This article is one of two discussing environmentalist efforts at the Five Colleges. The latter will feature trustee, professor, and student opinion.
It’s a common story at colleges across the country: student activists demand a phaseout of fossil fuel investment at the institutional level, and the board of trustees offers a provisional fifteen, twenty, or thirty-year plan. Smith made the switch in 2019 following a survey in which 92% of students voted in favor of divestment. Yet the school’s fifteen-year, best-case-scenario promise falls short of scientific consensus– the U.N. writes that we have nine years left before climate collapse becomes irreversible.
The raw destruction of the climate crisis has forced students to be unsure whether they have a future beyond global warming— and raises the question: is waiting to divest the most financially pragmatic choice in the face of total economic collapse within this century? Of course, the step is a positive one, and some schools in the consortium, like Mount Holyoke College, have not made a divestment effort at all. Still, it feels like Smith, and many other schools, had the choice between saving money now and later financial ruin— and has chosen wrong.
What fosters disconnect between students and trustees at the Five Colleges? New studies have demonstrated that opinions around the climate crisis differ around age gaps, not along party lines. Stasisa found that 51 percent of surveyed 18 to 39-year-olds felt that climate change would imminently affect them, while only 29 percent of those over 55 felt the same way. And even for respondents over fifty (like many members of the Smith faculty) who recognize the crisis as a cause of imminent concern, their sense of urgency is rarely translated into action.
In courses on environmental science or ecological critiques of literature, I have felt a disconnect between the theoretical, academic rumination on the crisis and the ticking time bomb that is my own personal trajectory into adulthood and later retirement, neither one of which is promised due to climate collapse.
It’s worth noting that much of Northampton’s experience of the crisis is along class lines. Those lower on the socioeconomic spectrum are buried in the margins of Smith’s elite presence and will suffer the effects of the climate crisis before the trustees do. The Northampton Health Department has already begun to anticipate increased hospitalizations and emergency department visits from heat stress, asthma, and cardiovascular disease, flooding, losses of home, and difficulty evacuating due to changing weather patterns.
If it seems peculiar that Smith is sitting on its divestment decision for the next decade and a half, look to the ways in which these issues are only imminent threats to students and staff without the wealth, health insurance, and housing flexibility of the members of the board. In many ways, the college’s interests, as with its peers, lie in preserving the privileges of this population, not in meeting the emergent needs of their largely middle and lower-class student body or the struggling neighborhoods of Northampton.
It isn’t as if colleges aren’t trying. Amherst College, Bowdoin College, Williams College, and Smith College have signed a partnership to reduce carbon emissions through solar energy, with Smith purchasing around 30% of its energy through the project. Students have worked with the school to develop carbon proxy pricing figures, allowing the board to incorporate carbon costs into their financial decisions. In 2015 Smith founded a study group on climate change and released several reports outlining plans for the next twenty years. Features of the college like the Botanic Garden and MacLeish Field station are reminders of Smith’s roots in environmentalist thinking, in many ways beyond the capabilities of the average college. Such was the conceit of the 2019-2020 “Year on Climate Change,” which boasted advancements like doubling the curricular enhancement grants focused on climate change and handing out honorary degrees to climate activists.
Still, students are rightfully concerned, and I am, too. As a child of the 2000s, I spent hours in classrooms learning about climate change’s terrifying consequence. In middle school, I did months-long projects designed to prepare locales in my home state of Oregon for water shortages and earthquakes that we could expect in the next century. I was rewarded with chocolate and raffle tickets for biking to school instead of driving. I stood outside a federal courthouse and listened to the plaintiffs of Youth V. Gov (a federal lawsuit against the U.S. government for environmental destruction) announce that their appeal had once again been rejected, and wrote “I will be twenty-nine when my climate fate is sealed” on a t-shirt.
Coming of age at this point in history can feel a little bit like starting an entry-level job and being handed the CEO’s to-do list: previous generations’ mistakes have compounded into a nearly insurmountable list, and it is up to us to fix it.
So, if protests like those who organized on Chapin Lawn last week feel like overkill, we might try to give a little grace to a demographic whose entire childhoods have been bound up in the promise of apocalypse. For kids who don’t see a future, change can’t come too soon.
[Image: Students on Chapin lawn for the climate march this spring. One sign says “No More Empty Promises” and the other “Fridays For Future” (Photo by The Sophian/Elizabeth Van Arnam ’24)
