44: Choosing a Career in Sustainability

USA

A Climate Pollinator story by Leah Kauffman

Leah Kauffman is the illustrator for the Climate Pollinator. She shares about her experience grappling with climate change as a college student, and more recently a graduate exploring a career in sustainability.

I started studying sustainability at Goshen College in the fall of 2020. That semester, I participated in the Sustainability Leadership Semester at Merry Lea Environmental Center, a satellite campus of Goshen College.

At Merry Lea, I really started to dig into climate change and its implications on my life and others around the world. The two years that followed were full of conversations around why our planet is dying, who is responsible, and what really needs to happen to turn our situation around.

After graduating from Goshen College, I was definitely feeling the “doom and gloom” of the state of our climate. I felt this insurmountable pressure to do something, to change, but I felt like I didn’t really have the power or capability to do so.

Climate anxiety and burnout are real and it can feel a bit paralyzing. Giving myself some time away when I graduated helped me not feel so overwhelmed.

A year later, the plans I had for my future career were once again influenced by the urgency and excitement I felt to do something meaningful and helpful in regards to climate change.

I began applying to graduate schools for landscape architecture, but was somewhat disappointed by the program options in relation to sustainability. Many of the programs I looked at only include a couple of classes grazing over the idea of sustainability.

I wanted to be involved with a school that would put sustainability and its importance at the forefront of their education.

There is this idea that has been restated many times by many different groups and people. It is that our generation is the first to see and recognize the consequences of climate change, but we are also the last to be able to take strong action to reverse the damage that has been done.

Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan where I will be studying this fall, restated this point at my first orientation day this past weekend. He called us to pull together our own talents and initiatives to make big changes.

Over the past lent season, you have read about the different ways that regular people are taking action by doing what they can.

It’s each person, doing what they can, together, that will make a difference.