FACULTY – Susan S. Kilham Collegiate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology & Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies
“So I’m a professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and I ended up here because [U of M] is a really wonderful university. It has amazing students. It has amazing resources. And my research focuses on aquatic ecology and disease ecology, [with] all of our field work is done in lakes, and Michigan has some amazing lakes. I think it’s funny, especially when I talk to students, [that] they think I was born with this path in mind. And that was absolutely not the case. I’m originally from New York, very close to JFK airport. And my mom’s a nurse, my dad was a New York City firefighter–everyone in my family had these very practical professions. And I went to college knowing I was interested in biology, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do, other than that I was not pre-med. That was kind of all I had figured out. And then it was really just a variety of very fortunate experiences that I had while I was an undergrad taking some classes and getting connected with some people and then getting connected with research [where] I really started to fall in love with lakes. By the time I finished, I was like, ‘Oh, I really like doing this type of work.’ And so then after that, it just became: how do I keep doing this type of work?
[As I’ve done this work], one of the things that I think is interesting is, as an ecologist, I did not set out to study climate change. But at some point, I realized I was studying climate change. We have a dataset on lakes here in Michigan, [where we now] have 10 complete years of data. So we’re at climate change scales and, and we look at [some of these, and] we’ve done some work on how changing temperatures can influence patterns of disease, or how the diet that the hosts consume can change disease and one of the things that has a really big impact are if they’re eating cyanobacteria. And cyanobacteria are increasing because of climate change. So yeah, I would say there was sort of this gradual realization that I was studying climate change, even though I didn’t set out to study climate change. Also, right after we moved here in summer of 2012, [fall that year] is when Hurricane Sandy happened, and I’m from Long Island. The area I’m from was really hard hit, like the flooding came up to the stop sign on the street of the house I grew up in, like it was right there. The sewage treatment plant backed up into the basement of a house across the street. Very clear, immediate impact. And so for me, that had just [happened] when I was teaching about climate change the first time I taught BIO 171, or Intro Bio, here.
[Since] I started here 12 years ago, I have taught BIO 171 a whole lot of times and over my time teaching it, we’ve made a lot of changes. [In particular], several years ago, I spent a lot of time updating the climate change lecture, or unit in the course, because it’s so important, right? It’s one of the most important topics for our students today. And so I wanted to really communicate about it as well as I could. And in updating that, I realized one of the number one lessons of science communication is to know your audience. And I realized I didn’t know my audience, I didn’t know what students were thinking when they came into the course. And then I also wanted to get some sense of whether the teaching was effective and if students were feeling empowered to act about climate change. So we ended up doing a study where we surveyed students before and after we taught them about climate change [and] I had two amazing collaborators on it, Susan Cheng, and J.W. Hammond. And one of the things I learned from that is that almost all of the students arrived in the course accepting that climate change is happening, which I didn’t [expect]. I was stunned. When I first started analyzing the data, and I saw 98% of the students arrived in the course accepting climate change, I [thought] I did something wrong, but no, they basically all arrived in the course accepting climate change. And because I hadn’t known that originally, I spent a lot of time [emphasizing that] climate change is happening, which they didn’t need. They knew. But also, and one of the things that was the most striking about that was, we realized I was making them very anxious during class, especially because I came in with this idea that ‘I had to teach them it was real.’ They already thought it was real and were like, we know, we know! And so one student on the student evaluations described having a panic attack in the middle of the lecture. And I was like, ‘Whoa, that is not what I wanted.’ And so that really changed how we teach about it and we added in a lecture that I think of as ‘reasons for hope’. And there are!
“I think over the past couple of years, a lot more people have come to realize this, [in] studies like the one that I did, that when we were communicating about climate change, we were leaving students feeling hopeless and disempowered. And one of the things if you look at definitions of climate literacy [is that] a climate literate person isn’t just able to tell you that climate change is happening and why. They also feel empowered to act on their knowledge. And the teaching we were doing originally was not leaving students feeling empowered. So we’ve tried to update the course. And we’re doing more updates this summer, to try to really emphasize the reasons for hope. [Katherine Hayhoe] does amazing climate communication and has a weekly newsletter and it always includes a reason for hope. And every week, there’s something, right? Like, this country just elected a climate president, or this old church now is powered by renewable energy. There are a lot of reasons [to be hopeful].
[Another] thing that just occurred to me is —and this is a different thing that I’ve written about— I think sometimes when we talk about climate change, especially communicating to other people about climate change, we [sometimes] have this narrative that’s like, you have to convert people from not believing or accepting climate change to accepting climate change. And the word that comes to mind is evangelical, right? Like you’re trying to convert people from one life to another. And one of the things that I think —especially in talking with other scientists about this— is that we should be preaching to the choir, right? There’s a lot of variation in that choir and then, you know, you can expand that. So it doesn’t all have to be the choir, it could be the congregation, too. But we tend to think of preaching to the choir with this negative [connotation], like you’re badgering someone [that already gets it.] But [those people] don’t necessarily know what actions they can take. Or maybe they’re feeling sad, and if you talk to them, then you can team up and do something together. So I think, when we think about who we should communicate with and who we should talk to about climate change…Sometimes there’s [this idea that you should] find the uncle who’s like, you know– ‘this is all a hoax.’ And I’m not interested in that conversation. That’s not the person I want to spend a lot of my energy on. I want to take the person who’s like, ‘well, I’ve heard about it, but like, I’m just a little unsure. I don’t know what to do.’ And that’s the conversation that I think can lead to a lot of action and change. So yes, I’m very much for preaching to the choir.”
As part of the LSA Year of Sustainability, LSA Dean’s Fellow Cherish Dean sat down with a range of students, staff, and faculty across the University to illustrate the various relationships people across campus already have to this work, to showcase ways people can get involved, and to highlight the reasons that this work should matter.
To view an abbreviated transcript of Cherish’s full conversation with Meghan, click here.
Cherish can be reached at cherishd@umich.edu. To contact the LSA Year of Sustainability Team as a whole, please contact sustainable-lsa@umich.edu .