by Dr. William Anthony
Director, Study Abroad Office
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
I remember those endless cicada-buzzing bright yellow New England summers in the 1950s, when the kids in our neighborhood played “Mumblety-peg” and “Relievio” and “All-y all-y in come free,” great long outdoor games with complicated rules and shrieks of laughter that lasted all day or until someone skinned a knee. There were some days that started out hot and only got hotter, days my grandfather called “scorchers,” when we kids kept an ear out for the sound of Angelo’s brass bell. Angelo was an Italian grocer and from the back of his little red truck he sold fresh fruit and vegetables to mothers whose children thought string beans grew in cans. But we knew that Angelo had ice in his freezer—huge blocks of hard ice—and a soft heart for kids. So when he made it to the end of Longfellow Drive, he’d reach in and stab off cold slices of ice with his pick and pass them out to a swarm of sweaty kids, who moments before had been wounded at the Alamo, or thought they’d found signs of Big Foot in the nearby woods. The ice didn’t last long and we soon melted back into our games, deep in childhood’s own dreamtime. But that sense of contrast between summer’s heat and ice’s cold touch came to my mind every now and then, as I watched our new program on renewable energy come alive in Bonn this July. While the ice melts in Greenland and some Americans continue to debate the reality of climate change, European researchers, governmental agencies, NGOs, and businesses innovators are moving, if you’ll excuse the expression, full-steam ahead.
And it was another summer of record-breaking heat in Europe this summer of 2010—a not so subtle reminder of the rationale for a program designed to help U. S. undergraduates get a close look at recent advances in Germany’s renewable energy development and the implementation of “green” policies—at the local, regional, national levels and throughout the European Union. If you asked me why none of our students complained about the heat—and the lack of air conditioning in almost every location except in the bus we used on excursions—I’d have to say it was because we had the great fortune of having such stellar students in the program: 15 students from all around the U. S. As Director of Northwestern’s Study Abroad Office, it was a pleasure to be on site during this program and to have the opportunity to meet some of the most motivated, interesting, and intellectually curious students I’ve known, many of whom were outside the U. S. for the first time in their lives. As any educator can tell you, a student’s grades only reveal so much, so in this first year of our Bonn Program we sought students who not only had exemplary academic records, but who had already demonstrated serious interest in renewable energy and a personal commitment to environmental causes. We sought men and women from all disciplines: engineering and environmental science, of course, but also economics, business, political science, even psychology (after all, people need to adapt to change). As the saying goes, “If you build it, they will come…”—and so they did, from every corner of the U.S. We even had a graphic artist, who is interested in using her talents to educate the public about environmental concerns. I’ve no doubt whatsoever that among these outstanding students—who impressed virtually every guest speaker as well as their University of Bonn professor this summer with their probing questions and their understanding of the complex issues facing Europe—are future U. S. leaders in business, research, and politics. Just ask any of them about “feed-in tariffs” and “cap and trade”; a “smart Grid”; “geo-engineering”; or the complexities of moving a proposal from the European Council to the European Commission. (As one speaker at the European Union in Brussels told them, they are now among the 5% of the people in Europe who actually understand how the EU works!) But just don’t ask them if they “believe in” climate change. They get it: it’s not a question of believing. It is real. As they heard first-hand from young representatives from three of Germany’s top political parties, climate change itself is not up for political debate: the issue at hand is how to respond, and fast.
So these students listened politely during one of their morning coffee breaks, as I told them that we lived just fine without air conditioning in the U. S. when I was a kid back in the 50s. Granted, that was more than half a century ago. But somewhere between then and now, we Americans have gotten used to a level of comfort that, in contrast to the rest of the world, is no longer sustainable. This is especially true, as several of our guest speakers pointed out, if folks outside the U. S. consumed as much energy per person as the average American. In fact, one of the leitmotifs running throughout the presentations we heard from German researchers, politicians and business people was their hope that Americans might learn from European initiatives in energy conservation as well as renewable energy production—and take our lead among industrialized nations. In fact, that is the ultimate educational goal of the Bonn program: that our students might learn first-hand about European initiatives in renewable energy and how Germans have confronted their energy challenges—then bring those insights back to the U. S. to enrich their current studies and to contribute, long-range, to the “greening” of America.
“It (the European Commission) has described how the ‘20-20-20’ objectives can be achieved in Europe: 20% reduction in emissions, 20% renewable energies and 20% improvement in energy efficiency by 2020 – important and ambitious objectives that the individual EU states now must implement. Emissions could even be reduced by 30%, if other major countries – such as the USA – also commit themselves to mandatory reduction objectives.” (Source: The European Energy Review.)
It’s not as though Americans are unaware of the issues. The head of a leading international wind organization based in Bonn, whose staff presented an overview of wind energy in Germany in a global context, showed me a copy of a 1980 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report commissioned during Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, called “Dispersed, Decentralized and Renewable Energy Sources: Alternatives to National Vulnerability and War.” It was cutting edge then—and still is—he told me.
Many study abroad programs seem to have their own logic: if a student wants to study art history, for example, she might think of studying in London, or Paris, or anywhere in Italy. Spanish language? Dozens of places. But renewable energy policy and development is not so obvious. At first. However, almost as soon as I’d begun researching locations in Germany for this summer program, Bonn quickly emerged as the most logical site. Only later did we realize just how extensive the research and development of renewable energies was throughout the surrounding state of North Rhine Westphalia. This former capital of Germany, Beethoven’s birthplace, Bonn still shares some federal German ministries with the new capital of Berlin. It is also home to a new UN Campus, with branches related to climate change and desertification; SolarWorld, a world leader in photo-voltaic energy development; and the World Wind Energy Association. Not far from Bonn is a University of Bonn bio-mass research station and about an hour distant is the famous Jülich Research Center, which conducts cutting-edge research in energy and the environment. Brussels, home of the European Union Commission and the EU Council, is a half-day’s bus ride away. And Aachen, home of one of Germany’s leading technical universities and the site of a major EU-German geothermal project, is an hour away by train. You get the picture: this region bristles with activity in renewables, from policy-making to research, to development, and innovation. Want culture and history? See the Beethoven House and the German history museum in Bonn—or the towering gothic cathedral in Cologne and next to it the Roman-Germanic museum (the city was a Roman colony 2,000 years ago). Not only did our students visit these sites, but they rafted on the Rhine, visited nearby castles, and had a wine tasting. We capped the program with 4 days in Berlin, where, in addition to visiting the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety and the Federal Foreign Office, we literally walked through recent German history, from the Brandenburg Gate past the Holocaust Memorial to Checkpoint Charlie. Students got a special tour of the wonderfully restored Reichstag building one day and the next day made a somber visit to a former East German Secret Police Prison. In many respects, our students got a “crash course” on German history that started during orientation with a discussion of German national pride and the thousands of flags that our students saw waving from windows and cars and rooftops during the first two weeks of the program as the World Cup soccer championships heated up, with “Public Viewings” (in new German parlance) on flat screen tv’s in virtually every café and public square, the sound of vuvuzelas buzzing like cicadas, as if echoing the excitement.
I’ve been credited with having the original idea for this program, but the fact is that the seed wasn’t planted in my mind until Lorna Stern, Director of Strategic Development at Arcadia’s College of Global Studies, begged me to come to a one-day workshop she’d organized at Arcadia several years ago. October is a busy time for every Study Abroad Office and it is a quiet testament to Lorna’s powers of persuasion that she succeeded in getting me to attend that workshop on climate change and study abroad, led by Sue Mennicke at Southwestern University and Andy Law at Denison. It quickly became clear to me that this topic had real potential as a focus for undergraduate study abroad: it spanned the globe, affecting virtually every country where there was a study abroad program, as well as the Antarctic, where there currently are none. We all agreed that the issues related to climate change are inherently interdisciplinary. But the question remained: how could we translate these insights into action? About a year later, while visiting a study abroad program in Germany near the North Sea, I heard about a German wind research institute on the coast, and the idea began to grow. Germany was leading Europe in its commitment to the development of renewable energies—not just wind, but in solar, biomass and geothermal, too. As I soon learned, Germany’s exploration of the potential for off-shore wind farms in the North Sea, where they’ve been collecting site-specific data for several years now, far outpaces similar efforts in New England. But it’s not just the science behind renewable energy that makes Germany—and Bonn, in particular—so optimal a location: it’s the Germans’ political and financial commitment to this ambitious “20-20-20” undertaking that is so impressive an example for our students. Indeed, as we all learned this summer, there are very real geo-political and national security reasons for an accelerated approach to renewable energy: foreign oil and foreign natural gas supplies will run out. And before they do, they will become increasingly expensive, as the global population swells to 9 billion by 2050, bringing with that trend, increasing consumer demand for products and a corollary increase in atmospheric CO2 in the atmosphere and global air and sea temperatures. These issues affect us all, worldwide, regardless of one’s position on the issue of climate change. Consider what one leading energy expert told me this summer: “Forget climate change…we should be interested in renewables anyway, because they simply make good economic sense: the wind is free and the
sun is there…”
The problem with an interesting idea is that it takes on a life of its own. Whenever I travel abroad now, I’ll ask folks what they know about climate change in their corner of the world. A wine connoisseur in Germany tells me it’s already impacting the grapes and the harvest in Europe. I learn about a Swiss glacier that locals are trying to cover over in order to slow its melt. But the story that has lingered in my imagination since I heard it was told to me by an Alsacian friend who has been conducting one of the longest-running scientific research projects on the remote northeast coast of Greenland. Every summer since the late 1970s, Benoit has packed up and left Freiburg, Germany, for Greenland, where he studies the lemming population and its fluctuation with the owl and fox populations. (No, my friend assures me, lemmings do not commit suicide. Their population simply rises and falls in a slow dance with the owl and the fox populations.) To the point: when I asked my friend what he’s seeing in Greenland, he said each year over the past decade or more, the pack ice has thawed earlier and earlier—and freezes up later and later. That’s not all, he added. In the past, he and his colleagues never took a rifle with them and when they did, they never had to use it: the polar bears never came near because they found plenty to eat out on the ice. But now, he said, the bears come closer and closer to their research station every year. With their food source now limited, they are thin and hungry, my friend said. Then he added solemnly, someday we may have to shoot a bear. That was two years ago. I’ve not had the courage to ask what it’s like now. ~
Acknowledgements: I want to express my sincere gratitude to my colleagues in Northwestern’s Study Abroad Office, the Initiative for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern (ISEN), and the Office of the Provost, for their support, academic input, and enthusiasm. I also wish to thank my colleagues in The College of Global Studies at Arcadia University. I want to say “Vielen herzlichen Dank!” to our colleagues in the International Office at the University of Bonn: Professor Dr. Lieselotte Krickau-Richter, Dr. Holger Impekoven, Ms. Katharina Schmitt, Mr. Tobias Hecht, and Professor Thomas Weiler.
Tue, Nov 30, 2010
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