Save the planet, save the world

With yet another Spring Break gone, Duke students are once more left to wonder where the time went. For many if not most of us, one place it didn't go was to performing volunteer work in the environmental field, even in a time when such work is desperately needed. As detailed in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, our planet stands on the precipice of an unprecedented natural experiment. Additionally, headline-grabbing events such as the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina have served as blunt instruments to remind us of our reliance on a sometimes cruel, sometimes kindly Mother Nature. In spite of these facts, Duke students remain largely absent from the broader environmental community.

An informal survey of nine local and statewide environmental organizations was conducted by the authors of this column to determine the number of Duke students that had volunteered with them over the past year and whether they thought Duke students were well represented in the local environmental community. Apart from hosting student interns supported by the Stanbeck Fellowship and other resume-building programs, all reported little to no interaction with the Duke student body.

For some students, this dearth of support may be driven by a lack of actual concern. Most of us, however, are simply shrouded in our cocoons of privilege and our mantras that to each and every problem there is a scientific solution.

In 1999, before most of us crossed paths at Duke, more than 6 billion people crossed with us into a new millennium; by the time Duke becomes but a very distant memory to most of us, another 3 billion humans will have joined our ranks. Our challenge will be to provide food, shelter, health and peace to this ever-growing human population, while at the same time maintaining the fabric of biodiversity that sustains all life on this planet. The Nicholas School stands at the pinnacle of Duke's intellectual foray into environmental issues. It is designed to train environmental professionals-those who will work within the private and public sector to manage the environment and its portfolio of natural resources and those who will work within academic and other research institutions to understand the human impact on our planet. More than 200 graduate students at any one time are focusing on issues ranging from the reproductive habits of bumblebees to the economic pitfalls to the environment inherent in the treadmill of production. In addition, the Nicholas School cooperates with Trinity College of Arts and Sciences in awarding four undergraduate degrees: the BA in Environmental Sciences and Policy, the BS in Environmental Sciences and the BA and BS in Earth and Ocean Sciences. Courses in these degree programs are taught by more than 60 Duke professors in 20 cooperating departments and schools.

Indeed the Nicholas School is the go-to place for learning environmental expertise. But where, one must ask, is the go-to place for learning practical, hands-on environmental stewardship?

The environmental movement in general has been losing momentum since its heyday of the early 1970s, which saw the first observance of Earth Day, the passage of the Clean Water Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Today, the relative lack of progress we are experiencing is not a product of lost hope or need. Rather, it is due to the fact that younger generations, so full of the ideas and passion that brought us this far, are not participating in local environmental efforts.

Nowhere is this more evident than among students at Duke University. As we noted, last year, only a handful of Duke students volunteered their time and expertise to the area's environmental community. Aside from this pioneering handful, few others from Duke, even those dedicated to environmental studies on an academic level, left the comfort of their ivory tower to walk among the masses and delve deep into the real world morass of environmental problems.

Learning is about more than just books and statistical packages. Similarly, environmental expertise is about more than biology, spatial analysis software and ecological economics. Both learning and environmental expertise are about trial and error, about spending intellectual capital in the pursuit of a better world. The Nicholas School and Duke University must more broadly extol not only the importance of scholarship to guide research but the experience to ground it. And as students, there is no better way to gain this experience than to volunteer.