroduce wolves. This book delves into the predator-prey study, why the wolves are being reintroduced, and how that reintroduction is going.

It was just wonderful to go there, to meet the people I had studied in college that have been working on this project for so many years. It was fascinating: It was like my college classes coming back, full speed.

Buildings That Breathe comes out at the beginning of November. And it’s a young adult book about green infrastructure, urban greening, greening parks, and it focuses primarily on the vertical forest called Bosco Verticale in Milan, Italy. My research for that involved spending a week at a United Nations conference in Italy on urban forestry. It’s fascinating to be able to build buildings that actually help the environment—that can alter what our cities will look like in the future. So, that comes out in the beginning of November.

Is there anything else you want readers to know?
One of the things that I hope for the book is that my readers will also discover ways to deal with adversity. I think that’s very important at any time, but particularly now. We can’t get through our lives without such experiences. It may not be a water issue, but it may be a different issue. I’m hoping that my books provide tools to strengthen my readers and help them become active citizens in our world.

I hope the book empowers them, instructs them, entertains them, but also provides them with a way to develop their empathy, as well.

Fordham College at Lincoln Center graduate Marquetta L. Goodwine, Queen Quet of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, sang those lines from the spiritual “I’ve Been in the Storm Too Long” at the beginning of her presentation during an April 25 panel on environmental and climate justice. The event, held online, was sponsored by Fordham’s MOSAIC alumni affinity chapter and the Office of Alumni Relations. It featured alumni, faculty, and other experts who discussed how environmental and climate issues disproportionately affect certain populations—and how we can, both globally and locally, work toward lessening those impacts.

The lyrics Queen Quet sang also speak to the work she has been doing for more than two decades as chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, a sovereign people who live along the Atlantic coast from Pender County, North Carolina, to St. John’s County, Florida. On the low-lying land populated by the Gullah/Geechee, flooding has been a longstanding problem only heightened by the increasing number and severity of storms due to climate change.

As one of two keynote speakers, Queen Quet emphasized the importance of communicating about climate change in ways that are easily understandable to every community.

“It cannot be spoken of in terms of carbon emissions and CO2 and these types of things, because that is not everyday common vernacular throughout America,” Queen Quet said.

She also discussed some of the specific work the Gullah/Geechee Nation is doing to prepare for natural disasters caused by climate change, including building resiliency hubs to store supplies and solar power charging stations, which could also serve as an airdrop point for food and other necessities. And while her nation has already seen a great deal of damage from flooding and beach erosion, Queen Quet said that speaking at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in 2019 was an opportunity to share optimistic ideas with other leaders from around the world.

“We’re all trying to show each other living examples of what we’re doing where we are to make this world a better place, to try to heal it, try to reverse some of the impacts,” she said.

‘We Must Be Willing to Serve’

The second keynote speaker, Dr. Daniel Chidubem Gbujie, a climate activist, writer, and oral surgeon from Nigeria, seconded Queen Quet’s call for effectively communicating the risks of climate change to every community.

“Context matters,” he said. “The way you deliver your message is very important.”

Dr. Gbujie pointed to the ways that sub-Saharan Africa has already been devastated by climate change, from flooding in his native Nigeria to drought that has played a role in conflicts like the Sudanese Civil War, which in 2017 the U.N. World Food Program called “the first climate change conflict.”

As the founder of the Team 54 Project, a nonprofit organization with the goal of raising awareness about the impact of climate change and the need to take urgent global actions, Dr. Gbujie said that he has found inspiration in the mission of Jesuit education and the idea of cura personalis—care for the whole person—when thinking about how best to approach the climate crisis.

“For everything that we experience here,” he said, “there’s a level of empathy and sympathy we have to have. To resolve the climate crisis we have right now, we must be willing to serve. …

We must be willing to look for new, innovative ideas, and we must be willing to ensure that we have a moral compass that guides us when we negotiate.”

Along with the keynote speakers, the panel—which was moderated by Marion Bell, FCLC ’92, one of MOSAIC’s co-founders, with support from fellow chapter co-founders Felicia Gomes-Gregory, FCLC ’88, GSAS ’98,  and Marlene Taylor-Ponterotto, FCRH ’79—featured presentations from several speakers who discussed the infrastructural keys to adapting to and mitigating climate change, both at Fordham and beyond.

Using Infrastructure and Policy to Prepare for the Future

After opening the event with a prayer, Bell, who is also the chairperson for environmental and climate justice of the NAACP mid-Manhattan branch, introduced Marco Valera, vice president for administration at Fordham. Valera, who took on his current role in 2019 after serving as vice president for facilities management, discussed the work that has been done and will be done infrastructurally to reduce the University’s carbon emissions,—continuing to improve building insulation, for example, moving the University’s vehicle fleet to electric, and using available surface space for green roofs and solar panels, like those atop the Rose Hill regional parking garage.

The second speaker was Sameer Ranade, a climate justice adviser for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), a public-benefit corporation whose mission is to “advance clean energy innovation and investments to combat climate change, improving the health, resiliency, and prosperity of New Yorkers and delivering benefits equitably to all.” Ranade’s position at the authority was created as part of the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019—which was signed into law at the Fordham School of Law—and he provides support for both New York’s Climate Action Council and the Climate Justice Working Group.

Ranade presented some of the state’s energy and climate justice goals, which include reducing statewide greenhouse gas emissions to 60% of 1990 levels by 2030 and to 15% of 1990 levels by 2050.

“Clean energy can actually lower emissions in all sectors, but especially so in buildings, transportation, and electric power generation,” Ranade said, noting that moving to clean energy would also add 10 jobs for every one job displaced, according to a study by the state’s Just Transition Working Group. He also encouraged audience members to attend one of the Climate Action Council’s remaining public hearings to share input on the scoping plan for New York’s climate goals.

Fordham professor John Davenport, Ph.D., discussed another element of mitigating the effects of climate change that is particularly important to New York and other coastal communities: managing stormwater runoff. As the danger of strong storms and flooding continues to increase, Davenport said, it will be essential to use infrastructure like green roofs and street trees to absorb water and limit runoff, and to provide tax incentives to land and building owners for implementing methods of runoff reduction.

“It’s going to be important to start using the language of savings,” Bell said in response to Davenport’s presentation, touching on the same need for good communication highlighted by the keynote speakers. “What it will save us rather than how much it will cost us.”

“We want to set up a network of air quality sensors around the city and map out the air quality—particularly in the Bronx—and help students become scientifically literate activists in their communities,” said Stephen Holler, Ph.D., chair and associate professor of Fordham’s physics and engineering physics department, who is co-leading the project with Usha Sankar, Ph.D., an advanced lecturer in biological sciences. “Through our project, we can start a dialogue about climate change and say, ‘Let’s do something to fix it together.’”

Air pollution triggers many respiratory illnesses. One in 13 Americans have asthma, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. Among the five New York City boroughs, the Bronx has the highest percentage of asthma diagnoses for children up to age 12, as well as the highest child asthma hospitalization rates. 

The goal of Project FRESH Air (Fordham Regional Environmental Sensor for Healthy Air) is to combat those statistics with education. 

Holler has started setting up a network of PurpleAir air quality sensors in middle and high schools in the Bronx and upper Manhattan, including Jonas Bronck Academy, All Hallows High School, and Cristo Rey New York High School. Each sensor—not just the project sensors in the city, but independent Purple Air sensors worldwide—records data 24/7. The data is viewable on an interactive map in real time. 

The project garners interest because air quality is an issue people can relate to, Holler said. 

“I don’t think that many people in the Bronx are interested in the fact that it’s going to be one or two degrees warmer in a few decades. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and worried about your kids, that’s not your high priority, right? So we’re tackling this issue by looking at it through an air quality perspective,” said Holler, who has previously worked with local students on climate change projects. “Air quality will degrade as the climate changes. We’ll have more pollution and particulate matter in the air from combustion sources, vehicles, and the urban environment, which irritate the lungs and aggravate asthma. But this is an immediate problem that we can address.” 

The FRESH Air team, which includes Fordham faculty, undergraduates, and middle and high school educators, is now working on ways to incorporate the sensors and their data into middle and high school curricula. Students will be able to build their own handheld sensors with special kits. They will also be tasked with plotting air quality data from their sensors and searching for trends. 

“They can plot the data in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets and correlate it with factors like weather. Was the air quality better on this day or another? Was there a holiday? And they can start to understand the dynamics and patterns that are happening in their community,” Holler said.

This fall through a virtual webinar, the FRESH Air team introduced the project to students and families at Jonas Bronck Academy, located one block away from the Rose Hill campus. 

“The day after the informational session, our students were asking questions to all five of us teachers,” said Alexiander Soler, a seventh grade science teacher at JBA. “‘What is air quality? How does that relate to us? How does it connect to asthma?’”

Next spring, JBA will integrate Project FRESH Air into its sixth, seventh, and eighth grade curricula. The sixth graders will learn about air pollution and how it’s measured, the seventh graders will learn about health implications affected by air quality, and the eighth graders will learn how technology improves data collection, while using the sensors and their data, said Soler. Fordham undergraduates will also work with students on a weekly basis to help them analyze their data, said Holler. About 260 students at JBA will benefit from this curriculum, said Soler.

“These sensors are effectively going to be permanent installations,” Holler said. “Over the next two to three years, we are looking to have about 25 schools on this project.” 

The project originally emerged from the Higher Education Incubator and Think Tank led by Eva Badowska, Ph.D., dean of the faculty of arts and sciences and associate vice president for arts and sciences, and Anne Fernald, Ph.D., professor of English and special adviser to the provost, before the pandemic. It is being largely funded by James C. McGroddy, a former senior vice president and director of research at IBM who wants to promote STEM education, especially for minority and underserved populations. 

“The purpose of science is to gain an understanding of the natural world and its impact on our lives. This project will create a real scenario that our students can identify with, and hopefully increase their interest in science and becoming problem-solvers,” said Soler. “It will allow our students to see how science truly affects their lives.”  

That is the question that led Olivia Greenspan, FCRH ’19, and Zanagee Artis to write A Kid’s Book About Climate Change.

The two first connected a few years ago, after Greenspan read a New York Times article about Artis and his fellow co-founders of Zero Hour, a youth climate action group. Greenspan, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior at the time, had been involved with environmental work on campus and in her native Connecticut, where she helped establish TILL, a community-based real estate development company focused on rehabilitating brownfield sites.

Over the next two years, they discussed how children learn about climate change and decided they wanted to provide parents and teachers with an effective way to reach young kids. Greenspan came across A Kid’s Company About, which had recently started a series of books to help young people understand tough topics, including racism. While she was reading A Kid’s Book About Cancer in a Connecticut train station, she was approached by a woman who said her husband’s oncologist had recommended the book for their grandchildren.

“That was a moment for me where I was like, ‘OK, this company understands that kids are capable of understanding a lot more than we give them credit for,’” Greenspan said.

She reached out to the company, and founder Jelani Memory told her they’d been wanting to publish a book on climate change. In Greenspan and Artis, Memory found authors with experience organizing communities, especially young people, to address climate change.

Action as an Antidote for Anxiety

A Kid’s Book About Climate Change, published last April and marketed as being for children ages 5 to 9, is sleekly designed and includes the kind of information that adults may find both eye-opening and useful in talking about the topic with kids.

It arrived amid growing concern about how climate change is affecting kids’ mental health, with studies showing young people struggling to cope with anxiety about climate change and a sense that governments aren’t doing enough to counteract it.

In the book, Greenspan and Artis trace how 250 years of industrial living have affected the Earth’s climate, using a metaphor of sickness to help kids understand those ill effects. And while they don’t shy away from the enormity of the problems caused by climate change, they also lay out some concrete ways that young readers can help alleviate those problems, offering visions of what a more climate-friendly future could look like, from alternative energy to a robust high-speed rail infrastructure.

“There’s definitely a through line in the book about ways to take action and reasons to be hopeful, and learning about actual solutions to the crisis,” said Artis, who is currently a senior at Brown University. “It’s about ways that kids can think about solutions on their own and ways that they can influence others to take action on solutions. And there’s a quote at the very end that I really like, which is that ‘the best antidote for anxiety is action.’ We really believe that.”

Greenspan noted that she and Artis had a climate scientist who works with youth, as well as a licensed mental health practitioner, review the manuscript to help them ensure it strikes the right tone for their audience.

Now, the two have their sights set on a slightly older audience. In November, they launched 1 Point 5, a podcast on climate justice. Greenspan said the 12-episode series, produced by A Kid’s Company About, will cover three main topics: what climate change is, intersectionality and climate injustice (i.e., how issues of race, gender, class, and other forms of identity affect and are affected by climate change), and solutions. They plan to interview activists, climate scientists, and policymakers, and they hope to reach teens and tweens, in particular.

“It’s just such a great challenge,” Greenspan said, “because I’m always trying to become a better communicator about climate science and climate justice, and there’s no greater challenge than trying to condense really complex information to the simplest possible language. It’s really teaching me a lot.”

An Economic Perspective on Environmental Work

While working on the book and podcast, Greenspan, who majored in economics and minored in psychology at Fordham, has also been working a full-time job as a performance analyst at Paradigm Capital Management and serving as a climate fellow at Martini Education & Opportunity Trust, founded by Fordham graduate Brent Martini, GABELLI ’86.

Greenspan met Martini a few years ago, when he was an executive in residence at the Gabelli School of Business and she was a member of Fordham’s Social Innovation Collaboratory, a network of students, faculty, alumni and others working to promote social innovation. The group instilled in her “great values of collaboration and teamwork,” she said.

Greenspan added that while some might think economics an unlikely major and finance an unlikely career choice for someone with a passion for environmental justice, the two fields have given her a valuable perspective on how to address climate issues.

“Majoring in and working in those fields gives me credibility and a great lens through which to look at problems like climate change,” she said. “At the end of the day, it has helped me in getting into rooms and meeting people who have helped me on my climate journey.”

Educators with the New York Transit Museum guided attendees through two centuries of transit history as part of the event, “Sustainability of Public Transportation,” organized by the Office of Alumni Relations.

The presentation was framed by themes of economics and environmental and social sustainability. “We’re talking about public transportation systems that should be affordable, efficient, provide access to all, minimize their environmental footprint, and mitigate the effects of climate change,” said Kate Lanceley, an educator with the museum. She spoke—via Zoom—from inside a vintage train car at the museum, housed in a decommissioned subway station in downtown Brooklyn.

Thus began the tour. The first stop? New York City of 1827, a time when public transportation began with horse-drawn omnibuses, which offered bumpy rides on wooden wheels along cobblestone streets. Riders paid about 12 pennies, “which was really a lot of money at the time”—unaffordable for most people, Lanceley said.

Fares were lower, and the ride smoother, in horsecars riding on tracks, which debuted in 1832. But the cars moved slowly, about 8 mph along congested streets, and the horses’ waste “was a massive problem” because no formal department of sanitation existed yet, Lanceley said. While horse-drawn transport would continue, alternatives were on the way.

Steam-Powered Trains Arrive

Next, the tour pulled in at New York of the 1870s, when elevated steam-powered trains began service in the city, providing a faster ride—12 to 15 mph along a dedicated right-of-way—and enabling riders to live in spacious uptown areas while commuting to lower Manhattan. But the trains spewed a lot of pollution, blocked the light on city streets, and “were incredibly noisy,” Lanceley said.

And they were vulnerable to the elements—as shown when a blizzard snarled the trains and immobilized riders in 1888. The disaster is credited with catalyzing the formation of a rapid transit commission that examined options for a subway, Lanceley said, adding that some elevated train lines would be incorporated in the subway system.

The First Subway Leaves the Station

Next, the presentation arrived at the founding of the city’s first subway line, built between 1900 and 1904, which began at City Hall and stretched up the east side of Manhattan. Lanceley noted that early trains had overhead fans, “considered a big improvement” at the time. “Today, we look at the fan in horror,” she said. “Imagine if you were really tall and you stretched.”

The subway’s electrified cars were made possible by the same technology that powered streetcars and trolleys, which posed safety concerns as they moved through city streets crowded with pedestrians.

“Everybody is taking their lives into their own hands just crossing the street,” Lanceley said while showing a video from 1903 that appeared to be shot from a moving trolley. In fact, the dodging of streetcars was memorialized in the name of an iconic sports team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, Lanceley noted.

Also essential to the subway’s creation was the 1897 invention of multiple unit control, or putting a motor truck on each car, which allowed more cars to be strung together, since they didn’t all need to be moved by a single engine.

The final stop on the tour was present-day New York, where the work to make the subway system more efficient and accessible continues. The city has begun installing a signaling system using transponders to precisely locate trains so they can run more closely together, allowing more of them to be in service at once, Lanceley said. And the system also faces a formidable task in making all its stations accessible; right now, just 25 percent have elevators, she said.

Climate Change Considerations

Other work on the system highlights the looming issue of climate change, she said, describing upgrades to lower Manhattan subway stations to help them withstand storm surges like the one that devastated the South Ferry station during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

The hurricane “was really a huge wake-up call for the transit system,” Lanceley said. “Rising sea levels are going to be an ongoing challenge.”

The city is also confronting climate change via changes to the bus system, which was expanded in Manhattan in the 1930s to provide a safer alternative to trolleys, she said. The expected switch to an all-electric city bus fleet by 2040 will not only reduce carbon pollution but also combat that other scourge of New York transit: noise.

That much was clear when she chatted with a driver of one of the new electric buses, Lanceley said: “She really emphasized just how quiet they are, compared with the old noisy diesel buses.”

Alumni attended the event from as far away as Texas and California, taking advantage of the virtual format that alumni relations adopted for cultural and entertainment events with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. In-person cultural and entertainment events for alumni will resume in the fall, although virtual events will likely continue as well.

Alan Alda, FCRH ’56, has been working on this kind of thing for decades, promoting techniques not only for conveying science more clearly but also for enhancing communication by becoming more attuned to one another. And he draws on his experience as a six-time Emmy Award-winning actor, writer, and director.

“It may never have been more urgent to see the world through another person’s eyes than when a culture is divided so sharply,” he said in accepting a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild in 2019. “Actors can help, at least a little, just by doing what we do.”

Alda’s efforts toward better communication are detailed in his book If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating (Random House, 2017), and on Clear + Vivid, the podcast he launched in 2018. At the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, which Alda founded at Stony Brook University, researchers take a page from the playbook for actors by using improvisational exercises to get in a better state for communicating. And they also learn about the importance of deep interpersonal connection.

Alda has noted the importance of such connections in discussing issues like climate change, which often generates fierce arguments about how humanity should respond.

In an interview last year for the WNYC Studios radio show Science Friday, he emphasized trust and openness. “I don’t think I’m really listening unless I’m willing to be changed by you,” Alda said. “And that doesn’t mean that I’m going to agree with what you’re saying, but I might be changed by something about you, some deeply held belief you have, about just living, about your dedication to your children, or something like that, and I might be touched by that.

“That’s more important than hitting you over the head with my argument, I think, because it leads to more interaction.”

And they have their own head of state—Marquetta L. Goodwine, elected Queen Quet, chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, on July 2, 2000, when this nation within a nation was formally established in the presence of international observers.

A native of South Carolina’s St. Helena Island, where she lives today, Queen Quet double-majored in mathematics and computer science at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, working in the latter field during college and for a few years after graduating. But she changed direction in 1996, founding the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition to help her people safeguard their rights and way of life. Their nation exists within a coastal area stretching from Jacksonville, North Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida.

Queen Quet draws on a kaleidoscopic skill set ranging from art and preservation to mathematics and computer science in advocating for her people. She has written books about them; spoken up for them everywhere from the United Nations to city council meetings; and served as an expert commissioner on the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission established by the federal government in 2006.

Locally, she helps her people with land rights and other issues that tend to come up when native cultures meet rapid development and a rising cost of living. One recent bureaucratic tangle: a municipality putting Gullah/Geechee cemeteries on its delinquent taxes roster. “That has never happened before,” Queen Quet said one morning this past September after making calls about it. “People are asking me, ‘Well, Queen Quet, what’s going on? They’re going to take our graveyards now?’” Such snafus are often resolved amiably, she said.

Harder to resolve, however, is a global problem that is especially dire in the low-lying coastal lands where her people live, and that’s climate change. As rising seas and extreme weather ravage the land and fisheries that are central to Gullah/Geechee lives and livelihoods, she’s helping build support for long-term policies to stem climate change. She also works to mitigate its impacts locally—appealing to local officials to remediate rapid erosion on the Sea Islands, promoting more stewardship of area waterways, and other efforts.

“Gullah/Geechee culture is inextricably tied to the land and the water,” she said. “The land is our family, and the waterway is our bloodline.”

How has climate change affected the Sea Islands?
We’ve seen rapid erosion from sea level rise, and more intense and prevalent tropical storms and hurricanes, in the past 10 years especially. We went from one extreme about 15 years ago, with massive drought, to this overabundance of water—the sea level rise, the rains, the floods, the “king tides,” all coming in at once.

Farmers and the fishing families have suffered financially, whether they’re involved commercially or doing subsistence farming and fishing, which is our natural tradition. We’ve seen agricultural land inundated because of ocean and creek flooding, and now there is ocean acidification and pollution by single-use plastics. People are not catching the same amount of crabs, they’re not picking the same amount of oysters, they’re not getting the same harvest from the sea. So our food security is something that’s been taxed the most.

How does climate change intersect with racial injustice in your part of the country?
This year in the South, we had 100-plus-degree weather for weeks, and as a result our people are suffering because most don’t have health care. Am I having heatstroke? I can’t go to a doctor, I don’t have that kind of money. So of course more people of color, more people of African descent, are dying in heat waves. And mold and mildew are major issues on the Sea Islands. Who can afford to remediate a home if it gets flooded? Two, three generations may be living in there who develop lung problems but don’t realize why. So people then die of other conditions that develop due to long-term mold exposure.

Does racial bias show up in environmental action?
You look back in the history of environmental organizations, and Black people are not reflected visually; the optics show these are white-led organizations, and so therefore they don’t tend to look at communities of culture like the Gullah/Geechee Nation and say those communities and those lives are valuable, so we need to protect them. What you make a priority is what you’re going to resource. For instance, your organization’s not going to budget to help save a part of a Sea Island where Gullah/Geechees live, and protect their fishing industry in that location, if they’re not on your priority list.

What gives you hope?
Having the opportunity to go to the U.N. Climate Change Conference and work with groups advancing the Sustainable Development Goals, and being in the arena with people who are passionate about this topic. In international gatherings, I also see a lot of people of color fighting for their own communities and their own culture. It always gives me hope that it’s not me in a glass box hollering like I’m a mime and nobody can hear me, that someone’s hearing me and I’m making a difference.

One thing that people always hear me say is a statement that came to me as a vision from my ancestors and became the motto for the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, and it’s this: “Hunnuh mus tek cyare de root fa heal de tree” (“You must take care of the root to heal the tree”). If you want to get to the root of a problem, you need to dig for it, because roots that are really solid, they’re not on the surface. I’m ready to work to make sure that the fruit that’s produced from this tree in the future is sustainable and is healthy.

Queen Quet is also quoted in “Rising Temperatures, Rising Concern,” our related article about the Fordham community’s ideas for addressing climate change. 

She related all this not at a policy forum or in front of a class, but during her valedictory address at Encaenia in May 2019, taking advantage of the large, attentive audience at the traditional pre-commencement event for Fordham College at Rose Hill graduates and their families.

“This isn’t a story about what I overcame, or what so many of us have overcome. This is a story about how no one should have to,” said Happel, who majored in environmental studies. “There’s still time to fix this, but only if we start right now. Together, we have the power to solve the climate crisis.”

That crisis is getting more public attention because of nature itself, as wildfires have ravaged the West Coast this year and stoked public concern about extreme weather in a warming world. At Fordham, professors who have spent decades observing the effects of climate change offered insight into how science can help frame the need to take action.

Preserving Ecosystems

To build support for climate action, “you have to explain to people that their own survival depends on it, using economic terms and then health terms,” said Craig Frank, Ph.D., associate professor of biological sciences.

With species struggling—and possibly failing—to adapt quickly enough to rapid warming, natural processes that sustain humanity could be disrupted in ways we can’t anticipate, he said. In his own research at the Louis Calder Center, Fordham’s biological field station in Armonk, New York, he has seen eastern chipmunk populations drop by about two-thirds over the past two decades.

Warmer temperatures have changed the chemistry of seeds they feed on, preventing the chipmunks from lapsing into an energy-saving state of torpor while hibernating underground. To make it through a wakeful winter, they often need to gather more food than can be found in the forest, where trees are producing fewer seeds because of hotter and drier summers, Frank said. He estimated that nearly 1,000 mammal species use torpor in one way or another. It’s not clear, he said, how many hibernating species could adapt to environments that are changing at “an artificially rapid rate” due to growing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“We’re already in a situation where between 20% and 30% of the mammals in the world are threatened with extinction,” a figure that would grow substantially if warming temperatures keep disrupting hibernation, Frank said.

The highest rate of extinction is among plants, said Steven Franks, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences.

He has led or contributed to studies showing how field mustard plants are affected by extreme weather shifts. While they adapt to flower earlier in response to droughts, their seed production suffers, and earlier flowering can leave them more vulnerable to disease, he said. And when the plants respond to wetter periods by evolving to flower later, it’s that much harder for them to readapt when drought returns. The plants used in the studies were harvested in a part of California that, since 2004, has seen several droughts as severe as any in the prior 100 years after seeing only one such drought since 1977.

Drought is having “an enormous effect on many plants, and water scarcity is a really pressing environmental issue,” he said. “The population can be evolving and can even be evolving rapidly, but still not adapting fast enough to keep up with the rate of climate change, and the population still goes extinct.”

The rate of extinctions is accelerating, with about 1 million species—both plants and animals—at risk of dying out, “more than ever before in human history,” according to a 2019 statement by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Many of them could go extinct within decades, the organization said.

Frank highlighted what else could be lost or affected when species die out. “The air that you breathe is a result of natural processes,” he said. “The food that you eat is a result of natural processes. The soil that grows the food is produced by natural process. The water that you drink, that’s a natural process, too. All these are what we call ecosystem services provided to [us].” And yet, “we don’t fully understand how the ecosystems work or how they’re interrelated,” he said.

Using an analogy from the naturalist Aldo Leopold, he likened degraded ecosystems to an airplane losing rivets from one of its wings in midflight. “Each one of these rivets is a species, and we don’t know when the wing is going to fall off,” he said.

Consequences Big and Small

Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., associate research scientist and director of the Calder Center, noted the importance of getting people to care about nature and about future generations—not “by yelling at them,” but by setting an example. National leadership and political will are critical, along with cultivating an appreciation of nature among the young, he said.

Occupying 113 acres, the Calder Center serves as a laboratory where many subtle, still-unfolding impacts of climate change can be seen. Daniels’ own research specialty is ticks, the tiny arachnids that can transmit Lyme disease. Studying their population at the center over the years, he has seen them becoming active earlier in the spring and later into the winter because of rising temperatures. The warming climate has also allowed the Asian tiger mosquito, a possible vector for yellow fever and dengue viruses, to show up in Orange County, New York—“farther north than we expected,” he said.

While this is worrisome, “the larger picture is so much more devastating than vector-borne diseases being an issue,” he said. “The consequences [of climate change] go so far beyond us, and our particular risk in a particular location on a particular day, or in a particular year.”

Those consequences can range widely, from rising seas to food shortages to ocean acidification to an increase in climate refugees who are driven north by rising equatorial temperatures, said physics professor Stephen Holler, Ph.D., who will teach a new honors course on climate change in the spring 2021 semester. Emissions of carbon dioxide from human activity are contributing to the planet’s sixth major extinction event, which follows five others that also correlated with heightened amounts of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, he said. The most recent major extinction was the one that wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

He noted the value of showing how people can immediately benefit from actions to curb climate change. As part of the University’s Reimagining Higher Education initiative, launched in spring 2020, his team of faculty and staff members devised a project for communicating climate science through the lens of air pollution and how it affects people who live in the Bronx. It will bring together students from Fordham and from Bronx elementary and high schools to educate the community about air quality, using data from particulate sensors to be placed at the Rose Hill campus and throughout the Bronx.

Their goal is to empower residents to take social or political action about air quality in the borough. The Bronx has some of the country’s highest rates of asthma, which is exacerbated by particulates in the air, Holler said.

Holler’s course will cover social justice aspects of climate change, such as populations displaced from Pacific islands—as well as parts of the U.S.—because of rising seas, in addition to droughts and other environmental impacts.

Taking Action

In her speech at Encaenia, Happel called on her audience to work on climate issues with other members of “Fordham’s amazing global network, [f]rom bankers to biologists, diplomats to dancers.” And she called out one particularly inspiring Fordham graduate, a head of state who is “a powerful voice on the world stage for the rights of island nations.”

That alumna is Queen Quet Marquetta L. Goodwine, chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation. A graduate of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, for the past 20 years she has been the elected leader of this internationally recognized nation populating low-lying coastal areas and islands stretching from North Carolina to Florida. “It’s no stretch of the imagination to say that, someday, her country may simply cease to exist,” Happel said.

To avoid that outcome, Queen Quet has become a high-profile voice on climate issues, speaking at the United Nations and testifying before Congress while also working on smaller, more local efforts. (See related story.) In an interview, she touched on the importance of plain language in describing climate change and getting people to care. One of her projects is devising educational materials to explain the concepts of heat islands and ocean acidification. “Just because we throw around these terms in the environmental world, doesn’t mean the average person knows what we’re talking about,” she said.

Immediate actions can counter the feeling that the issue is too complicated and beyond one’s control, Franks said. It’s important to “promote the positive ways … we can change our major patterns of consumption … in a way that’s really going to be sustainable and beneficial for us as well as natural populations,” he said.

One example is choosing energy sources other than fossil fuels, he said. In her current studies toward becoming an environmental lawyer, Happel is learning about the importance of getting involved in local government to ensure clean energy is an option.

“So much of our energy grid is regulated through state public service commissions,” she said. “Even though I think a lot of us focus on national policy, state and local policy have a huge impact on whether you’re able to have clean energy in your neighborhood.”

Happel’s remarks at Encaenia in 2019 were part of the youth-led “Class of 0000” campaign to focus graduation speeches nationwide on the issue of climate action and convey its urgency.

“So many students and parents came up to me after that and thanked me for it, and said they thought it was really important,” Happel said. “So many people are impacted now. I think the landscape has changed so much, just in the past few years.”

See our related story, “Alan Alda on Creating a Good Communications Climate.”

“We are to care for the habitat because it is essential to our care for others. To care for our habitat is to care for ourselves,” said the guest speaker, Ryan LaMothe, Ph.D., professor of pastoral care and counseling at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in St. Meinrad, Indiana. “We can continue to care for people who are suffering from various maladies, psychological and physical, yet we must also keep in mind these larger forces and consider ways to intervene.” 

This year, the annual conference was called “Between Hope and Despair: Caring in the Age of Climate Crisis.” In a series of three hour-long lectures, LaMothe spoke about how climate change could affect pastoral theology and care, identifying challenges for caregivers and offering solutions. 

A Lesson from Mister Rogers

The effects of climate change are more significant than ever, said LaMothe. Over the past three centuries, global carbon dioxide levels have risen from 270 parts per million to well over 400, he said, adding that today’s situation is serious. The rise of greenhouse gases have melted glaciers, increased sea levels, and created catastrophic storms; those who receive the brunt of the damage are the poor and people of color. And people around the world—including his clients—are starting to feel anxious, said LaMothe. 

Our biggest challenges toward making our world green again include global capitalism, which exploits people and natural resources in the pursuit of profit, and nationalism, which keeps us from working toward the common good on a global scale, he said. 

It’s also difficult to change our lives for the Earth’s well-being. We’re all busy—with our careers, with raising kids, and being involved in our local communities, he said. But people, including pastoral caregivers, can still make a difference. 

“In terms of pastoral theology and pastoral care, we need to become more versed in making use of our disciplines as we seek to organize and cooperate with others with the aim of caring for the Earth and its residents,” LaMothe said, to an audience of more than 50 educators, students, spiritual care providers, and clinical practitioners. 

With clients, pastoral caregivers can use spiritual practices to facilitate mindfulness about the environment, he said. He encouraged the audience to view their vocation through a more communal lens—to see the Earth and humanity as a whole. He asked the audience to practice “personal recognition”—recognizing every client for who they are—as most famously shown by Fred Rogers, an American television personality and Presbyterian minister who hosted the preschool television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Lastly, he described the importance of “inoperative care,” in which a caregiver supports a client without following the rules and expectations set by society. He said a good example is a scene in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood where, on a particularly hot day, Mister Rogers invites a black police officer to cool his feet in a plastic pool with him. Despite the racial tensions in their lifetime, the two share a simple, routine conversation—like any two human beings, LaMothe said. 

“Inoperative care meant that Mr. Rogers was not operating out of the dominant cultural representations of the day,” LaMothe said. “Both men, in this moment of mutual care, were not operating under the delusions and contending disciplinary apparatuses of white superiority. They were operating under a mutual personal recognition and care.”

‘The Reality of Working With Human Beings’

In response to LaMothe’s lecture, Mary Beth Werdel, Ph.D., director of the pastoral mental health counseling program at Fordham, spoke about how pastoral caregivers can treat clients experiencing trauma related to climate change or natural disasters. 

Climate change can cause negative psychological effects, including a decreased sense of predictability and control that can lead to acute stress and anxiety, said Werdel. She urged the audience to help clients find meaning in their post-traumatic experiences, especially those related to climate change. 

“Stress and trauma remain intrinsically negative,” Werdel said. “But it’s moving through and enduring the stress and trauma that we come to find and feel and see something different about our world, about ourselves, and about others.” 

She also encouraged the audience to explore psychological and spiritual questions with their clients—not as separate issues, but as one.

“The reality of working with human beings is this: When someone is sitting in front of you … they don’t parcel out, this is my psychological question and this is my spiritual question,” she said, to laughter from the audience. “They just come to you whole. And so we, who spend time thinking about the realities of stress and trauma induced by climate change, have to consider both of these questions together.” 

Towards the end of the conference, LaMothe and Werdel held a panel discussion with two faculty members in the pastoral mental health counseling department: Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., and Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D. 

Bingaman thanked LaMothe for encouraging the audience to neither look away from nor discount the impacts of climate change. Cataldo urged the pastoral caregivers in the room to enter every clinical encounter without memory, understanding, or desire—three things that could impede their work. 

‘The Simple Power of Connection’

An audience member, who identified herself as a hospital chaplain who has supported new amputees and young mothers with traumatic brain injuries, shared a personal story. She said she was a quadriplegic who was once told she would live in a nursing home for the rest of her life. But now, she works as a chaplain who provides emotional and spiritual support. She noted the importance of hope and the place where it is born—“the simple power of connection” with others. 

In the last minutes of the conference, another audience member commented on the positive ways that society is combating climate change, from efforts as wide as New York’s recent ban on single-use plastic bags, to the conference committee’s decision to use paper plates during the breakfast buffet. 

“Any last comments on how we can go forward and encourage our children to be positive and hopeful and do concrete actions to help the environment?” the audience member asked the panelists. 

On a projector screen, Werdel had shared her son’s recent elementary school assignment. He and his classmates were asked to write their wishes for the New Year. “My wish for 2020 is … save white rhinos,” he wrote, beneath a hand-drawn sketch of two rhinos smiling under a sunny sky.  

“I cannot save these rhinos, or the thousand other species that will die because the rhinos die,” Werdel told the woman in the audience. “But I can instill a sense of, hopefully, optimism and agency for what he can do, encourage him to speak out loud his sadness and his loss … Caring about other things—people and places and spaces—that are outside of what he normally sees.”

“Work 2040: Future of Work in a Sustainable World,” a daylong Gabelli School centennial event held at the Lincoln Center campus, brought together leaders from the private sector and academia to share their thoughts, hopes, and dreams with Gabelli School students, faculty and alumni for the way people across the globe will earn their keep in 20 years.

The day kicked off with a “fireside chat” between Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., dean of the Gabelli School, and Emanuel “Manny” Chirico, GABELLI ’79, chairman and CEO, PVH Corp. Chirico, whose firm hosted the January kickoff celebration of the Gabelli School’s centennial, said the key to surviving and thriving in business is accepting that volatility and unpredictability are the norm now. Resilience and nimbleness must be built into any long-term plans.

Prepare for Constant Change

“There’s more uncertainty today, and you have to accept that as part of how you’re going to manage your business,” he said, citing the coronavirus outbreak as an example.

“You have to build a business-planning process that allows you to be flexible and adjust, and a workforce that is highly resilient and can deal with constant change coming at them. That’s what we constantly talk about. I don’t know what’s coming around the corner, but I know there’s going to be something.”

He noted that the apparel industry—of which PVH is a major player, with brands such as Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger—has already been subject to major changes over the last five years. In addition to shifts toward online sales, there will continue to be challenges with supply chains. One of the unexpected side effects of shifting production to Bangladesh from China, for instance, was that factories that could once be built horizontally now had to be built vertically, thus increasing risks to workers. After an eight-story building in Dhaka collapsed in 2013, killing 1,134 people, Chirico said the industry made major changes to ensure it wouldn’t happen again.

Balancing profit and purpose is always going to always be tough, he said. PVH, for instance, has set an ambitious goal to protect the global climate by reducing energy use, driving a 30% reduction in its supply chain emissions by 2030, a tall order for a company that currently generates 65% of its profits and 50% of its sales from overseas, and must therefore negotiate myriad government regulations and incentives.

“Each of the decisions we make is impacting our associates, our consumers, our suppliers, communities where we operate, and society at large,” he said.

“People want to work for companies they can be proud of. It’s not just about the check you take home every week.”

One thing he said he did not see happening is the return of manufacturing of toys and clothes to the United States.

“Would you rather work in an office or a service environment, or would you rather be in a factory in the deep south, sewing dress shirts in 95-degree heat for minimum wage and still be uncompetitive with other parts of the world? That’s romanticizing an industry here in the United States that once was. It’s just not practical and doesn’t make sense,” he said.

“Do we really want to compete with Bangladesh, Ethiopia, or Cambodia? We want to compete with Germany, China, Japan, and Korea with high-tech manufacturing that creates high-paying jobs.”

Bringing Business Schools into the Conversation

Educating future company leaders was the subject of the day’s last panel discussion. Rapaccioli; William Boulding, Ph.D., dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business; and Josep Franch, Ph.D., dean of the ESADE Business School; sat for questions with Ellen Glazerman, executive director of EY.

There was a broad consensus that business schools bear some responsibility for the decisions that were made leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, and therefore, graduates should be trained differently.

Boulding said that corporations long ago abandoned the old model of elevating the person with the highest IQ to CEO and simply letting that person tell everyone else what to do. The strongest team, he said, is going to be more successful than the smartest person, which is why there is now an emphasis on recruiting students with high levels of DQ, or decency quotient.

You can find signs of DQ in a prospective student’s letters of recommendation, he said, as well as admission interviews. If an applicant responds to a question by answering another question they prefer to talk about, that’s a red flag. At Duke, he said they also ask candidates to share 25 random facts about themselves.

“Each one of those facts will truly be random, but when you put them together in total, it’s not going to be random at all. It’s going to reflect who you are and what you care about,” he said.

“Some people are ‘me, me, me, me, me,’ and then you have other people who show humility, a sense of humor, make fun of themselves, and you have people who elevate moments when they were able to celebrate someone else’s success.”

Rapaccioli said one of the ways the Gabelli School is working to prepare students for these challenges is increased group projects, where students are forced to refine their communication skills.

“You’re placed on teams, and we almost hope that you have a dysfunctional experience, because you can then use it as a learning experience, and, you know [think], ‘What do I do when this happens in the future?” she said.