The Rachel Carson Campus Network Takes Chicago by Storm
We started the Rachel Carson Campus Network in 2014 because we recognized that academia — students, faculty, campus organizations, and research centers— is a crucial arena for influencing environmental justice. Passionate students sound the alarm bell about the ever-entrenched role of the fossil fuel industry in funding education and greenwashing their extractive histories. Faculty teach their students to question assumptions we all have about change, progress, what is right and wrong, and even learning. Researchers push the boundaries of science to develop climate solutions that may change the world as we know it. Together, campuses are a place where knowledge is produced, refined, and used to pursue real change.
Connecting with the institutions that prioritize the fearless pursuit of knowledge has always been the backbone of the Rachel Carson Campus Network. This Fall, Director of Communications & Strategic Development, Claudia Steiner was asked to deliver an original presentation on Climate Communication to a graduate class at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC). A minority-serving institution and the only public research university in the city, UIC sits in a diverse, culturally rich neighborhood and made for the perfect grounds to connect RCC’s ambition to mobilize students and faculty to tackle the climate crisis and the creative, attentive energy of student scientists.
Steiner’s guest-lecture was delivered to Dr. Sheetal Khedkar Rao and Dr. Cynthia Klein-Banai’s course, “Principles of Sustainability, Climate, and Health.” The class covers a systems-level view of climate change, interrogating the interacting causal elements and cycles that drive climate change and its concomitant implications for the environment, economy, health, and social equity. Steiner’s introduction of the key principles of effective climate communication was a welcome facet to the multistakeholder approach this course took to analyzing sustainability solutions.
Steiner emphasized the importance of audience relatability in delivering climate communication in news and other media. She listed appropriate use of scientific language (jargon: use, don’t abuse!), integrating climate science into editorial coverage of other topics, and naming the causes and effects of climate change explicitly, all as bids for connection with an audience of potential changemakers.
She concluded her lecture with an interactive activity, asking students to respond with a communications plan to a scenario in which the city of Chicago presented their fictional non-profit or company with a grant for climate justice excellence. In their speedily made final products, Dr. Rao and Dr. Klein-Banai’s students demonstrated a careful balance of scientific complexity and clear explanation. They instilled their knowledge of climate change into their writing about the grant’s social and economic impact. They made the connection between Chicago’s changing climate and the need for environmental justice programming. Steiner left the lecture feeling that these students were empowered to relate their own lives and futures to the wicked problem that is climate change (and with some new ideas for communications plans of her own!).
