Caroline Levine, David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities, Literatures in English

October 2023

I have stopped conducting business as usual, and I hope you’ll join me.

Our colleagues in climate science have been warning for decades that we need to make major changes fast. We haven’t done nearly enough. And now climate breakdown has begun. The catastrophes are coming faster than predicted—including sea level rise that will drown the world’s coastal cities, extreme storms, floods, fires and droughts that are already pushing people from their homes, and the rapid extinction of species. The UN predicts that a billion people will be migrating in search of food, water, and shelter by 2050. 

This is suffering on an unprecedented scale. It is also wildly unjust, since the people who are hardest hit by global warming are those who have contributed least to climate breakdown.

I hope you find all of this as intolerable as I do. But even if you’re outraged and terrified, you might also feel powerless. What can any of us do while Big Oil continues to mine and drill and governments drag their feet?

Since I’ve turned my focus to the climate, I’ve come to understand that there’s actually a lot that we as a university faculty can do. 

Faculty have two core missions: the first is to produce rigorous knowledge for the public good and the second is to prepare our students for flourishing lives. The fossil fuel companies have been actively working against both. Big Oil has waged a long campaign to cast doubt on climate science, smearing experts right here at Cornell, and they’ve succeeded in delaying public action and keeping their profits going so long that now we are facing mass death and indescribable suffering worldwide. Our students, meanwhile, feel bleak and hopeless for good reason: their futures are in fact radically precarious. I’m not surprised that climate anxiety among young people is rising as fast as the famous hockey stick graph.

And yet, I imagine you are quietly objecting, we are scholars, not activists. Surely we should stick to our expertise, and not wander off into issues we don’t fully understand. 

I hear you. I have a PhD in English literature. For years I told myself to stay in my lane. 

But specialization itself is now intensifying the climate catastrophe. A recent report shows that economists have been making predictions about the impact of global warming that are strikingly inconsistent with scientific research. Peer reviewed economic papers claim that a rise in temperature of 6°C above pre-industrial levels will reduce global GDP by less than 10%, whereas every climate scientist will tell you that a 6° rise is likely to destroy humans as a species. And yet, economic experts have been influencing pension funds like TIAA, one of the two retirement companies that handles Cornell’s pensions, which has no climate scientist on their Board of Governors or Trustees, and has at least $78 billion invested fossil fuels, including massive sums in coal. Your retirement savings and mine, thanks to experts in finance and economics, are hastening climate collapse. 

Faculty like us are good at evaluating research. We can find mistakes and omissions within fields like these, and start speaking out about them. 

Tenured faculty have an especially serious responsibility to speak now. We’re among the least precarious people on the planet. If we don’t stand up for our research and teaching missions, who will? Our students are looking to us, too, hungry for leadership that is brave enough to break from established norms and habits to usher in a world that will allow them to thrive.

So: what meaningful actions can we take? My own research shows that it’s important to stop focusing on individual consumer decisions, like recycling or buying electric cars. This gets the bad guys off the hook. It was British Petroleum that invented the “carbon footprint” to turn public attention away from their continuing plans to mine and drill, encouraging you and me to feel guilty instead. They got many of us to police our own private actions, rather than pushing for larger structural change. 

What works better is outspoken public pressure. This pressure has to be sustained long enough and at a large enough scale to exert an effect on corporations and governments. It has to be non-violent. Think marches, protests, coordinated boycotts, letter campaigns, institutional change, voting drives, direct actions, walk-outs, rallies, media blitzes, strikes, and sit-ins. 

No single protest is likely to make massive change on its own. But even small groups of activists can have major structural impacts. For example, the few hundred people who regularly attended ACT UP meetings in the 1980s and 90s ended insurance exclusions for people with AIDS, shifted the focus of infection research, and introduced fast-tracking for experimental drugs. Nonviolent revolutions over the past few decades have succeeded with the support of just 3.5% of the population. 

Of course, if you’ve spent any time with activists, you’ll know that we like to argue about tactics. Some insist that confrontation and disruption backfire, just entrenching the status quo. Others counter that moderate proposals allow people to feel good without really making change, fostering business as usual.

It turns out that both approaches work. And in fact, they work especially well together. In what social scientists call the “radical flank effect,” confrontational tactics increase support for more moderate positions within the same movement. Debates about divestment, for example, have helped to legitimize and popularize arguments for a carbon tax. 

The big takeaway? To be effective, we need to join forces in ways that will put substantial pressure on governments and corporations. Lots of us at Cornell are already organized and organizing. Consider joining Cornell on Fire, TIAA-Divest, Sunrise Ithaca, No Fly Climate Sci, Fossil Free Research, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Stop the Money Pipeline, Climate Action Now, or Sustainable Tompkins. You can keep climate change on the agenda in the Faculty Senate. You can raise it with your college. And you can support students doing incredible work in organizations like Climate Justice Cornell, Engineering for a Sustainable World, Agua Clara, and the Environmental Law Society. 

The fact is, we have enough voices. Now we just have to start singing together in a chorus that’s loud enough for the world to hear.