Q and A with the new Dean of the Falk School of Sustainability
In August, Lou Leonard, JD, became the new dean of the Falk School of Sustainability & Environment. We sat down with him to get to know him a bit.
What were some of your early experiences around environmentalism?
LL: When you talk to some people who end up in environmentalism, they have formative childhood experiences in nature, or had parents who were very outdoorsy or activist-y. I didn’t have that experience, so I’ve often thought back about how it all came together. I’d say there are two things: One is the fantasy books that I read when I was younger, C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia, and then as I got older, the Tolkien books.
“I didn’t have a place where I experienced nature, or could go and be refreshed or invigorated or excited or in a state of wonder, but I did have the ability to get into these books where nature literally came alive—animals would talk, trees would walk.”
It was nature portrayed in a way where it had power, and was an important part of the story. We often think of nature as separate, and our society has developed in such a way that you could almost pretend like nature wasn’t there. It doesn’t seem to have a lot of power, except in those moments when it really has a lot of power, and of course we’re having more of those moments now because of climate change.
The second thing that was formative to me happened in undergrad. I got a summer job with a public interest research group that involved learning about different environmental issues, going door to door, talking to people about them, and trying to convince them to sign a petition or contribute money. So that summer, being with peers, talking to people every day about issues that had an impact on the environment and what we could do to try to address them—I came out of that summer and felt like I had found my place. From there, it kind of snowballed. I went to law school right after undergraduate and studied environmental law, and every job I’ve had since has been in this field, in one way or another.
You taught law as a Fulbright Scholar in Tanzania. What is something that surprised you about Tanzania?
LL: There are so many things (laughs). The thing that surprised me first and most about the experience of teaching there was the fact that the conditions made it really hard to learn. So for example, there were power cuts every other day. The university was already so over capacity that most of the classes I taught were in converted cafeteria rooms that were never meant to be classrooms, so the acoustics were bad and the students couldn’t really hear the lecture. When I arrived, I found out that if there was no power, they just didn’t have classes, because you didn’t have power to run the mobile microphones. But the classes that I was assigned to teach fell on the power cut days, so I was like “does that mean I’m never going to teach? Never have classes?”
The other thing that was hard was that students had all these reading assignments, but no bookstore. There was a library, but there would be one, and sometimes if you were lucky, two copies of the books students needed on reserve for classes that had between 100-300 students. I was like ‘This is like checkmate, how is any learning or teaching going to happen here?” It took me a week or so to let it all sink in, but my approach—which wasn’t the way it was done at the time—was that I was going to hold class even if we didn’t have power. So that meant I was going to yell and walk around and try to make myself heard. The second thing was that I had gotten this great tip from a previous Fulbrighter who’d taught in the developing world to buy a $100 3-in-1 scanner/copier and bring it with you. I narrowed down the reading assignments and really tried to make sure we covered that material in class, then I scanned my reading selections and uploaded them to the campus intranet, so when we did have power, students could go into the computer labs and access the reading. Through that combination of things, I was able to actually jerry-rig a learning experience for folks. But it really required a lot of adjustment to these circumstances, and it gave me a lot of empathy and compassion for the students and teachers who are trying to make this work.
You cofounded One Earth Sangha. How would you describe the “western Buddhist response to the ecological and sociological crises”?
LL: One of the biggest challenges is that when you try, as an individual, to engage with these big, hairy, systemic global problems, it can be really hard psychologically and emotionally to stay engaged with the work. Because the problem seems so big, and so impossible for one person to make a dent in, and therefore it’s quite possible for people to either burn out or think “that’s too much, I can’t.” Then you check out or become jaded and cynical and say “sure, I care about those things but there’s nothing we can do.”
“The potential for practices like meditation and mindfulness that are basically at the heart of Buddhist spirituality are that they give us the tools to work with our hearts and minds, so that we can really be fully in these problems.”
That’s the reason that I helped found One Earth Sangha, because I thought there was this great need. The idea was to try to harness the wisdom and practices of Western Buddhism, which has been growing a lot in recent years, and turn it into practical things that people could use to stay engaged in these issues. And to create some community around that, because one of the things that those teachings point to, but also we know from social and psychological science, is that we tend to feel alone when engaging in big challenging issues like climate change and social justice, so being in community with others who are recognizing that this is an issue and speaking about these things directly, really helps.
What are you most looking forward to about being at Chatham?
LL: Two things. One is that I am excited about the way Chatham and the Falk School approach learning. I think that my experience and the experience of some of my friends in undergrad, was that you had teachers, and they had the knowledge and the answers, and you sat there and tried to take it in. And what I feel up here at Eden Hall Campus is that this is a place where we’re trying to do it a different way. We’re trying to bring students behind the curtain on the challenges that relate to sustainability and food systems and knotty environmental science problems, and really try to focus more on the questions than on the answers. And in the process, you help students develop their own capacity to look critically at what’s happening in whatever the systems are we’re studying.
“I think that’s what we need out in the world right now—more folks who are ready to and have the ability and experience to grapple with the hard questions, rather than look for the quick answers.”
The second thing is, I’m really excited by the idea of trying to build a multigenerational learning community at the Eden Hall Campus that can engage folks at all levels of their career and their life stages in the challenges of sustainability. We want to really broaden the definition of who a learner is, or what someone who comes into the Falk School community looks like, because we need people at all levels of society to engage in these problems. We cannot wait for the next generation of 22-year-old college grads to work their way through society to make the change that we need.
“We need everybody, and we need them now.”
This article was originally published in the Winter 2020 issue of the Chatham Recorder alumni magazine. For more on Chatham’s commitment to Sustainability both on-campus and around the world, click here.