Summary – Research universities have as their current primary mission a focus that is likely at odds with the emerging decline in surplus energy, and may be at odds with the global climate crisis. But they are among the more flexible institutions in modern society. They can adopt a new social role, or update an earlier one, that crafts a new set of relationships with the planet’s resources. Outlined here, this role is further developed in these localization papers.
The University of Michigan’s 10th president said that universities are responsible for training and research that serve our society’s current economic and cultural needs. That statement was expected and uninspiring. What was said next was fascinating. A public university also, “has a fundamental responsibility to be critical of society’s current arrangements and to entertain, construct and test alternative visions.” That is a radical and exhilarating thought.
That latter responsibility is newly relevant given the rapidly changing biophysical and social context within which large universities function. This new context is one of emerging biophysical limits, the bane of modern, large-scale institutions. Reactions to the fact of biophysical limits to material growth usually vary within a narrow range between dismissive and derisive. However, an expected end to energy-fueled growth is receiving renewed attention from both ecologists and economists (Bardi 2020, 2014, 2011; Daly and Farley 2010; Hall and Day 2009; Morgan 2016; Herrington 2020).
Most universities emerged and flourished during a period of extraordinary affluence, a centuries-long consumption and construction binge. The premise of these localization papers points to an end to this situation. McKibben summarized this new context in his book Eaarth (2010): The world onto which we each were born has been so disrupted that it is not the world on which we now live. McKibben points out that, “We know, definitively, that the old planet “worked.” That is, it produced and sustained a modern civilization. We don’t know that about the new one” (2010: 33).
It is praiseworthy that universities are front and center in addressing the climate emergency. Indeed, they have contributed significantly to the science and policy-making that underpin the global negotiating process that recently created a nascent response. Furthermore, most universities have established on-campus sustainability initiatives to address global heating and other environmental challenges. A few are reflecting on their environmental impacts beyond the walls of the academe. These efforts are coming from a deep understanding of the fundamental responsibility of universities: to look beyond everyday political and market-based issues, to look far into the future, and to look, as one of my colleagues says, around distant corners.
But there is another area of concern that universities must urgently address yet currently seem reluctant to do. On the matter of declining surplus energy and other limits to continuous material and economic growth (Morgan 2016, Rye and Jackson 2018), universities are oddly silent. They are not alone; most large-scale institutions exhibit a similar muteness on these issues. Yet, this is a peculiar silence since a belief in continuous growth on a finite planet would certainly fail any first-term logic course of an earlier academic era.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” (Upton Sinclair, 1934)
Sinclair’s insight is often used to explain the reticence of both individuals and institutions to confront inconvenient truths. If so used here it would explain the silence by noting the exceedingly close relationship between modern universities and techno-industrial enterprises. This close and growing relationship makes it hard for ideas like limits-to-growth, energy descent, and re-localization to find an academic home let alone funding support. It also makes it difficult for the university to fulfill their fundamental responsibility expressed in the opening quotation above.
However, a path forward is provided by universities’ recent experience with the climate emergency. The same analysis that posits global heating as an existential threat, might also be used to question the assumption that techno-industrial society can remain unchanged and will prevail in the face of growth limits and energy descent. Such a re-framing of the universities’ role, “to be critical of society’s current arrangements and to entertain, construct and test alternative visions,” has not yet happened, except in small, unfunded, out-of-the-way corners of the academe. But taking up the challenges of localization is consistent with the long-term social contract universities have with society.
These challenges are covered in more detail throughout these papers. The few stated below give a sense of what is to come.
- New behavioral interventions – Develop interventions that move beyond those that are expert-driven, modest in request, serial in implementation, and short-term in horizon. Explain why past approaches no longer suffice. Instead, engage with citizens in ways that bring out the best in them as they prospect the future.
- New living patterns – Understand that everyday life soon will differ substantially from conventional expectations. The norm will become reduced consumption, curtailed mobility, less specialization, and, over time, decentralized settlement patterns. Life will be much less consumerist and affluent, and become more agrarian. Focus on the many embedded benefits within the new patterns.
- Expanded motivations – Explore and employ durable intrinsic motivations for actions. Focus more on tangible, pragmatic, small-scale, group-based initiatives. As Brooks (2019) suggests, emphasize “…individualism less and relationalism more.”
- Re-framed well-being – Focus on eudaimonic well-being. Call attention to the fact that humans find the pursuits of competence, frugality, and participation to be intrinsically satisfying. Explain that the very behaviors that need to be adopted for a positive localization to emerge, contain their own rewards. Understand that these rewards emerge because the needed behavior are challenging, not despite that fact.
The best shorthand for this approach is well fed neighbor. When universities choose to engage in this worthy pursuit, psychological well-being will improve with everyone and their neighbors being well fed, in the broadest meaning of that word.
References
Bardi, U. (2020). Before the collapse: A guide to the other side of growth. Springer, Cham, Switzerland.
Bardi, U. (2014). Extracted: how the quest for mineral wealth is plundering the planet. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT.
Bardi, U. (2011). The limits to growth revisited. Springer, London, UK.
Brooks, D. (2019). A Nation of Weavers: The Social Renaissance is Happening from the Ground Up. (18 February) New York Times, New York.
Daly, H.E. and Farley, J. (2010). Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications. Island Press, Washington, DC.
Hall, C.A.S. and Day, J.W. (2009). Revisiting the Limits to Growth after Peak Oil. Am Sci 97:230–237.
McKibben, B. (2010). Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. NY: Times Books.
Morgan, T. (2016). Life after Growth. Harriman House, Hampshire, UK.
Rye, C.D. and Jackson, T. (2018). A Review of EROEI-dynamics energy-transition models. Energy policy 122:260-272.
Raymond De Young
School for Environment and Sustainability
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Updated: May 5, 2021
Copyright © 2021 Raymond De Young, All Rights Reserved.
