Inside the Classroom: The Impact of Environmental Cycles: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water
When I take students on summer geology study trips to Iceland as part of Northeastern’s Dialogues program, I have targeted field interpretation skills that I want everyone to acquire, but those trips are also “trips about everything,” because there’s also much to learn about what choices people in Iceland have made over the past 1,000 years to live sustainably in a volcanically active environment along the Arctic Circle, etc. The choices people make often affect their local environment, and paying attention to the places people have chosen to live, and not to live, are in turn affected by environmental hazards like volcano-triggered glacial floods, the availability of water or sunlight, etc. One of the jobs that I think we have as faculty is to provide students with opportunities that will lead them beyond their comfort zone, where people learn or discover new ideas and connections they didn’t have before. That widened skill- or knowledge-set enables people to go even further with a topic the next time.
The Connecticut tragedy of December 2012 reminds us again that we live in an age of violence which can strike any of us, any time, anywhere. Seemingly, it can come out of nowhere and, if we are not mindful, could crush us. This is not the planet-busting, nuclear era of the Cold War, but when the threat strikes, it is hot terror.
