Hilary Hungerford: Okay, I think we’re good. So, welcome. This podcast is part of the Environmental Ethics Symposium Fall 2020. So, I have two really exciting guests with me today. We have Cassie Bingham and Marissa Getz from the Center for Social Impact. So, I’ll have each of them just briefly introduce themselves and then we have some questions around environmental ethics and their work. Cassie, let’s hear from you.

Cassie Bingham: Yeah, I’m glad to be here. My name’s Cassie Bingham, as Hillary mentioned. I’m the program director over Impact Program Design in the Center for Social Impact. I work with our student leaders in the center creating programming that is socially impactful and getting UVU students involved in that, so yeah.

Marissa Getz: And I’m Marissa. I actually have sort of downplayed my—not downplayed— bumped down my hours at the Center for Social Impact. But I worked with student leaders in similar work that Cassie was doing, developing programs to teach people how you can change the world in a strategic way. We worked on taking students on trips where they can dig into different social problems and learn from living experts. That, and we started a couple of classes that I’m really excited about. Right now, the reason why I stopped working at UVU—a wonderful place—is because I’m doing a graduate program at Harvard School of Design. And I’m studying Urban Planning. So, the environment and humans and how we all intersect is very, very interesting to me.

Hilary Hungerford: Great, thank you. I’m so glad you’re both here with us today. So, first I would just like you to tell us a little bit about the Center for Social Impact and what kinds of work you do at the center

Cassie Bingham: Yeah, uhm, the Center for Social Impact, it used to be the Center for Volunteering and Service Learning, for a little over two decades actually. But really, recently, in just the last couple of years, we’ve really transitioned into a more holistic approach to social impact work and now we’re called the Center for Social Impact. So although we still have direct service as one of the pillars—we call them pathways in the center—we also have five additional areas where we do social impact programming, social impact events, and areas where we mentor students. And they include things like community activism, and policy and governance, and social entrepreneurship, etc. And so we take a really holistic approach to teaching students that no matter what they’re interested in, no matter what they’re passionate about, there’s a place for them to be able to get meaningfully involved and strategically involved, like Marissa said, in social impact work and in addressing the social challenges that we face in our current world. And a couple of the frameworks that we use to approach that are looking at problems through a systems lens—so, systems thinking—and also design thinking. We teach students how to strategically design interventions for social problems and that includes looking at problems through a systems lens. So, yeah that’s what we do at the Center for Social Impact.

Marissa Getz: And just to add, really quick onto that, a lot of people think that because what we’re called is the Center for Social Impact—you know, quote-unquote “social”—that that has nothing to do with the environment. And anyone that assumes that could not be more wrong. I’m sure you’ll hear through our whole discussion that the environment intersects with social so much, with our relationship with it, it impacts our lives and also, you know, we care about world problems beyond just humanity. Just wanted to make that very, very clear in this environmental ethics symposium

Hilary Hungerford: Yeah, that’s great, thank you so much. Next, I’m just going to ask if you could each tell us a little about your journey and becoming part of social impact at UVU. Kind of what motivated you to get into this work, what motivates you to keep going with this work.

Cassie Bingham: Yeah, I’ll start. Actually, Marissa was already working at the Center for Social Impact before me and luckily both her and I had been colleagues in college and we had also worked together a little bit in various social entrepreneurship initiatives in Uganda, Africa, actually. And so she had reached out to me and said that the job was available and I got excited because the way she was explaining the approach that the Center takes, which I just described as very holistic, was really appealing to me because I’m really interested in intersectionality and just the interconnectedness of social impact work. And like Marissa just mentioned, that involves not only our human relationships but our relationships to the earth, our relationships to our physical surroundings, and the systems that we live within. So, I got really excited and I’m glad that I was hired. I’ve been at UVU for about a year now and Marissa and I in conjunction with a couple other staff members at the Center have really worked on pushing forward these views of interconnectedness and intersectionality and how we address social problems through those lenses. So I, personally in my career trajectory, I graduated in social anthropology and international development and so I had a lot of interest in how we address social issues. And then in my personal career I’ve worked in non-profit organizations, I’ve worked with international NGOs doing various aid work and then development work and fundraising. And then I’ve dabbled a little bit in social entrepreneurship. But, one of my biggest personal passions has been social justice, and especially racial and ethnic justice and equity. And that’s something that I’ve kind of brought to the table. But learning from Marissa, a lot of that being a co-worker with her, has been learning about the environment and about the intersection environmentalism has with social justice issues.

Hilary Hungerford: Nice, thank you so much Cassie. Marissa, let’s hear from you.

Marissa Getz: Yeah, first I think it’s very important: Cassie is one of the most talented and intelligent people that I have ever met in my life. So, anyone at UVU etc., please, please get involved with the Center for Social Impact and just learn from her, so important. We were so excited when Cassie accepted the position. I, my route has been pretty similar to Cassie’s. I studied sociology, a minor in international development. The first class that we took together was an international development course where we were both so intimidated and both thought the other person was so cool. But, yeah, I was also a Middle East studies minor. And I think, in all of that, I recognized some really important things. That we make a lot of assumptions about our way of life being the best way of life, in the western world especially in the U.S. and that really colors a lot of the way we look at and interact with the world. And I started seeing really big holes in that. And so that was able to pull me away, a little bit, from this general, like, “white savior” type of idea, which anyone who gets involved with the Center for Social Impact will learn more about that and what it means and the harm that it’s done in the world.

So, yeah, I worked on a lot of similar things that Cassie did. Did a lot of international development stuff, did some research on access to water in rural Malawi, did research on agriculture in rural Malawi. Some really fun and interesting things that brought into my worldview a lot. I also did a lot of teaching in social impact during my undergrad. I TAed for a class called Social Innovation and I loved it. It’s really amazing to see students come alive as they get better frameworks for critical thinking surrounding social impact issues. And so that was always so exciting. I felt like my light bulb continues to go off and so it’s so, so fun to see students, as they hear something they’ll go “oh my god, I thought something so different my whole life and this is blowing my mind!” Because it absolutely changed my world.

And so, also growing up in Glacier National Park, Montana like right next to it, has made the environment a huge part of my life. People look at it very differently than many people do in cities. And so understanding that and coming to Utah and seeing how differently people treated the environment, along with my work about access to water and agriculture in rural Malawi, have really fueled my interest in just finding different ways to think about how we improve our world.

Hilary Hungerford: That’s so great, thanks so much. I’m going to kind of combine the next two questions, thinking about what does environmental ethics mean to you and then what are a few of these ethics that are really important in your life and kind of guiding a lot of your thinking?

Cassie Bingham: Yeah, you know, I think that my understanding of and incorporating of environmental ethics is still emerging. I guess all of ours is still emerging, but for me especially, like I was saying, you know, I’ve started to realize more and more how important it is from an intersectional lens that I incorporate environmental ethics into my worldview and into my value system in order to continue to move forward in other equity goals, whether it’s racial equity or gender equity or whatever it may be. But I would say that for me environmental ethics includes that then. You know, seeing how environmental issues can affect more than just the planet or some of the more surface-level ways we think about it. But looking at, you know, the geographical differences between where, you know, I mean colonizers, basically, have put brown and black people in the world and then how we’ve chosen where we build specific industries and things like that and seeing the statistical disparities between pollution rates when it comes to districts that have brown and black people or other marginalized people compared to people of privilege, right? You know, those are things that I’ve just now in the last few years started to become more aware of and started to become aware of the fact that me being invested in having environmentally ethical values plays a role and affects the actual outcomes of various peoples in this world.

And, you know, you can zoom out even more to the global, you know, ethics of environmentalism when it comes to climate change and how that is affecting people who are marginalized and disenfranchised compared to people with privilege. Looking at, you know, the populations in the world especially in other countries that are being affected by natural disasters that are increasing, you know, statistically increasing due to climate change or that are being affected by drastic changes in weather patterns and things like that and how that affects food availability and food accessibility and everything like that. Just seeing the interconnectedness of

how our decisions as humans environmentally impact the very real human outcomes of various populations around the world, that has started to weigh on me quite a bit.

And so, I guess wrapping that up, my environmental ethics then have become more personally important. I’ve started to question myself more on my personal habits but also more on what am I doing with the freedoms that I have when it comes to voting, or to ethical consumerism and how I’m affecting the choices of large corporations, or how I am pushing for the lobbying and advocating in big government, which I think has an outsized effect on environmental outcomes and environmental policy, right? So I guess my ethical stance is just much more interrogative of myself and what I’m doing to influence these systems.

Hilary Hungerford: Thank you.

Marissa Getz: Cassie’s always so hard to follow because she always manages to say everything in a perfect amount of time. I would say I agree wholeheartedly with everything that Cassie just said and that anything that she said could be said for me and how I also feel about the earth. Some things to add to that is, for so long I was so interested in international development, I think because of that sort of white savior-y “oh I can help people in other places.” That kind of idea, it felt, you know, maybe the wrong word, but sexier in terms of a career, etc. And I started realizing, like, “oh, the work that I’m doing Malawi in researching access to water, in researching agriculture and how it’s changed, is all directly linked to climate change.” Which is almost entirely driven by the western world and our consumption, our modes of transportation, the way we do business. And so it became this question of how can I, ethically, go to other countries and go “oh, do this! do this!” Like, how can we solve this problem when the root cause of all these problems really comes back to my and my country’s way of life? And so that’s really where I began to interrogate that. And it’s been a continuous process of that and I hope that I do that for the rest of my life.

Something else that has really influenced my environmental ethic is—so Cassie mentioned earlier this idea of design. And how can we do this design in a way that we are creating, that we are really solving problems based on the user of these systems? You know, like, our system of mass incarceration is not solving anyone’s problems; it’s actually causing so many and it’s hurting so many people and it’s not designed around the people of our country. It’s designed around white supremacy and upholding that. So, when we think about designing systems, our environmental systems or our economic systems, it’s designed around humans. And there’s a reason why many scholars and writers have started to call this period of time the Anthropocene, which is, you know, where basically everything sort of revolves around humans and the changes that are happening in our earth are happening because of humans and because of our exorbitant consumption and quest for comfort above anything. And so, I think I’m really interested in—you know, there’s some systems in design where humans are absolutely the users, they’re the main people we must design around. But what does design look like when we’re designing for people as animals? People as species? For humans as part of this bigger ecosystems? What if it was ecosystem design, instead of human-centered design? What if we stopped thinking about humans as the center of our earth? And those are some of the really big questions that underlie my main environmental ethic and my actions while also, yeah, this—we can’t be perfect until we fix our systems. Yeah.

Hilary Hungerford: Yeah, great, thank you so much for that insight. You’re right, there’s such big ideas and so many big conversations; I think it’s really exciting to talk about these things. The next question, you both touched on a little bit, but it’s thinking about how the environment intersects with other things you’re working on. So, I like that you’ve talked a lot about interconnectedness and intersectionality, because that’s kind of the same way that I approach environmental issues: that they’re not just these isolated kind of put the environment in a box and deal with, like, reducing your carbon or something. It’s this really larger conversation about how you’re living in the world and how you’re approaching so many different aspects of justice: social justice, environmental justice, so many commonalities. So if you can talk just a little bit more about some of these ways that environment intersects with some of the other issues you’re working on.

Marissa Getz: Could I pop in first on this one? Great. Some of things that I’m interested in and that also are happening, like some exciting movement at the CSI, is this big reckoning with ourselves about how we, the U.S. as a settler-colonial state, have treated indigenous people. And you cannot talk about environmentalism, about having a relationship with the land, without acknowledging that many of us who are here are settlers in a land that is not our own. And that the people who have led the way in sustainable lifestyles are indigenous people. And yet they are some of the voices we have silenced the most, and continue to do so, and that a lot of the new kind of Elon Musk type of sustainability people are taking a lot of those ideas from indigenous people and calling their own, when actually they’re centuries-old, I mean, millennia-old. And I think that’s a really big thing that we’re interested in, is this intersectionality of land sovereignty, of investing in indigenous wisdom and communities, and how that relates to the environment and creating, like, this sort of ripple effect throughout the U.S. And Cassie can talk more about the specifics.

Cassie Bingham: Yeah and I’ll talk a little bit more in a minute about the specific projects that we’re working on, but just to add to what Marissa was saying, you know, I wholeheartedly agree with everything she just said about indigenous technology, indigenous knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and how we often exploit or take, instead of just share in or give credit for and utilize and reciprocate and, you know, all of the good things we could be doing with that. But I’ll also add in there a little bit, you know, another intersectional lens from the black community and from what we’ve been seeing in these recent and current events, with Black Lives Matter protests and all of the conversations and dialogue going around, you know, what Black Lives Matter means and, you know, various people fighting about if they support it or not. You know, for me and at the Center, we support and endorse Black Lives Matter, just, period. But for me, when I try to explain that concept to others, we might be focusing a lot on just individual incidents and events. You know, like one instance where police officers shot an unarmed black man. And although all of those incidents are extremely important, especially when you see the statistical patterns of police brutality against black people, Black Lives Matter is not only about police brutality. That’s just one aspect. We have seen the systematic devaluing of black lives across many sectors, across many fields, and in many ways, not the least of which is in environmentalism. You know, what I was already referring to when it comes to the actual geographic, you know, districting of black and brown communities, you know, with segregation itself during Jim Crow, but then also was upheld through these systems of design, like Marissa is talking about with redlining and things like that. But also, when it comes to where we value actually intervening with even current issues. Look at Flint, Michigan. And that was an environmental issue of, you know, water purity and how the slowness to intervene with that problem and to try to correct that problem—and we still don’t see it corrected. Thinking about how that environmental issue, had it been affecting a white community or a wealthier community, it probably would have been intervened with immediately, right? But instead we see it being completely ignored. And so, there’s so many ways in which black lives, but also other BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] lives in general, are being devalued in terms of how we respond to environmental disaster, how we respond to environmental degradation and things like that. And so, I think that it’s important for us to acknowledge that when we look at these current issues and disparities, how that intersects with environmental ethics and the people whose lives we’re valuing or devaluing.

Hilary Hungerford: Yeah, those are both such important issues that I think we think a lot about in terms of environmental ethics in my classes and other classes across UVU too. So I’m happy to see that there’s a lot of commonalities with the Center for Social Impact and other discussions being had on campus. So this kind of brings me to my next question, which is, what are some of the projects that you and your students are working on right now that are around these questions of environment and intersections? And maybe if there’s ways that other students can get involved in those or learn about those?

Cassie Bingham: Yeah, I’ll jump in on this one, just because I’m at the Center for more hours currently than Marissa is, although she was key in developing many of these programs and is a mastermind in helping us insert a lot of the intersectionality that we do find in our programs. Because we are so recently transitioning into this holistic approach to social impact, a lot of our programs are in the development stages. And so some of them are, in terms of student involvement from UVU, some of them are like to be announced when it’s time for other students to come in. But we’re in the active stages of developing them. But we have some exciting stuff going on.

In our philanthropy pathway, as Marissa, this is one of the points where Marissa was talking about, where we’re trying to start to incorporate non-western viewpoints on some of the parts of social impact. And so for philanthropy, specifically, we’ve been trying to set up a program where we’re working in partnership with the native initiative at UVU to kind of reframe philanthropy away from the way that we necessarily look at it from a western sense and look at it more from an indigenous viewpoint, where philanthropy is very much a healing method of distributing funds where they’re needed, and looking at reciprocity and what that might mean, and where money is used and distributed in a way where we are respecting both humans and the land. And so we’ve got some cool things in the work. We’re going to be working directly with hiring and working with native students on this project and some of the funding activities that we’re looking into actually include some, like, ethnobotany things. We’re looking into doing some hikes and stuff that students can pay for, where indigenous hike leaders will talk about the land and talk about native plants and things like that in Utah. So we’ve got some cool intersections of indigenous viewpoints of the environment when it comes to creating philanthropic funds and things like that. So that’s one of the projects we’re working on.

Another kind of environmental project that we’re working on is what we’re calling social impact boxes. Some students might have seen those already if you attended this summer. But we’re trying to focus on creating or curating some boxes with samplings of various ethical products, a lot of them being ecologically friendly products, so students can start thinking more consciously about their consumer habits. So we’re trying to introduce students to brands that are, not just brands that are using it as a branding ploy, to say, you know, that they’re eco-friendly or that they are in some way ethical. But our impact at the Center is actually vetting right now and doing deep research into what their actual practices are. And we’re trying to find products that are really exemplary of, within a capitalist system, how do we produce products that are actually earth friendly or equitable or ethical in other ways? Whether that means that they’re minority- owned, or whatever it might mean. So that’s another project that we’re currently working on.

And the last one that I’ll highlight is, we have two of our fellows who will soon be launching a podcast. It’s going to just be called Real Talk, people will be able to find it on our Instagram TV, IG TV. And they’ll be discussing topics exactly like what we’re discussing right now on this podcast. They’ll be discussing topics of intersectionality when it comes to a wide range of social issues. And so I’m sure that there will be environmental topics included in those. And so we’re really excited to hear from students on that.

Marissa Getz: And one thing that I’ll add is that we have this amazing class that we are so excited about. It’s [...] Social Impact Seminar. So it kind of talks about, what are these basic frameworks for questioning how we involve ourselves in social problems that we care about? Cassie teaches it; we used to co-teach it and that’s one of the things that I miss most about my job, is teaching that class with Cassie. But it’s this really amazing one-credit class where students can start to engage in these processes of critical thinking through choosing a specific social environmental problem that they care about. So, you kind of get to direct some of that and the way that you’re engaging or the lens that you’re engaging these questions and these frameworks with. But I would highly recommend that if students want to get involved, that’s one of the readily available things that’s developed, it’s running. It’s so good for students to just jump in and start being, like, “alright, I’m ready to look at the world in a little bit of a different way and I’m ready to explore something I care about more in that process.”

Hilary Hungerford: That’s great, I want to take the class too! I think we’ll wrap it up there. So, just a reminder, this was Cassie Bingham and Marissa Getz from the Center for Social Impact and you can find the webpage of the Center for Social Impact on UVU’s site. Thank you both so much for this conversation; I learned a lot and think you all are doing such amazing work in the Center, but also it was really cool to learn more about your ideas and what’s kind of motivating you towards this work. Thank you for spending time with me! Yeah, and we’ll end here, have a good day.

Marissa Getz: You too, thanks for having us.

Hilary Hungerford: Thank you.

Thomas Bretz: Welcome to one of our podcasts for the 2020 Utah Valley University Environmental Ethics Symposium hosted by UVU Center for the Study of Ethics. For this year’s symposium, we recorded several interviews with some of the people right here at UVU who do interesting work in environmental ethics and related themes. And we do actually hope to conduct maybe some more of these interviews in years to come. My name is Thomas Bretz, I am an environmental philosopher here at UVU and today I have the great pleasure of talking to Dr. Hilary Hungerford, who is a professor at Utah Valley University in the Earth Science Department, working on various issues relating to environmental ethics and sustainability. We are also, I might add, directing the Environmental Ethics minor together here at UVU. Dr. Hungerford, welcome and thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Hilary Hungerford: Thank you for interviewing me; it’s so fun to be a part of this podcast.

Thomas Bretz: How are you doing today?

Hilary Hungerford: I’m doing well. It’s chilly here, it’s starting to be fall, so the mornings are just like invigorating and cold. It’s so great.

Thomas Bretz: That’s awesome, I love fall.

Hilary Hungerford: Me too.

Thomas Bretz: Well, let’s kind of jump right to it. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what environmental ethics actually means to you?

Hilary Hungerford: Yeah, that’s a really good question that I’ve been thinking a lot about. Even though I’ve done some of these interviews, it’s sometimes...it’s hard to really come up with, like, one definition of what environmental ethics means to me. So, when I was thinking about it the last few days, I was thinking there’s kind of a personal way of looking at environmental ethics and then there’s kind of a social way or an interpersonal way that I think about it. So, personally when I think about environmental ethics, I think about things like “how do my actions impact the earth?” or “how do my consumption patterns impact climate change?” or like “how does my water use impact all these other earth systems?” And then kind of a social way of looking at it is: how are these bigger environmental issues impacting different groups of people around the world? And how are we, like, all connected in these relationships around environmental systems, but then some people are impacted way more than others? So, I guess both of those frames kind of look at impacts and justice and thinking, really, about how we live in a more-than-human world. It’s really easy, I think, in my day-to-day life to just think about myself and my kids and my husband. And it’s sometimes it’s easy to forget about the bees or the flowers or the molecules of water in the atmosphere. But our lives depend on everything and we’re interlaced with everything. So, thinking about our impacts, justice, and trying to center other things. A more-than-human world. I really like that way of thinking about things.

Thomas Bretz: That’s excellent, yeah. No, and I think I definitely agree that partially it’s about paying attention to the things that do all this work, you know, like the bees but that, you know, usually receive short thrift in our appreciation of what makes things run.

Hilary Hungerford: Yeah, exactly, like even in my yard. So, I live in Orem, Utah, kind of just like a typical ranch-style, old brick house and we have this huge lawn and I just like can’t bring myself to be putting on all these other pesticides when I see, like, there’s bees buzzing around all the time, there’s other insects crawling around, there’s all this kind of, like, a biosphere right in front of my steps. And so, I even think about environmental ethics like that. Like, do I want to be using these pesticides or fertilizers like everyone else? Like, it’s a weed patch but it’s like alive and it’s exciting.

Thomas Bretz: Yeah, now that’s really interesting. Actually, I talked with somebody the other day about, I think, the two different attitudes you can have towards a garden is either an aesthetic object for your pleasure, or maybe it’s building a community around your house. You know, we have like, we have insects and other animals and plants and kind of feel that it’s kind of cool having a garden, but that, like, two different approaches, I would say.

Hilary Hungerford: Yeah, for sure.
Thomas Bretz: Are there any environmental ethics or forms of environmental ethics that are dear to you? And why is that, if they are?

Hilary Hungerford: Yeah, that’s great. So, something that we try to do in Geography—my discipline—is, we try to uncover relationships that are often hidden. So, we can think about like products that we use or, like, I drink coffee, I’m a big coffee drinker, I kind of need that in the mornings. So, in Geography, we talk about, like, trying to uncover all the relationships that would go behind, like, producing your cup of coffee. Like, what is it? What do the fields look like where it’s being produced? What kind of ecological impacts are there? What about the people that are working there? Are they treated fairly? Are they paid fairly for their labor and for their time? So, I guess just trying to make all this stuff that’s hidden behind the workings of capitalism, trying to uncover those and think about those and be really conscious about the way that you consume things. And, you know, I’m not perfect. I don’t do this all the time, but I try my best and try to think about just the impact that I’m having in my daily life. But I also recognize that like there’s like small things that everybody can change, but there’s also like these huge, larger systems of, like, energy production or something, that’s this huge contributor to climate change that no matter how much I try to lower my carbon footprint, there are these other systems that are like so big. So also trying to figure out a way to change those through policy or just even like helping students be aware of those systems. Yeah, so I guess how that relates to environmental ethics is just like again, just like understanding your impact and that everything you do has an impact for good or bad, and just trying to think about like what do I want that to look like? Do I want to support companies or products that pay people nothing, that don’t pay a living wage? Even if it’s not in our own county. But, you know, the U.S., we have this huge global footprint. So trying to think about like what’s my responsibility in that and how can I help communities around the world? Even though it can be a little daunting, but I think it’s really important to think about those things.

Thomas Bretz: Yeah, I think that’s really great. I also think, like, at least in the mainstream dominant western traditions, when we think about ethics, we think about, usually about these kind of things you intentionally do in a very specific time and place. But I think, you know, that you bring up this really important point, right? That when we do EE, it goes way beyond this kind of nicely limited actions, because there’s all this hidden stuff that’s happening as well. HH: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I’ve been thinking a lot about that hidden stuff. Like, even in my classes, I have them do some readings lately and people are like “oh my gosh, I had no idea this was happening.” or I had, recently I had my students read—

Thomas Bretz: Actually, can you tell me a little bit more about the way you teach with these kind of ideas, because I think that would be very interesting.

Hilary Hungerford: Yeah, I guess I’m going right into that question. But yeah, I had my students read a chapter about the pioneer/indigenous contact around Utah Lake and kind of think about what our landscapes look like now and how they’ve been so altered and what that means for, like, sustainability. Like, can this continue to go on? And it was a really hard reading for a lot of them because, you know, you often don’t like to think about your own backyard or even people in like your family lineage doing things that maybe weren’t the best. Yeah, but then after, their responses were really interesting, saying, just like, “I had no idea this happened. I had, like, no idea that pioneers treated indigenous people just like most other colonizers.” Like, “I had no idea that farming maybe wasn’t actually the best practice of land use in such an arid place like Utah.” Or just kind of like things that we take for granted now. Again, trying to, like, see the context of how those things came to be and question, like, “is this the best way to be sustainable?” And that’s something I think a lot about. I teach the sustainability class at UVU which has been really, really fun.

Thomas Bretz: And that’s the first of its kind at UVU, right?

Hilary Hungerford: Yeah, it is, we started it—this is the second time I’m teaching it and we have a great group of students; they’re really diving into these questions. Like, this week we’re talking all about wolves and rewilding. It’s such a fun class; everybody should take it. But yeah—yeah, the first we even think, even question this idea of sustainability like what does that mean? A lot of times we hear “sustainability,” we think about just using natural resources. And kind of a point that, like, we can continue to use those and maintain our lifestyles for the coming future. Or like, you know, so our children or grandchildren can live, like, a reasonable lifestyle, like we do. But we really interrogate that idea and say like “well, maybe the West is using too many resources.” We take, like, our carbon footprint quiz, try to measure how much we’re using of Earth’s resources. And we see that, it’s not that everyone on Earth is using too many resources; it’s that we in wealthy countries have this huge, huge impact on earth systems, like, way overburdening the earth systems compared to other people. I saw too, just this week in the news, there was a study that’s estimating, like, “the top 1% has like as much carbon footprint as the bottom half of humanity.” So, when we think about sustainability, it’s not just like “okay can I recycle this?” or “how can I use this product?” But it’s also about, like, “well is this the best way to organize our economy? Is this the best way—like, should we even be doing these things?” We live in a world that’s way bigger than just the United States. Is it ethical to say that some places shouldn’t have the same standard of living as we do? I mean, that seems, that seems crazy. So when you start to really peel this idea of sustainability off and, like, thinking more than just about “okay, I can recycle” or I can get, like, solar-power for my house, or I can get an electric car—which are all good things—but if you think about it in a more kind of global way of looking at things, you see that it’s not that easy. And it makes these really, really big ethical questions about like the way that our lifestyles are, the way we use so many resources, and the way like we exploit so many places and people. It’s really hard, it’s really hard work.

Thomas Bertz: Yeah, you know, and I think that also speaks right to a common misconception, or at least way of misspeaking, when we talk about environmental issues, right? It’s always like “humans do this, humans do that.” There’s this idea that we’re all in this together, in the same way, to the same extent. But I think what you just said really complicates this idea, you know, that we’re all equally responsible or that we’re all equally impacted. You know, which I think really isn’t the case.

Hilary Hungerford: Yeah, right, so I have my students watch this documentary film called Keeping Our Head Above the Water. It’s about Tuvalu, in the South Pacific, and that they’re already seeing sea-level rise. It’s already impacting their communities and their agriculture. And it’s basically countries that are, like, planning for their own demise because of climate change and sea level rise. And it’s now. A lot of times we think about climate change impacts we think about, like, “well, in 100 years these things are going to change.” But we already see it now, in countries in the South Pacific like Tuvalu or Kiribati. I mean, their contribution to these problems is negligible. But they’re really bearing the impacts of it. So we talk about, like, well what’s the responsibility of the international community then? What’s the responsibility of China or the United States as these major carbon producers? And it’s fun? and it’s hard, because there’s no clear answer. But I think that they’re really critical questions to think about for our future.

Thomas Bretz: You know, I guess whenever you teach it, the relevance is obvious. Like, you don’t have to do a lot of work to show people why it’s relevant.

Hilary Hungerford: Yeah. That film does such a great job. Because like we can talk about “oh, Utah is in a drought” or “we’re seeing less snow every year” But, I mean, we all can water our lawns without trouble, we all have water. So it doesn’t—it’s not real for us. Even though the ski industry, it’s real for them. They’re feeling impacts. They’re trying to figure out ways to mitigate it. But for, like, an everyday person in Utah, we don’t really feel it. And we might not. We have massive amounts of wealth and infrastructure to mitigate climate change, but not everywhere has that. I mean, the majority of the world probably doesn’t have that.

Thomas Bretz: Yeah, yeah no. These are great points. Now I’m actually curious, like, what kind of research are you doing? Or what are some of the projects you have worked on or are working on right now?

Hilary Hungerford: Yeah. So, a lot of my research has been around community adaptation to environmental change, mostly in West Africa. So, early on my work was about, like, water infrastructure and what happens when people don’t have access to water infrastructure in urban areas in West Africa. And then thinking about, you know, how urban growth and climate change is just going to make those systems more difficult. I took some students, UVU students, a few years ago to Senegal and we looked at community adaptation to flooding. That was really, really cool. We worked with a local mayor’s office that I happened to have a little bit of contact with. And that was a really fun project because my colleague, Eddie Cadet in Earth Science, he came too and he—so, I’m more of a social scientist and Eddie is more of a physical scientist. So he sampled water and soil to look at contaminants that were posing problems to the population and then I did interviews with people about kind of the social impacts of flooding. And that was a really exciting project to kind of bring this interdisciplinary view to this environmental problem.

I’m starting some work on water conservation in Utah. Kind of the barriers to water conservation, particularly in regards to outdoor landscaping. So, we’re just starting now, going to do some surveys on, like, why people don’t have more water conserving landscapes. Like, maybe it’s cost, maybe they don’t know about it, maybe it’s aesthetic. So, trying to figure out what the problem is and then we can try to adjust that through some education programs. That’s something I’m excited about that’s coming up.

I was supposed to go to Benin, West Africa, last summer. I was a Peace Corps volunteer there, before I came back to grad school. And it’s a really interesting part of the world because they have some historic forests there that are protected through their cultural systems. They call them, like, ancestral forests or sacred forests. So they’re kind of, like, created forests but protected areas, people still interact with them but they’re these, like, biodiversity hotspots. So we were going to go and do some mapping work, try to map how land uses changed around them over time and how people interact with them. And that’s still, still in the cards, as soon as pandemic let’s us travel some more. But yeah, those are kind of the things I’m working on right now.

Thomas Bretz: It was in the before times, but yeah.
Hilary Hungerford: Yeah, I know. Yeah. Well, luckily those communities haven’t been  impacted by COVID too much.

Thomas Bretz: That’s good to hear. Yeah. You know, I’m really also fascinated also by, you know, kind of the applicability of the work. Because in philosophy, that’s always what students demand but you can’t always give them, because it’s really conceptual analysis and that’s often kind of it. But it’s really great ot hear about these projects that also think about, well, what are we going to do about this?

Well, is there anything else that you want to add or say about EE. I mean, this was really fascinating but is there anything else you want to share with our students, faculty, listeners?

Hilary Hungerford: Yeah, I think I would say that I see a lot of times when students start to learn about this stuff, they get overwhelmed and, like, “how do I make a difference and what can I do?” And you can’t do everything. Like, you can choose what you can do. Like, not everybody has to live, like, your life doesn’t have to look the same way in order to still like kind of be responsible in like environmentally ethic and environmentally responsible. Like, not everybody has to be a vegan—no offense, Thomas, I know you’re vegan. But, like, not everybody has to do that. Not everybody has to have an electric car. I don’t. They’re expensive. But I try to do other things to try and offset it.

So, I would just say, do what you can. And also, you know, make sure that you’re electing representatives too that also have these ideas of a more-than-human world. Because they’re going to be making policies that you live within. So, even if you try to be as ethical in your daily life in terms of approaching the environment, at some level there’s going to be some infrastructure that you can’t get out of. So it’s really great to like—this is election season, but even in a non-election season, it’s always good to think about how you can get involved in politics or programs in your local area. Like, for example, today’s a really exciting day for me because I’m going to be appointed to the Natural Resource Stewardship Committee for the city of Orem. So, like, the official day.

Thomas Bretz: That’s amazing!
Hilary Hungerford: Yeah, I’m really excited for, like, a way to get involved in my city and trying to make my city better. It’s really exciting.

Thomas Bretz: That’s really awesome. Yeah, that’s also a really great way to end, on a kind of more optimistic/realistic note, like, what we can do. But yeah, thank you so much, I mean, this was really great and fascinating. And again, this was Dr. Hilary Hungerford from the Earth Science department here at UVU. And yeah, check out her classes, sustainability class in particular, and her projects. And yeah, I look forward to talk more.

Hilary Hungerford: Yeah, thanks Thomas, this was so fun. Bye.