We Are the People We've Been Waiting For

by Teresa Shipley, ’05, SCA Staff
The auditorium vibrated with a continuous buzz of excited students who could barely sit still after the post-lunch sugar rush. Microphones failed to pierce the din or get folks to quiet down—until tiny Simran Sethi sauntered up to the podium, (shown here in the center with two friends.) The multi-talented and award winning environmental journalist for NBC News, CSPAN, treehugger.com, and the Sundance channel hopped onto a step so the crowd could see her over the podium, proving that good things come in small packages.

A budding journalist myself, I was amazed and delighted to hear about Sethi’s unconventional career path that led to her current successes as an environmental journalist. She has never taken a journalism course, and yet today Sethi is a professor of environmental journalism at the University of Kansas. She failed the one and only environmental science course she took, but despite that she helps produce television shows that document green trends and news around the nation. “Hey—it’s possible!” she said of her career path.

Her keynote address focused on this theme of the journey—a voyage of discovery in both a career path and also of changing attitudes towards climate change. The reason she failed the environmental science course, Sethi said, was that the semester was all about tectonic plates. “I couldn’t care less about plate tectonics,” she said. What really jazzed her was drawing a connection between the environment and human beings, and figuring out how to make environmental issues relevant to communities.

Citing the town of Greensburg, Kansas, devastated by a mile-wide tornado in 2007, Sethi pointed out that while over 80 percent of the population is registered Republicans and around 50 percent “aren’t sure that global warming is real” the town used the natural disaster as an opportunity to rebuild their town in an environmentally friendly way. They put the “green” back in Greensburg. Although the demographic of Greensburg is not what is generally considered typical of an environmental set, residents still saw the benefits of building green: cost efficiency.

“As story tellers, we don’t want to get too precious about it,” Sethi said. “My story is only as good as the people who hear it and get it.” She reminded everyone how important it is to expand environmental issues in a way that is relevant and specific to each individual and each community. For Greensburg, that meant talking about saving dollars.

She quoted her boss, Robert Redford, who said that all issues are sheltered under the environmental umbrella. Sethi added to that. “Sometimes I don’t talk about the umbrella,” she said. “But we all still recognize that it’s raining.”

Sethi ended her riveting lecture with a call for compassion about activism. It takes everybody on the spectrum, she said, from the blatant consumers to the most environmentally conscious among us, to challenge global warming. "We are the people we’ve been waiting for."

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