Exploring Climate Apathy at Dartmouth

I often hear phrases like “Dartmouth doesn’t recycle” and “the heating plant burns bunker oil” repeated at Dartmouth, the type of thing instinctively believed because of general pessimistic attitudes towards the college and its climate actions. The first time I heard these, I accepted them at face value without hesitation and my pessimism about Dartmouth was reinforced. In reality, the truth is much more complicated, but it feels easy to believe the single, simple story of constant institutional letdown.

Student experiences reinforce this letdown, like when inefficient and poorly regulated dorms cause overheating students, unable to adjust their thermostats, to leave their windows open all winter. In the face of these frustrating lived experiences and surrounded by apathetic campus culture, I often find myself falling into continued apathy and inaction.

Part of my own apathy comes from cynicism about the college’s track record on climate. Spriha Pandey ’24, Dartmouth Energy Alliance’s President, says that “traditionally Dartmouth has not been known to be a leader in green actions, especially among the Ivy league.” Dartmouth’s lack of past leadership can inspire pessimism about its capability of future change.

“Climate Apathy” falls into two main categories within the “Discourses of Climate Delay” framework: surrender and responsibility redirection. Dialogue placing responsibility on Dartmouth as a whole redirects action away from the individual and removes personal accountability. It is both easy and seemingly logical to delay climate action this way, especially from the standpoint of a student with little apparent institutional leverage. The other, “Surrender” takes two forms: one is emphasizing the impossibility and impracticality of change, while the other is “Doomism,” accepting that climate change is irreversible and that our actions will not do anything to change it. While in my experience this is stigmatized at Dartmouth and less commonly verbalized, it can absolutely play a role in thinking about climate.

One reason for climate apathy at Dartmouth could be its associations with competition. One study found that apathy towards environmental issues was associated with “General competitiveness…across a wide range of occupational domains, including business, law, and sports.” Intuitively, this makes sense: competition fosters self-prioritization with less regard for others or collective well-being. Dartmouth is well-known as an athletic campus and has long been a pipeline for competitive positions in law, investment banking, and consulting. More broadly, an extremely competitive application process ensures, well, a competitive student body ripe for apathy around climate change.

Importantly, this apathy can be impactful, and can discourage student engagement with sustainability. Believing that Dartmouth doesn’t recycle makes it easier to simply throw away the hundreds of cups and cans used every week at my fraternity. Leaving lights on in empty rooms feels inconsequential compared to the pollution spewing from the heating plant’s smokestack. feeling unable to change institutional practices causes a lack of student engagement in the decision-making processes that drive those practices.

On the whole, Dartmouth’s student body holds very climate-forward beliefs that often conflict with our collective actions. I certainly entered Dartmouth hoping to make a larger impact than I have. Pandey describes how she started working on climate issues in high school, and “I was very ambitious” and believed that “ I can make these big changes overnight… and then at some point you’re hit with reality.” For Pandey, that moment was freshman year, when her mindset shifted to thinking “this is not going anywhere” and “I’ll just see what happens.” Now, Pandey is far more optimistic and is heavily involved in campus energy efforts, but her story of squashed idealism is not isolated.

Another environmentally conscious student, Emily Barosin ’25, emphasized how the magnitude of climate change as a problem can lead to a sense of pessimism. “If we’re thinking about climate change in terms of avoiding irreversible global temperature increase, I’m very pessimistic about that,” she said. “I simply do not see a future where we reduce carbon emissions quick enough to avoid the irreversible effects.”

Apathy and pessimism are just two threads in the tangle of complex emotions around climate change. Working in climate can be “deeply emotionally challenging work,” according to Irving Institute Academic Director Amanda Graham. Many climate workers point to anxiety, anger, or hopelessness as their dominant emotions. Barosin says that “a lot of what drives my passion for thinking about these issues is fear. But I understand that’s a very unsustainable way to frame the problem as a whole.” Navigating the intersection of emotions and passion is difficult, and the emotional toll of living in today’s world should not be understated, deeply involved in climate work or not.

Students’ perceived inability to effect change isn’t simply rooted in emotion. On both individual and institutional levels, there is a great deal of decision-making inertia that must be overcome in order to break outside of the default historical path of least resistance. Pandey says that the difficulty of changing Dartmouth is due to “just a lot of stakeholders.” Irving Institute Academic Director Amanda Graham echoed these sentiments: “Organizational change is hard… if you recognize the fact that we as individuals are complicated in many ways, and then you add us all together, we add our individual complications.” Even for a committed climate do-gooder, these interwoven complications shroud avenues for effective change and dissuade efforts. Barosin has “struggled with finding the right place to start or a specific issue to focus on within all the problems and issues associated with climate change.” As the saying goes, “starting is half the battle” — but how have students started to overcome apathetic tendencies?

One avenue for student influence is larger-scale advocacy. The college has a long history of effective student activism, and our years here as students are no different. As Pandey put it, “anything that becomes very clearly something that students care about, the administration kind of has to act on it.” Whether directly or indirectly, communicating environmental priorities to recently inaugurated President Beilock is one way to “get over the hump” of climate apathy and shift into action. Beilock has made meeting students a priority and has shown her receptiveness towards student input as well as climate action. I hesitate to commend anyone for an announcement alone, but in her inauguration speech she committed “more than $250 million in additional investments in campus decarbonization efforts in the next three years.” With my knowledge, it’s hard to judge how effective this will be, but Pandey called the College’s updated plan for climate action “pretty concrete.”

Transitioning to action doesn’t need to be a grand motion, though. Pandey called sustainability a “collective action problem, very much like voting where one person’s vote in a national election does not matter… so many people are voting and my word alone doesn’t count. But it’s the fact that a significant portion of us go out and do it that actually decides who’s going to win.” Small but concrete steps, such as using reusable silverware and mugs, add up and can be empowering. Climate acts can be fun, too: Barosin says “I often see it as a minor creative pursuit to make the day a little bit more interesting.” To limit food waste, before cooking, she looks at her fridge and wonders “How can I use these ingredients up in a way that tastes good?” Creative solutions are essential to the climate crisis, and incorporating creativity in daily life can be joyful as well as meaningful.

For students such as Pandey, the dissemination of individual acts to collective action through behavior modeling and conversation is perhaps the most powerful part of personal sustainability choices. “There’s a domino effect that we were talking about, which is that if I am super climate conscious in my life, people around me pick it up too. Even the smallest thing seems like it doesn’t make a difference, but it really does,” she said. “When people observe you doing that, they’re going to make some small change in their life, even if it’s not the same thing that you’re doing.”

While action can be the antidote to disengagement, centering hope and community moving forward may be just as important. Graham says that she worries about “sustaining a sense of hope” in the face of overwhelming climate negativity. Leaning on the Dartmouth community for hope and support is essential to overcome exterior challenges while simultaneously caring for oneself. While climate apathy has affected her at times, Pandey said that “as of right now, I feel optimistic… There’s a lot happening behind the scenes that we don’t see. It’s slow, definitely much slower than it should be. But at the same time, there is hope.” In the face of all that is happening, it takes courage to have hope.

Leaning on hope allows Barosin to reframe problems: “Recently, I’ve been trying to think about the opportunity” associated with climate change, and she hopes “we will recognize that we need new ways to structure the way that resources flow and we’ll find new systems that are more equitable.” It takes hope to imagine a more sustainable and just future, creativity to find opportunities, and action to make that future a reality for our community.

A different edition of this article was originally published in The Dartmouth on 10/18/2023.