Last school year I grappled with my role and responsibility as an educator with subjects to teach and a global mission to fulfill. I judge that I spoke too frequently and too laden with sadness and frustration about the climate crisis and our need for people who know better to step up.
I went into this summer knowing that I wasn't very effective last year in inspiring a community of climate activists, but unsure how to win that game and still train citizens in scientific thinking and in effective participation in science- and engineering-related fields.
Sometime in early July I found contentment in the space between the pull and the push: the need to pull the brakes on the free-market ideological god of the "hidden hand" finding global equilibrium and balance through The Market, and the push to imagine and create technological saviors for our troubled societal and global body. There's actually a middle ground on which I can be both a stand for a different perspective and a stand for scientific and design mastery.
On the one hand I am a climate activist who sees the need for minimizing product consumption and the product development that drives it. Necessity isn't the mother of invention so much as invention is the mother of necessity. And breaking our society's addiction to "progress", incorrectly and unfortunately measured by gross domestic product, is a necessary strategy in winning the climate war.
On the other hand I am a physics and engineering teacher who aims to inspire interest and inquiry, and to train students in mastering concepts and problem-solving skills related to the development of technology. Technology that we need to help mitigate the effects of human-induced global warming and other ecological crises. We need solutions and some of my students will be among those developing them.
I never had two heads, it just felt that way. There's just the one now, and I like it.
I went into this summer knowing that I wasn't very effective last year in inspiring a community of climate activists, but unsure how to win that game and still train citizens in scientific thinking and in effective participation in science- and engineering-related fields.
Sometime in early July I found contentment in the space between the pull and the push: the need to pull the brakes on the free-market ideological god of the "hidden hand" finding global equilibrium and balance through The Market, and the push to imagine and create technological saviors for our troubled societal and global body. There's actually a middle ground on which I can be both a stand for a different perspective and a stand for scientific and design mastery.
On the one hand I am a climate activist who sees the need for minimizing product consumption and the product development that drives it. Necessity isn't the mother of invention so much as invention is the mother of necessity. And breaking our society's addiction to "progress", incorrectly and unfortunately measured by gross domestic product, is a necessary strategy in winning the climate war.
On the other hand I am a physics and engineering teacher who aims to inspire interest and inquiry, and to train students in mastering concepts and problem-solving skills related to the development of technology. Technology that we need to help mitigate the effects of human-induced global warming and other ecological crises. We need solutions and some of my students will be among those developing them.
I never had two heads, it just felt that way. There's just the one now, and I like it.
“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.”
- Rumi
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