Communicating the need for sustainability
With founder’s passion, new program takes on daunting task
By Clint Talbott
Among his students, Brian Daniell saw a well of untapped energy. Around the world, he saw an environmental crisis of unprecedented proportions. Applying the former to the latter, he hopes, will help both students and the Earth.
Daniell is a senior instructor emeritus of communication at the University of Colorado and an environmentalist deeply concerned about climate change.
“My 20-some years of working with university students taught me two important things. First, our students are bright, energetic and creative. And second, nothing excites them more in a class setting than being given the opportunity to bring their talents to bear on a real problem,” Daniell says.
“Ask them if they want to go to work on something that will make a real difference, a real contribution, in the world, and they’ll get excited. But I’ve felt for a long time that modern university life cuts students off from real engagement with external problems and the people working on them.”
Now he’s connecting those dots—providing opportunities to work on the most complex and difficult problem humans have ever faced: global climate change and the question of environmental sustainability
Daniell taught at the university level beginning in 1987 and at CU since 1992. Though his discipline is communication, he’s taught courses in the uniqueness of the human species, its relationship to the natural world, collapse of societies, and, most recently, the history of the American environmental movement.
Following the death of his mother in 2007, Daniell resolved to do something reflecting his values.
Birth of a program
“It was a watershed year for me. My mother was an avid supporter of the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund, and I wanted to do something in her memory. And I wanted to integrate environmental activism into my work with the students because I was becoming more and more aware that we weren’t doing nearly enough to orient them to the threats posed by climate change. I wanted to help them learn how to participate and contribute to our responses over the coming decades.
“I went to Michele Jackson, the chair of the Communication Department, in the fall of 2007 and said ‘I think I have an idea for a program.’ Over the next few months we fleshed out what it would look like and what we could hope to accomplish. Michele was enormously supportive and helpful. Having a big vision isn’t enough, especially in the university context; you have to have someone who really understands how to make things work at the pragmatic institutional level. That’s Michele’s forté, and I have to give credit where it’s due. Without her, this program would still just be an idea today.”
In 2008, he established an endowment with the CU Foundation and dedicated funds to a new CU Communication Department program called the Communication Project for Civic and Social Engagement (for brevity, the program is referred to now as “CASE”).
Jackson is now co-director of CASE and handles the on-campus operations.
The idea is to engage communication students in internships “to serve their communities in the interest of environmental sustainability.” The goal is to “integrate service with learning experiences which make real contributions to efforts to respond to global climate change and which might just shape students’ lives and subsequent career choices.”
While doing this work, students will be challenged to learn how to communicate the threat of global warming and “our critical need to move to sustainable practices and renewable-energy sources.” How, exactly, is that need best communicated? The answers are not yet clear, the CASE web site states.
The program begins by getting students involved, awarding $1,000 stipends for CASE internships, which may be served at government and nonprofit agencies such as the Boulder County Department of Sustainability and the group Clean Energy Action. Interns also may be placed at private-sector companies such as Bella Energy and Eco-Products.
Students typically accept internships worth three credit-hours, a commitment of about 10 hours a week.
While students gain hands-on learning, the organizations, agencies and companies get needed assistance. “These folks are very happy to hear that we have students interested in working with them,” Daniell notes.
At the same time, he observes, internships can be revealing in different ways: “I always think of an internship as not only learning what you want to do but also learning what you don’t want to do.”
“A career in environmental activism can be extremely rewarding, but also terribly demanding. It’s not for everyone, and it’s useful for people to have a chance to know what they’re getting into.”
Though the program is so far focused on undergraduate communication students, Daniell plans to implement CASE fellowships for graduate students. In addition to internships, grad students would complete a substantial research project.
The larger challenges
Generally, these students would grapple with what Daniell characterizes as “one of the biggest problems we have,” namely, that “there’s a huge gap between the information possessed by the scientific community and what the public knows.”
“The scientific community, understandably, has had trouble communicating the urgency of the crisis,” he adds. “In fairness, many scientists have written some extremely powerful and accessible arguments for the public, for example, (NASA scientist) James Hansen’s new book, ‘Storms of My Grandchildren,’ lays down the research that has revealed climate change as well as the unbelievable obstacles he and other scientists have faced when they’ve attempted to interact with policy makers.”
Meanwhile, there’s a huge amount of “disinformation” about climate, Daniell says, adding that fossil-fuel and related industries have put enormous amounts of money into campaigns specifically designed to discredit climate scientists and their research or to create the illusion of a “debate” within the scientific community as to whether climate change is driven by human activity or whether it’s even happening at all.
The mass media have been complicit in this, he adds, presenting discourse on climate as if it were a debate between two perspectives of equal scientific merit.
The result, as he contends those who fund the efforts at confusion would hope for, is that a significant proportion of people in our country thinks there is still a valid debate on whether climate change is happening, and most people do not rank it among their top five concerns.
Further complicating the picture is the decline of “responsible, professional journalism,” Daniell contends. “We are, I fear, becoming simply a cacophony of opinions without any interpretation, without any weighing of the credibility of the opinions. And that’s dangerous.”
“If that weren’t enough, as a result of our education system, our public is not versed in what lies behind a scientific argument, and so they pick the argument they like.
“Look, I’m not a climate scientist. I was trained as a social scientist. I have done some reasonably careful reading on the topic of climate change, but nothing that the average person with, say, a B.A. degree in a non-scientific field couldn’t work through,” Daniell says.
“But I read with a basic question in mind: ‘Where is the preponderance of evidence?’ And the preponderance of evidence says clearly that climate change is not only real but the biggest and fastest-moving threat on the board. I wish it were not so, but I try not allow my wishes to influence the evidence in front of me.”
“So, I’m doing what I can with our CASE project to help our communication students learn how they can contribute to the many and varied climate-change education and response efforts that are out there now and that will emerge in the coming decades.”
At the same time, he notes, students and faculty in communication have specific expertise. “We’re not climate scientists. We’re the friendly folks who bring you the courses on public speaking, persuasion, argumentation, group dynamics, interaction skills and a variety of other topics that can be applied to the climate-change communication problem.”
Reaching audiences
Assuming better communication can help advance public discourse on climate, how do trained communicators do this? One key, Daniell says, is to tailor the message to the recipients, to engage in audience analysis.
If the aim is to deliver a message that says that humans have a very serious problem and are going to have to make some very serious changes to address it, one might well ask, “What gets in the way of people accepting or even listening to what you have to say? What are the experiences of the people? Why is (the topic) scary to them? What is it that you could say to them that would shut them down? And what might you say or do that would at least keep them listening to you?
“This kind of analysis can be based on empirical data as well as inferred from what we know about other similar groups of people. Once we know what obstacles we face, we can identify the right strategies and tactics to use with a particular group. ”
That’s not often how climate debates are staged. In some cases, scientists and advocates speaking about climate change embrace a “cognitive-deficit model,” which assumes that giving people more data will result in their reaching certain conclusions. Daniell laughs at that notion, which “presumes a rational world.”
“Why do people buy, say, clothing to follow some new fashion or cars with bodies that are shaped in some new way or offer features that no one really needs? Does it appear to be a rational world to you? It doesn’t to me,” he observes. “I make about 10 emotionally based decisions a day.”
One very effective way to address climate change is to communicate the economic benefits of sustainable practices and polices rather than “hitting people in the face with what is probably the biggest and most complex problem we as a species have ever faced.”
Daniell notes that other universities have launched programs similar to CASE. Yale and George Mason universities have good programs that served as templates.
And though he acknowledges that the challenge he’s taking on is daunting, Daniell says he has no regrets about founding and funding CASE. “I’m a very strong believer in the old idea of noblesse oblige, that we who are educated, privileged and wealthy … have an obligation to serve the societies that made these things possible.”
“And we are certainly among the wealthiest people on the planet, not to mention the greatest per-capita users of fossil fuels. We have been leaders in developing the technologies and resulting lifestyle that got us where we are today—living on a dangerously warming planet with a nasty end in sight—and we are certainly capable of providing leadership for a sustainable future. In the coming years, our students will take their places among those leaders.”
To learn more about CASE, see http://comm.colorado.edu/case. To support the program, contact Kimberly Bowman, associate director of development, CU Foundation, 303-541-1446 or Kimberly.bowman@cufund.org.
By Clint Talbott
Brian Daniell, a senior instructor emeritus of communication at the University of Colorado. Photo by Noah Larsen
Among his students, Brian Daniell saw a well of untapped energy. Around the world, he saw an environmental crisis of unprecedented proportions. Applying the former to the latter, he hopes, will help both students and the Earth.
Daniell is a senior instructor emeritus of communication at the University of Colorado and an environmentalist deeply concerned about climate change.
“My 20-some years of working with university students taught me two important things. First, our students are bright, energetic and creative. And second, nothing excites them more in a class setting than being given the opportunity to bring their talents to bear on a real problem,” Daniell says.
“Ask them if they want to go to work on something that will make a real difference, a real contribution, in the world, and they’ll get excited. But I’ve felt for a long time that modern university life cuts students off from real engagement with external problems and the people working on them.”
Now he’s connecting those dots—providing opportunities to work on the most complex and difficult problem humans have ever faced: global climate change and the question of environmental sustainability
Daniell taught at the university level beginning in 1987 and at CU since 1992. Though his discipline is communication, he’s taught courses in the uniqueness of the human species, its relationship to the natural world, collapse of societies, and, most recently, the history of the American environmental movement.
Following the death of his mother in 2007, Daniell resolved to do something reflecting his values.
Birth of a program
“It was a watershed year for me. My mother was an avid supporter of the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund, and I wanted to do something in her memory. And I wanted to integrate environmental activism into my work with the students because I was becoming more and more aware that we weren’t doing nearly enough to orient them to the threats posed by climate change. I wanted to help them learn how to participate and contribute to our responses over the coming decades.
“I went to Michele Jackson, the chair of the Communication Department, in the fall of 2007 and said ‘I think I have an idea for a program.’ Over the next few months we fleshed out what it would look like and what we could hope to accomplish. Michele was enormously supportive and helpful. Having a big vision isn’t enough, especially in the university context; you have to have someone who really understands how to make things work at the pragmatic institutional level. That’s Michele’s forté, and I have to give credit where it’s due. Without her, this program would still just be an idea today.”
In 2008, he established an endowment with the CU Foundation and dedicated funds to a new CU Communication Department program called the Communication Project for Civic and Social Engagement (for brevity, the program is referred to now as “CASE”).
Jackson is now co-director of CASE and handles the on-campus operations.
The idea is to engage communication students in internships “to serve their communities in the interest of environmental sustainability.” The goal is to “integrate service with learning experiences which make real contributions to efforts to respond to global climate change and which might just shape students’ lives and subsequent career choices.”
While doing this work, students will be challenged to learn how to communicate the threat of global warming and “our critical need to move to sustainable practices and renewable-energy sources.” How, exactly, is that need best communicated? The answers are not yet clear, the CASE web site states.
The program begins by getting students involved, awarding $1,000 stipends for CASE internships, which may be served at government and nonprofit agencies such as the Boulder County Department of Sustainability and the group Clean Energy Action. Interns also may be placed at private-sector companies such as Bella Energy and Eco-Products.
Students typically accept internships worth three credit-hours, a commitment of about 10 hours a week.
While students gain hands-on learning, the organizations, agencies and companies get needed assistance. “These folks are very happy to hear that we have students interested in working with them,” Daniell notes.
At the same time, he observes, internships can be revealing in different ways: “I always think of an internship as not only learning what you want to do but also learning what you don’t want to do.”
“A career in environmental activism can be extremely rewarding, but also terribly demanding. It’s not for everyone, and it’s useful for people to have a chance to know what they’re getting into.”
Though the program is so far focused on undergraduate communication students, Daniell plans to implement CASE fellowships for graduate students. In addition to internships, grad students would complete a substantial research project.
The larger challenges
Generally, these students would grapple with what Daniell characterizes as “one of the biggest problems we have,” namely, that “there’s a huge gap between the information possessed by the scientific community and what the public knows.”
“The scientific community, understandably, has had trouble communicating the urgency of the crisis,” he adds. “In fairness, many scientists have written some extremely powerful and accessible arguments for the public, for example, (NASA scientist) James Hansen’s new book, ‘Storms of My Grandchildren,’ lays down the research that has revealed climate change as well as the unbelievable obstacles he and other scientists have faced when they’ve attempted to interact with policy makers.”
Meanwhile, there’s a huge amount of “disinformation” about climate, Daniell says, adding that fossil-fuel and related industries have put enormous amounts of money into campaigns specifically designed to discredit climate scientists and their research or to create the illusion of a “debate” within the scientific community as to whether climate change is driven by human activity or whether it’s even happening at all.
The mass media have been complicit in this, he adds, presenting discourse on climate as if it were a debate between two perspectives of equal scientific merit.
The result, as he contends those who fund the efforts at confusion would hope for, is that a significant proportion of people in our country thinks there is still a valid debate on whether climate change is happening, and most people do not rank it among their top five concerns.
Further complicating the picture is the decline of “responsible, professional journalism,” Daniell contends. “We are, I fear, becoming simply a cacophony of opinions without any interpretation, without any weighing of the credibility of the opinions. And that’s dangerous.”
“If that weren’t enough, as a result of our education system, our public is not versed in what lies behind a scientific argument, and so they pick the argument they like.
“Look, I’m not a climate scientist. I was trained as a social scientist. I have done some reasonably careful reading on the topic of climate change, but nothing that the average person with, say, a B.A. degree in a non-scientific field couldn’t work through,” Daniell says.
“But I read with a basic question in mind: ‘Where is the preponderance of evidence?’ And the preponderance of evidence says clearly that climate change is not only real but the biggest and fastest-moving threat on the board. I wish it were not so, but I try not allow my wishes to influence the evidence in front of me.”
“So, I’m doing what I can with our CASE project to help our communication students learn how they can contribute to the many and varied climate-change education and response efforts that are out there now and that will emerge in the coming decades.”
At the same time, he notes, students and faculty in communication have specific expertise. “We’re not climate scientists. We’re the friendly folks who bring you the courses on public speaking, persuasion, argumentation, group dynamics, interaction skills and a variety of other topics that can be applied to the climate-change communication problem.”
Reaching audiences
Assuming better communication can help advance public discourse on climate, how do trained communicators do this? One key, Daniell says, is to tailor the message to the recipients, to engage in audience analysis.
If the aim is to deliver a message that says that humans have a very serious problem and are going to have to make some very serious changes to address it, one might well ask, “What gets in the way of people accepting or even listening to what you have to say? What are the experiences of the people? Why is (the topic) scary to them? What is it that you could say to them that would shut them down? And what might you say or do that would at least keep them listening to you?
“This kind of analysis can be based on empirical data as well as inferred from what we know about other similar groups of people. Once we know what obstacles we face, we can identify the right strategies and tactics to use with a particular group. ”
That’s not often how climate debates are staged. In some cases, scientists and advocates speaking about climate change embrace a “cognitive-deficit model,” which assumes that giving people more data will result in their reaching certain conclusions. Daniell laughs at that notion, which “presumes a rational world.”
“Why do people buy, say, clothing to follow some new fashion or cars with bodies that are shaped in some new way or offer features that no one really needs? Does it appear to be a rational world to you? It doesn’t to me,” he observes. “I make about 10 emotionally based decisions a day.”
One very effective way to address climate change is to communicate the economic benefits of sustainable practices and polices rather than “hitting people in the face with what is probably the biggest and most complex problem we as a species have ever faced.”
Daniell notes that other universities have launched programs similar to CASE. Yale and George Mason universities have good programs that served as templates.
And though he acknowledges that the challenge he’s taking on is daunting, Daniell says he has no regrets about founding and funding CASE. “I’m a very strong believer in the old idea of noblesse oblige, that we who are educated, privileged and wealthy … have an obligation to serve the societies that made these things possible.”
“And we are certainly among the wealthiest people on the planet, not to mention the greatest per-capita users of fossil fuels. We have been leaders in developing the technologies and resulting lifestyle that got us where we are today—living on a dangerously warming planet with a nasty end in sight—and we are certainly capable of providing leadership for a sustainable future. In the coming years, our students will take their places among those leaders.”
To learn more about CASE, see http://comm.colorado.edu/case. To support the program, contact Kimberly Bowman, associate director of development, CU Foundation, 303-541-1446 or Kimberly.bowman@cufund.org.