Like that of the earth, the climate of higher education today is increasingly volatile, and the seasonal rhythms that once grounded our work, teaching, and learning no longer hold. This summer, which came on the heels of one of the largest waves of campus protest since the 1960s, brought a stream of heat advisories and a political frenzy in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. For the second year in a row, winter break arrives with global temperatures warmer than ever and, as Donald Trump and his allies prepare to take office, forces us to confront fears of a future in which education, the climate, and civic life are altered beyond recognition. Arguably, those periods once considered a time of rest from the grind of the academic year are now spaces of heightened alert, anxiety, and grief. What are we to make of this, and what are we to do? If ever there was a time to consider a basic purpose of a liberal arts education—preparation for civic participation in a democracy—it is now.

This Terry Forum, organized and sponsored by Yale University’s Terry Lectureship Committee under the direction of Deborah Coen, was conceived of as an opportunity, in light of climate change, to return to some of the assumptions undergirding liberal education. How might the interlocking ethical, political, and epistemological challenges arising from climate change help to sharpen articulations of the aims—and limitations—of the liberal arts enterprise? How is climate change reshaping the terrain of civic life and the forms of knowledge taught under the rubric of the liberal arts? Beyond classroom instruction, what pedagogical practices are necessary to prepare students to live well in a warming world—and to act upon that knowledge?

Each of the panelists were invited to speak because of their basic commitment to liberal arts education and undergraduate teaching, and their engagement with communities of learning, whether inside or outside of the classroom. At the same time—and guided by the belief that the climate crisis, much like the crisis of higher education, can only be tackled through cooperation across difference—each panelist brought distinctive disciplinary, institutional, and geographic concerns to the table. What emerged was a conversation framing some possible futures for liberal arts education and affirming its necessity in a warming world.

J. T. Roane, whose research focuses on Black ecologies, geographies, and gender and sexuality studies, is assistant professor of Africana studies and geography and Andrew W. Mellon chair in global racial justice in the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. Stephanie Pfirman, climate scientist and educator, is the Foundation Professor, School of Ocean Futures in the College of Global Futures, and senior sustainability scientist in the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University. Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli) is assistant professor of Native and Indigenous studies at Yale University, where she researches and teaches on issues of settler colonialism, environment, and Indigenous sovereignty. Gregory Marks is a professor of English at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College of the City University of New York; his teaching focuses on making humanities topics and texts accessible to the deserving college students of the Bronx. Bryan Garsten is professor of political science and humanities at Yale and writes about the history of political thought and its ramifications today.

Ana Isabel Keilson: Welcome, everyone. We’re so honored to be here with you all today. If our informal lunchtime conversation earlier this afternoon is any indication, we have a rich panel ahead of us now.

To start, we could go in one of two directions. One the one hand, we could look at the issue of scale and the liberal arts: how liberal arts learning must respond to the multi-scale reconfigurations of civic life associated with climate change. We might also explore the interconnectedness of place and thinking, and the relationship of researchers and teachers to publics and places. In other words, what responsibilities do we have, as liberal arts educators, to the communities and ecosystems that we occupy?

J. T. Roane: Why don’t we braid these two questions together. The question of scale is critical. I am someone who takes home, as a very local place, to be a serious reason to think about climate change. But obviously, we can’t remake ecologies in one locality and expect that that will cover the whole globe’s “climate catastrophe.”

Likewise, jumping to the global scale also leads to blind spots, which, frankly, have fascist tendencies built into them. I’ve found that those willing to shirk the local as inconsequential move in a new kind of universality—one that establishes and justifies a willingness to cast off or throw away certain populations—whether people, species, life, non-human, a section of the ocean.

And coming from the vantage of critical Black studies, that’s the part that our liberal arts radical interdisciplinarity says: No, that’s a red line for us, this differentiation and disposability for the some or the many must end. What would it mean to really think about no place or no people or no species or no section of the planet as radically disposable? And that requires me to think across two scales at once in the work through the Black Ecologies Lab I co-facilitate with Dr. Teona Williams at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers. We organize hyperlocal engagements, where undergraduates, graduate students, artists, activists, organizers, filmmakers, et cetera, come together in one place. There, we deal specifically and in real embodied ways with that local place: We eat together, share all those kinds of things to actually experience community in a glimmer of what is possible toward different relations. We don’t substitute these for organizing and mobilizing our resources to bring hyper local places into discussion across other scales. For example, we did a zine on Black Ecologies that included fiction and interviews, original art, essays, and some other stuff. All this was supposed to also work at the larger scale thinking diasporically, drawing together folks in South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Virginia, Louisiana, and other US South locations with different genres of writing and expression so that we have these hyperlocal approaches to place and relations that connect to other places and begin to amass a scale of consciousness that is dynamic. In our gatherings we use cross-pollination as a metaphor, drawing organizers and artists together who might not know one another locally, and also again across locations to practice regional scale outside the power of the state. We are building out scale through translation across our shared vulnerability and our historical and ongoing capacities for alternate relations.

Bryan Garsten: I really like the emphasis on the local and also thinking about how to have a broader impact. I’ve been facing the same question from a different vantage point with the Citizens Thinkers Writers program that we started at Yale. This is an intense program for local high school students that explores fundamental moral and political questions as they arise in city life. That was my own response to having been involved in a very global effort, the founding of Yale-NUS College in Singapore. From that experiment in cosmopolitanism—which was certainly valuable—I came away with a new appreciation for how much the local matters.

I wanted to do something here in New Haven, and I wanted to keep it small because of the importance of thinking about the particular: that you have to think with particular other people about particular issues in front of you. It’s a strange thing for a theorist to say, but a great enemy of thought is premature abstraction. So recently, we’ve started to think in terms of a federal model. That is, if you can build a model that is local, and small scale, and thick—and if it’s a model of what can be built elsewhere and you can help others build similar models—you can hope for more of a bottom-up spread. We are a flagship program for the Knowledge for Freedom network, which has helped colleges and universities around the country found programs similar to Citizens Thinkers Writers, each adapted to its local home.

Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart: My primary reference point for the question of scale and thinking with climate and teaching about climate is the Pacific, where I’m from. I write a little bit about the Anthropocene and climate change in the Pacific.

In a lot of the discourses around scale, it is always striking to me how the comparative models are set up so that people here on the continent or the East Coast say, “Okay, well, what’s happening over in that place is equal to the size of three Manhattans,” or, “Sea level rise would put this place, like Boston, under water.”

I always worry about how such comparisons privilege particular relations across space. We need to actually apprehend these sites on their own terms, instead of comparatively thinking about how you teach that in a classroom. This also requires you to get hyperlocal; to think about, say, New Haven on its own terms and to really think about the particularities of place.

Otherwise, I find that students will be crushed under the enormity of the crisis. They need opportunities to work with their hands in order to process ideas and to process the frameworks that they have to think this through with, because it is existential.

Justin Reynolds: It seems that two ways of thinking about scale have come up in the conversation so far. First, we might think about the scale on which learning takes place, and the significance and limitations of any particular scale—campus, city, local, global—for approaching issues arising from climate change.

But we might also consider scaling as a particular capacity of thought: an ability to make connections between different scales, the local planetary of human history and geological time, for instance.

So here’s a question. Stephanie, maybe we can start with you because I know that you’ve thought about it a bit. Can you tell us about an experience you’ve had in the liberal arts where you feel you successfully (or unsuccessfully) helped students to cultivate scaling as a way of thinking about the world and in particular about climate issues?

The university has functioned under this fantasy that you should suspend all other labors and have these leisurely spaces, when, in fact, that is completely premised on unpaid domestic labor that you outsource.

Stephanie Pfirman: I come from a natural science background, and my teaching has largely been grounded in the natural sciences. But instead of standard labs (where you’re working with chemistry or the like), we had students work with a research-oriented viewer to look at global data sets. We then had the students slice and dice the data of ocean and the atmosphere and look at where cities are located and how sea level rise would affect them.

We were trying to get the students see that when we talked about a process, you could also see the ripple effects, and you could see the broader context.

Another way that we were able to tie scale to personal experience was by having students make concept maps, where they identified issues of importance to them, and then made connections between the issues. First, they would do a concept map individually, and then they would work in teams to merge the maps. Through this experience, they were able to see the complexity of the issues that they were dealing with, as well as different people’s perspectives on these issues. Taking it further, students would go around the room and look at what different teams had done; by doing this, they could see how complex many of these issues were and how they touched so many different facets. Afterward, we would show them what an expert’s concept map would be for the same topic, or, in the case of the Arctic, we would show them an Indigenous elder’s concept map, where relationships with the environment are both wide-ranging and reciprocal, including food security, transportation, spirituality, and seasonal and cultural aspects.

So in all of this we’re trying to span the global and local at the same time. Connecting that to what I said before—and to what Hi‘ilei just said about the students feeling crushed under the crisis—teaching climate can easily become just gloom and doom. It is disempowering to just show people an image and say, “This is what the world that you’ll be inhabiting is going to look like.” An important way to add agency to that, of course, is to talk about action.

Through climate change, professors, especially in the natural sciences, are challenged when students ask us, “What can we do about this? You painted this picture, so what can we do?” For many natural scientists, this is a really hard question to answer. I’ve actually heard some of my colleagues say, “Hey, that’s a political question! Not one for scientists.” But over time, I’ve come to realize that if a faculty member’s expertise was in COVID, of course they would talk about vaccines. And so an important aspect of liberal arts education is also talking about what you can do: talking about responses. Liberal arts education cannot just be theoretical. This means that you need to build into your pedagogy talking about different ways that we can respond, including actions that students can take—and the links between scales and places and peoples.

Gregory Marks: What everyone is saying—about actions, about the local and the global—for me brings up the image of borders. Obviously borders are always a hot topic; you can think of Texas, Ukraine, Gaza.

But I thought of Genesis, Cain and Abel: the brothers have different modes of being. The shepherd Abel goes into the commons, into a broader space where he can have his little sheep and take care of them. And it’s a beautiful broad space. Cain, on the other hand, has a definite space, farming is a definite. You can only do so many acres at a time and you want product from there, and so there’s a very different understanding of the relationship between the local versus Abel’s more global understanding. I’m getting this from a lecture down at Louisiana State University about 30 years ago by Robert McMahon. He gave a beautiful, quick little psychology of those two brothers. McMahon contrasted the two: “Look, so what does Cain do? He says, ‘Abel, come over to my place. Come over to my space,’ and he kills him.” And when Cain is confronted by God, he either thinks God is stupid and can’t see the murder that happened in “his” environment, so he’s not omniscient, or he thinks God is not omnipotent and won’t dare punish him. And so that understanding of finite property makes you narrow, and we hope the liberal arts can break us out of this narrow view, and into Abel’s more broad understanding of the commons.

And here in Genesis, even the environment responds to this violation, because then God says, “The blood is crying from the ground, buddy! I can hear that.”

And Cain just isn’t aware of that. He’s myopic.

J. T. Roane: Part of our training and retooling of the liberal arts from the vantage of a Black studies historical geographer is not to assume that scale adheres beyond its very specific historicity. Scale, as the ways that different orders of magnitude of space/time relate and produce a given order, is generated by historical development. This is critical in this moment when we’re seeing the central subject of liberalism, what Sylvia Wynter has underscored as the overdetermining genre of the human, Man, is remade spatially. Post-lunar space exploration, AI, and the molecularization of life itself in the wake of the human genome project, along with the declaration of global climate crisis, portend a new arrangement of space.

What I’m also trying to get us to do is to shake up how we think about timescales and place-based scales—to think about them more analytically and have our students think about them so that we can anticipate politically and practically what scaling will mean in our present and future. Again, it is critical to recognize that the territoriality of the central, normative subject of liberalism is transforming, and Anthropocenic discourse is a central part of this reconceptualization of human life and territoriality.

Bryan Garsten: You mentioned urgency, and that’s a question that I’m particularly interested in. I wonder what you all make of this. The liberal arts have, for a long time, been thought to presume leisure. We create spaces and times in which we study more than we could if we were in the midst of action.

Yet around climate change, there is, as you said, a sense of urgency that threatens to eclipse the space for thought and research because—Do we have the time? And yet, clearly the motivation to study these issues also comes from the urgency.

So how do we balance what is frankly the leisure that liberal education requires against the demand for action? That’s one challenge that the liberal arts face at the moment.

Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart: I will say that the crisis of climate change is always pressing and yet, the timelines and the horizons for it are also quite long. Folks working in Native and Indigenous studies have done a lot of work around renaming the tipping point of the Anthropocene as being empire and settler colonialism as the thing that starts to make that geologic impact on our environments. And so, the liberal arts education model helps us to see climate crisis as actually part of this whole composite of political, economic, and social shifts around it.

As I was meditating on how I personally have come to know the climate crisis, there were two touch points that emerged for me. The first was the wildfires in Lahaina in August of last year, which was noted as the worst natural disaster in the history of the islands, killing over one hundred people and leveling one of our most important historic towns. But a lot of folks pointed out that the conditions for that wildfire had been set 150 years prior, with the plantation economy rerouting all of the water that used to be there and then building luxury developments on top of those plantation infrastructures, such that a place that should have been verdant was bone-dry.

Furthermore, that became the mechanism by which multinational corporations came in to retool the legal systems that determine access to water in Hawaii. So residents of Maui, for years before the fires, had been under water conservation acts while all the while, golf courses were springing up around them and watering the courses and filling the swimming pools and doing all of those things. And so, a lot of folks have pushed back and said, “Well, that’s absolutely not a natural disaster and it may be related to climate change,” but the conditions are set under a different timeline than we’ve been trained to apprehend it as.

The second touch point was that I was living in Austin, Texas, in 2021 when we experienced what is now called the great Texas freeze, or the Texas power crisis. This knocked out the power grid in large sections of the state, while everybody was experiencing rapid and sustained subzero temperatures in a place where houses are designed to shed heat. The conditions were terrifying on their own: There was no food, there was no water, and there was no warmth for any of us, but it was also set in the high point of the COVID-19 pandemic. And so all the modes of community organizing and community care that usually emerge to form sites of resilience were just not there. Women were going into their cars with their babies to keep them warm and dying of asphyxiation because they were too afraid to get together with other people, or people were too afraid to come together in warming shelters.

The ecological disaster of it was one part, but the second part was the thing that I feel like I’ve held on to as one of the most profound examples of the ways in which communities have not only lost survivability, but resilience, too.

J. T. Roane: I would jump in and say this resonates in and across Indigenous studies and Black studies. From the advantage of Black studies, it is both the pressing urgency of right now and serial urgencies that have to be thought of in relation to liberal arts, especially education.

I’m thinking with Bedour Alagraa and other folks who pushed back against “crisis” or “catastrophe” as formulations that we should use, precisely because the world has ended every day since 1492 for many populations and groups.

This also brings out different critical questions about at what scale catastrophe happens. We are bound by older iterations of liberal subjectivity, understandings underwritten by Judeo-Christian theology around the apocalyptic as a singular global thing, which makes us miss the point that if one community dies, there’s already been an apocalypse.

Formerly enslaved people in the Tidewater have all these narratives—some from a post-emancipation period, which were taken as part of the Works Progress Administration interviews. In them, you have people saying, “My sister and everybody was sold to the Deep South to clear forest and to make cotton plantations and die with hoes in their hands.”

Black communities in the US and the Americas in general have had a different relationship to understanding that climate—what we are now bundling together under the adages or euphemisms “climate change,” even “climate emergency,” or “climate crisis”—are precisely all these kinds of histories. And Nathan Hare said in that 1970 “Black Ecology” essay something like, “Housing is an ecological issue if you’re Black.” Like, if we start piecing it together from this certain vantage, then we have a different timeline for “climate emergency”: one that understands genocides in the Americas and Africa producing the plantation as an origin story and blackening as a process of this forced proximity to extraction, disposability, and premature death, that spread out from those relations. This opens new routes to its resolution that resist the oil-funded abstractions of carbon counting and the like, and ground climate transformation in the remaking of our fundamental relationships.

And on the point of liberal arts education and leisure, which we might want to cultivate, especially insofar as labor extraction and expansionary global capital are bound with continuing the headlong drive toward the collapse of the biosphere through growth. What would happen if we were all communing through sharing, translation, thinking and discussion and other modes that exceed the narrow ableism of this configuration, rather than running to do other things and buy things to sustain unsustainable growth?

It is critical to recognize that the territoriality of the central, normative subject of liberalism is transforming, and Anthropocenic discourse is a central part of this reconceptualization of human life and territoriality.

Gregory Marks: Just what you said about just living that leisurely life, the life of the liberal arts: To me, that raises the issue of luxury. That’s what liberal arts is oftentimes seen as: a luxury. Climate change is often seen as a luxury for people to talk about when you don’t have to generate 900 calories a day for your five kids in some impoverished space. Maybe the answer is to say no, those are not luxuries or they’re necessary luxuries, they’re luxuries not in the Roman sense of morally reprehensible, but luxuries or just necessary things we have to do. The liberal arts, they require leisure, and they require briefly no longer working.

Justin Reynolds: Let’s turn to more specific questions of curriculum content and teaching practice. Stephanie, I’d like you to get us started since you had a great question that we discussed before the panel about general education.

Many liberal arts programs make claims about the kinds of topics or issues that all their students ought to learn or spend time reflecting on. What role might general education have in preparing students for climate futures? Do sustainability and “climate literacy,” whatever they might mean, have a place in general education—and if so, what does an education for it look like?

Stephanie Pfirman: First, to tie back to the urgency question, I wanted to mention that obviously climate change is intergenerational: we’re going to have a series of crises, series of urgencies that will roll out over the coming decades. In 2050, the people that we’re teaching as undergraduates right now will be in their 40s, which is a prime time to show leadership. Certainly we need to take action now, but we also need people who are in place to respond and be proactive later.

That leads me to general education. At Arizona State University we are implementing a sustainability general education requirement starting in the fall of 2024. I’ll be teaching one of these general education classes. In our course design, we had to decide what aspects we should focus on. Of course, liberal arts education needs to prepare students through developing scientific literacy, math literacy, historical/culture literacy and writing—different ways of critical thinking. All that prepares you for the future, but with climate change, there are other aspects that are not being taught that the liberal arts would really benefit from.

For me, the realization for this came from an experience I had when I was teaching this introductory climate class and I rolled out all of the impacts. I showed—to the best of our knowledge at the time—where are there going to be droughts, where are there going to be floods, what cities will experience heavy rainfalls, and what areas along the coast will be flooded. And I said to my students, “For the first time in human history, we actually know approximately where and when all of these things will play out.” Uncharacteristically, the students just sat there afterward—and I realized later that they were stunned as they saw what their future could look like. Finally one of them blurted out, “Well … what are you doing about it?”

They’re expecting our generation to take action to head off the worst. And they’re right to expect that. But we’re not doing it. We have been irresponsible, not responding when we learned of the consequences of our actions. Maybe that’s in part because of the siloed education that we’ve had. In most of my career as a scientist, it was considered bad form to talk about policy—it meant that you might have an agenda that could bias your science. So we need to be purposeful in integrating into our teaching preparing students to connect issues with actions, so that they feel empowered with capacities to respond, as well as a sense of stewardship. We’re talking about complex systems with interdependencies and reciprocity, and there are many different ways to teach about that.

Another theme that people have touched on here is that the conditions today are legacies of decision-making made in the past, and that today’s decisions will shape future trajectories for future generations. But it’s also important to teach about context-specific differentiation. Not all places, not all peoples are the same, and things change through time, space, and according to values. If we can help train students to envision scenarios of alternative futures, and then conduct rigorous evaluation of their implications on multiple scales and contexts, it will take us a long way toward opening up new perspectives and also give students skills to decide which trajectories they might want to follow, as well as where and how they can contribute to this problem.

Finally, of course, to engage in understanding these issues and problem-solving, you have to have a sense of care. This is our home—for all of us—and we have to find ways to draw the connections between who we are now and our past and future generations. Then we need to instill that sense of responsibility but also a willingness to make informed decisions.

Many liberal arts colleges and universities have general education requirements that are meant to help students become global citizens through raising their awareness of different perspectives and building their capacities so that they are empowered to navigate through their life course. But currently, most general education requirements tend to focus more on knowledge and skills, rather than actions. To better prepare our students, general education also needs to intentionally address options for responding—including their social, economic, and environmental consequences—to what we know will come.

J. T. Roane: How do we reinforce the spaces, like Indigenous and Black studies, that have been thinking in this frame and frankly beyond it for quite some time? If there’s a different reading practice that we’re engaged in around the various genealogies within the radical interdiscipline, from a Black studies orientation, we’ve had a lot to say about ecologies and climate. My approach includes enlivening or resuscitating certain traditions as they already exist in this rich interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary frame. What does it mean in the classroom setting to interpret slave narratives from across the Americas through their rich appreciation for their analyses of the plantation-mining complex in the Americas as fundamentally ecocidal; or to think with undergraduates using critical Haitian and South African Studies texts about Jim Crow / apartheid’s global anti-Black, anti-earth structuring?

Also, our field school model attempts to open liberal arts beyond the narrow vision of the life of the mind, as isolated experience of the quiet library and disciplinary classroom premised on banking educational models that assume singular expertise and the flow of knowledge down across a hierarchy. We invite ourselves, students, artists, organizers, and musicians, across youth to elder, to learn and translate together in discussion, movement, and sound.

Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart: We had a great conversation over lunch circling around these things. How do we think about the place of the university as the site for the liberal arts education and all of the difficulties that are embedded there? One of the things that I feel anxious about students learning when they come to these spaces is—they learn how to figure out who is an expert on something. That students will learn to look to these spaces as the sites of expertise when in actuality, sites of expertise are very rarely contained there.

The field school, or the field site, does a lot of work in decentering the institution as the place for expertise. It also requires us to think carefully in place and train students not in gaining expertise necessarily, but in paying careful attention and in careful listening. Those forms of expertise are cultivated within communities that have been in-site and onsite for long periods of time.

Nobody notices climate change as carefully as somebody who has been in-place and in-community. So those feel really important in terms of how we think about where the liberal arts education might be and who might be those teachers.

Bryan Garsten: Just to return to the question of general education, briefly, I want to say three things. One, I continue to think it’s an abdication of responsibility on the part of universities not to have their faculty come together and decide what an educated person should know. We fall into a pattern of allowing the fragmentation of research trajectories to create a fragmentation of educations for our students, which, although it creates lots of opportunities for originality, creativity, and individuality, also punts on the fundamental question that Justin asked: “What should general education consist of?”

And then to briefly comment on two other points. One of the broadest challenges that we face in light of the climate issue is that science is stranded from nonscience. We have produced generations now who do not know how to think about science together with the insights of literature or ethics. This is a major challenge that universities should be looking to address. How do we integrate the study of nature from the modern scientific perspective with the study of the experience of human beings in the world and the meaning of that experience?

My last point, which is linked to that question, is about the place of human beings in nature. Here is a clear question that the climate issue raises: Is anthropocentrism a human prejudice, or is it the precondition of responsibility and stewardship and value? That is, why do we care about climate change? Change is not always bad. We want to preserve something about … is it other species, or our own species? We must then ask, Why even preserve humans? What’s worth preserving? Hans Jonas, in The Imperative of Responsibility claimed that what we’re preserving is the idea of responsibility. His point was that preserving humanity is not just about preserving our happiness or furthering our interests. For Jonas, humans are the creatures who take responsibility. He argued that if we don’t preserve humans, that very fact about the world—that someone takes responsibility for it—will no longer be true, and that would be a tragic loss.

There are other ways to understand our stewardship and responsibility and care, to use Stephanie’s words. But a general education for the future must grapple with science, with the place of humans in nature, and with the difficulties of bringing faculty from scattered fields together into serious conversation.

Ana Isabel Keilson: Thank you for that point, Bryan. I’m aware of the time, so I want to give you all a chance to respond or pick up anything that he just said and then we’ll wrap things up in a few minutes and move to a Q&A.

Gregory Marks: One of the elephants in the room is the role of humans in nature. I’m not mocking here, but the last passenger pigeon did not mourn the passing of his species or see some larger global issue. It’s with us, with the humans, that ethical responsibility comes and which probably the rest of the world does not have.

I also want to add that in the list of qualities for general education in the liberal arts, and perhaps with climate change, one might also add the perception of beauty. Stephanie used the word stewardship, which is wonderful. Rudolf Otto called this the “numinous” quality of things, and so that’s also something that we have to be appreciative of.

J. T. Roane: I’ll add the example of the genealogy of Black studies coming out of its formal institutional history. Even with the formal institutionalization of these disciplines in San Francisco State in the late ’60s and early ’70s and from out of student protests, folks didn’t have in mind a preordained hyperspecialization. Instead, it was like you came to college to learn a Black-studies consciousness and then you leave go do a myriad of things. That idea of needing Black-studies-trained psychologists, Black-studies-trained physicians, Black-studies-trained scientists, or historians, et cetera, as an original model for radical interdisciplinarity is one thing that we could say about a possibility for looking backward for another future for the liberal arts. The Black Ecologies Lab field model draws on this model. We aren’t looking to self-reproduce or necessarily to create a single type of activated ecological thinker/practitioner. We want whoever has whatever skill to bring all those powers to the collective under a shared and co-articulated consciousness.

I also wanted to leave off by saying that we need to challenge the subject of the liberal arts or the normative subject of the liberal arts. Recent Black studies scholarship challenges the subject position assumed in the liberal arts. I’m thinking here with Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human and the conception put forward about plasticity and animality, as well as with the proposals for rethinking subject-object relations that Denise Ferreira da Silva brings to the fore through her analysis of all matter as performing labor.

Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart: I do spend a lot of time thinking about what these institutions do and the fallacy of the suspension of time and labor to have these magical years of a life of the mind when in fact, these institutions run as workplaces, labor places. And when students are learning, they’re doing work.

Careful thinking is work. The university has functioned under this fantasy that you should suspend all other labors and have these leisurely spaces, when, in fact, that is completely premised on unpaid domestic labor that you outsource. Caregiving is very difficult to do in these spaces for all kinds of intentional ways. And so I always want to make a call for orienting ourselves to the “work” of this work.

Part of this work means recognizing that labor—even thinking labor—is a relational practice. When we are talking about climate crisis, we are really having conversations about plants and animals, and how to forge a livable future with them. I also always come back to the work of Leanne Simpson and her conceptualization of us having diplomatic relations with nonhuman kin, and that we need to think about ourselves as being in relations of diplomacy with the worlds around us.

Stephanie Pfirman: I’ll also end by going back to anthropocentrism. I had a colleague who used to say, “Hey, the planet would be just fine without us! It’ll do just fine with climate change. Earth’s climate bounces around and it does all these different things and it’ll withstand and weather this as well.” And I just felt that that was so awful. What about all the people who are going to face really, really challenging circumstances? What about climate refugees both within and between nations?

Then there was a quote by somebody else who said, “The three choices are: adaptation, mitigation, or suffering.” But there’s going to be suffering with adaptation and mitigation too! So the scale of what’s before us is really huge, and we need to enlist everybody.

We need to come at this problem from every direction that we possibly can. We need a lot of minds thinking about how to soften transitions, through centering well-being and equity as we invest in energy transformation at local, regional, and national scales, address food security for all, and rethink immigration policies, because we can’t avoid disruption and the fact that challenging times are ahead.