Going to the Core of Climate Change Activism

Cameron Wake is an internationally known climate researcher, and he’s living testimony to the power of doing work one is passionate about. He is also an example of how many different ways there are to be engaged in the climate change issue; as a cutting-edge ice-core researcher, a dynamic educator and an involved community activist, his story is inspiring on many levels. It’s a tale of adventure, discovery and growth.

His work involves examining the chemical composition of ice taken from deep within the core of a glacier—formed in long-bygone eras—to find a record of how earth’s climate has changed over its history. In pursuing this type of research while getting his Master’s degree from Wilfrid Laurier University, Wake journeyed to the Himalayas. It was here that he learned of the ice core research at the University of New Hampshire.

Equipment like this helps scientists collect ice cores from deep within glaciers.

Working with ice cores.

The connection eventually led Wake to come to UNH as a researcher. Once there, he continued his work in the Himalayas, spending months heading out from a “base” camp with a small group of to high elevation glacier to drill ice cores. They often stayed out for several weeks at a time, “living off of rice and lentils and onions” and collecting ice core samples to analyze and study.

As his research progressed, Wake became more and more concerned about the compelling evidence of human-induced global warming—and simultaneously, more “miffed that society wasn’t doing more to address it.” He explains, “I felt that if people just knew a little bit of what I knew, we’d be doing a lot more to address human induced climate change.”

Wake and other scientists stayed in this working campsite during a recent research venture, this one to Canada’s Yukon territory.	A Yukon spectacle, captured on a research expedition.

Partly as a result of this conviction, Wake began teaching a course at the UNH called Global Environmental Change. Aside from giving him a chance to share the findings of his own research and other climate-related work, the course was created with other special functions and unique features in mind. As part of a “Teaching Excellence” program at UNH he undertook before he began offering the class, Wake learned that an active learning environment is more effective than a passive one. Taking this maxim to heart, he began thinking about ways to create such an active environment: “I realized,” he relates, “one way to do that was to engage students in solving a difficult real-world problem—in tackling a tough problem, with no pre-determined answer.”

The “tough problem” posed to students in Wake’s course is this: How can the University of New Hampshire effectively reduce its contribution to global warming? In developing this question, he hooked up with the University’s Office of Sustainability Programs to create context and a “negotiation” model that would become the backbone of his course. In it, students break up into negotiating groups, each representing a (thoroughly-researched) stakeholder position in the very relevant real-life process of developing a plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the University.

Though the solutions students arrive at each semester—based on factual data and policies or policy possibilities—hold no official weight with the administration, it’s worth noting that, for each of the 5 semesters that Global Environmental Change has been offered, negotiating teams have come up with feasible scenarios for institutional emissions reductions that take the concerns of multiple stakeholder communities into account.

(This link will take you to the agreements generated by the students through the negotiation process.)

For students, it’s a practical and dynamic way to apply their new scientific knowledge to their own community. For Wake, the process of providing this experiential education creates a “positive feedback loop” of empowerment and action. The hope is that the knowledge gained through this experience will cause the policy-oriented institutional solutions and the everyday, consciousness-driven lifestyle choices necessary to halt global warming.

Wake’s experience in the arena of public policy and citizen choice exceeds the scope of his activities at UNH, however. For example, he is president and a co-founder of a group called Seacoast Area Bicycle Routes (SABR), which raises money and awareness around the need for the creation of new or upgraded bicycle routes in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire. The work of SABR, Wake explains, is about “providing options,” recognizing that convenience and safety are two of the major obstacles to choosing climate-neutral bikes over polluting automobiles as a mode of transportation.

Cameron Wake and other SABR cyclists cross the Kittery Point bridge from New Hampshire to Maine.

In this and other citizen-activist activities, Wake is a model for exactly the kind of informed engagement that his course aims to inspire in students—the kind of action that his research seems to point to as necessary to avoid unimaginable disruptions to global ecosystems. Though he recognizes that “addressing CO2 mitigation will take decades,” Wake seems to take a long view of the problem—not surprising for a man who studies trends in the earth’s natural systems over millennia. “What’s important,” he declares, is that we start now, and that we don’t just say ‘Let’s adapt.”

—Jennifer Schroeder