Hope to See You at A Sustainability Event

Mount Mercy University has announced its Fall Faculty Series for 2018, and posted its list of events on the MMU web site..

It’s a bit smaller than some past series, with just seven faculty or staff presentations listed. That may be a good thing—an issue in previous series (which I coordinated in 2014, 2015 and 2016) was the tendency for the list of events to grow and grow. Maybe having fewer events will make each stand out a bit more—I hope so, anyway.

The series begins soon, on Aug. 29, with an overview by Dr. Joy Ochs, an English professor who now coordinates the series, and who has been very active in environmental issues. She was important in MMU obtaining a large grant that funds a more robust sustainability effort on campus. For a full list of events in this fall’s series, click here.

“Sustainability” is a key issue—maybe more now then ever. Not only does the Earth continue to heat due to human emitted gasses, but our current political leadership seems determined to exacerbate environmental problems as much as possible.

Anyway, one aspect of the issue is that big environmental controversies are not always covered well by media. Partly that’s because it’s not easy for a non-scientific journalist to understand and translate science. Scientists themselves are not always good at stepping out of the lab and communicating with the public.

As for the news media: Big science involves long-term trends that don’t always translate into daily dramas the way an Omarosa book does. And scientific concepts are sometimes resisted by the public and journalists (the newspaper that the Franklins ran in Boston early in the 18th century, for example, campaigned against smallpox vaccinations—the first health advice given in early American media was totally against science).

I’ll be exploring the interesting and twisted history of media coverage of global warming on Oct. 11 in a presentation called “Hot Story: How the Media Struggles to Cover Climate Change.”

There are many other interesting presentations planned. The fall series is one of my favorite things at MMU—it’s a chance for faculty to engage with students they don’t normally see, as well as to bring in any members of the public who are interested in a topic. Each series leads, I hope, to big conversations on important topics.

And this year’s topic is about as big and important as it can get. I hope to see you at some of these faculty forums!