This is has been a terrific semester that has included some of the best students of my career. This is my year-end review of the lessons on climate change that have been presented in the three courses that I teach. I hope you find this useful. A correction: the CO2 concentration from NOAA just before the volcano shut down the Keeling laboratory at Mona Loa was … Continue reading Climate change year-end review 2022
All of these courses are are online and all have synchronous live components. Until classes begin on 11 January I am willing to make room for UF registered undergraduate students. BSC3307C Climate Change Biology can be taken as a graduate course with the permission of your graduate advisor and is mostly asynchronous. Contact me by email (smulkey [at] ufl.edu) if you want to enroll and … Continue reading Courses by Stephen Mulkey on Climate Change at the University of Florida – spring 2021
I am preparing to give a presentation at the Association of Environmental Studies and Sciences annual meeting in Orlando in the spring. The following is an essay that will form the basis of my presentation.
Higher education is undergoing an accelerating transformation driven by financing and student demography. At the same moment in history, our species is facing rapidly cascading unprecedented crises of climate change and sustainability. Although considered by most to be part of the Public Trust, public colleges and universities are no longer funded as such. As budgets have become tighter, many states are experiencing a decline in available students. Although the challenges facing students today include traditional concerns such as preparing for a career, learning transferable skills, and getting good grades, over recent decades these changes have influenced the character and viability of the college experience. Career pathways have become more diverse, expensive, and confusing. Higher education has responded to our environmental imperative in a fitful and inconsistent manner. There are no common standards for ecological literacy. Continue reading “A confluence of crises in higher education”
A version of this appeared in Medium 17 July 2018.
A fully integrated complex adaptive system. Angel Oak, S. Carolina
“….. a faltering economy has raised questions in the public’s mind about the value of a college education and every revenue stream upon which institutions of higher learning depend has come under pressure.” – Drew Faust, President of Harvard 2013
I recently helped to conduct a workshop for a group of faculty facing large program cuts at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. UWSP will eliminate 13 majors, including English, history, philosophy, art, sociology, political science, geology, geography, Spanish, German, and French. Layoffs of tenured faculty are unavoidable and imminent. To justify the cuts, system administrators cited large budget shortfalls and falling enrollment. My colleague and I brought current thinking on curriculum design and program development to help this coalition of the willing envision a future. The situation is dire and it is legitimate to ask why upper administration had not long ago taken steps to cushion the blow of downsizing. Continue reading “Higher Education and the Gift of Desperation”
A condemned campus building.
“….the way we have structured research and organized universities is not consistent with how reality works…..the sciences and universities are stuck in the disciplinary status quo they have been in for centuries.” – Anders Wijkman & Johan Rockström in Bankrupting Nature. 2012.
“…..there has never before been a geological force aware of its own influence.” – David Grinspoon in Earth in Human Hands. 2016. Continue reading “Keeping the Torch Lit: Higher Education During The Great Disruption”
For The Natural Resources Council of Maine
“….what we’re doing today with greenhouse gas emissions — which is just a moment when you look at the geophysical timescales — has consequences for decades, centuries, millennia.” —Ricarda Winkelmann, Climate Scientist, Potsdam Institute, 2016
“Mobilizing to save civilization means restructuring the economy, restoring its natural systems, eradicating poverty, stabilizing population and climate, and, above all, restoring hope.” —Lester Brown, Environmental Analyst, 2008
Planetary Boundaries (Image credit: Azote Images/Stockholm Resilience Centre; Wikimedia Commons) Planetary boundaries according to Rockström et al. 2009 (doi:10.1038/461472a) and Steffen et al. 2015 (doi:10.1126/science.1259855). The green areas represent human activities that are within safe margins, the yellow areas represent human activities that may have exceeded safe margins, the red areas represent human activities that have exceeded safe margins, and the gray areas with red question marks represent human activities for which safe margins have not yet been determined.
Two overarching imperatives have come together to provide the framework for my lifework. The first of these is the long emergency driven by the existential threats of climate change and biosphere transformation. As a scientist, I have felt compelled to make my academic life relevant to these threats, which are illustrated above as safety margins for human activities. My research on the ecology of tropical forests has been meaningful in this context, but in early 2000, I became increasingly aware that higher education is broadly failing to prepare generations of students to face the unfolding crises of the environmental century. Thus, the second imperative is the need to transform higher education to provide students and professionals with the understanding to respond to profound disruptions of our biosphere and civilization. This represents a new paradigm of relevance for higher education, and increasingly students are asking how they can be a part of a meaningful response to these challenges. Continue reading “Higher education in the environmental century”
Having spent most of the last 35 years immersed in the university or college setting, I have slowly come to appreciate how socially abnormal this existence can be. Continue reading “Dysfunction in the community of scholars”
Gainesville, Florida, 9 February 2016.
Stephen Mulkey, PhD, principal
Today I am announcing the creation of an LLC dedicated to providing practitioners in higher education guidance for administration and curriculum development to support a sustainable civilization.
This is the opening keynote address to the national conference of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education held in October 2015 in Minneapolis. Here I outline my argument for the curriculum reform necessary to meet the environmental and sustainability challenges of the coming decades. I don’t know that my recommendations are the only path forward, but I assert that it is high … Continue reading Curriculum for sustainability in the environmental century
Commencement address December 2015
“We only want you to be happy……”
– Your parents
Rarely have I accurately predicted what would make me happy. Ironically, happiness often seems to be an unintended consequence of my inability to get what I want.
“The purpose of life is not happiness but worthiness.”
– Felix Adler
But, worthy for what? Who determines what is worthy? Continue reading “Twelve lessons I wish I had learned in college”
The Environmental Century 
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