Amongst the rows of students and visitors crammed in Woodburn Hall 120 on Wednesday was the sight of a few handwritten signs and the outbreak of an occasional shout from the audience, adding tension to the sixth official speech of SustainIU Week.
Posters were emblazoned with messages including “PERC took ¼ million dollars from Koch industries since 1997” and “Shame on SPEA.”
This year marks the ninth annual celebration of sustainability on IU’s campus. This year’s topic focuses on the theme “A Changing Climate, a Changing Conscience,” according to the Office of Sustainability website.
On behalf of the Ostrom Workshop, guest speaker Terry Anderson spoke Wednesday debating the issue of environmental responsibility and how the local community up to the federal government can influence it.
His speech was inspired by the career of Elinor Ostrom, a former political scientist at IU. As mentioned in Anderson’s introduction, Ostrom was one of his main role models. Ostrom’s legacy is primarily connected to her interpretation of “managing a commons,” or the way in which communities dealt with and managed their allocated set of finite resources.
Anderson stressed the idea of how many different hats society wears and sees in its community members, as he literally switched into different hats in his outfit depending on what societal role he discussed. Through homogeneity of a group and the sharing of customs and cultures, Anderson said it will be easier to build institutions to manage shared resources.
Anderson concluded his speech with the discussion of what he called the biggest environmental problem of our time — global warming.
“Global warming is the mother of all the problems that we face,” Anderson said.
The PowerPoint slide behind him read “Locally, what can we do? Adapt, adapt and be adept.”
Despite his current interest in environmental debates, Anderson was orignally an economist. In his speech introduction, he even made a joke about his profession.
“You know what an economist is, don’t you?” Anderson asked. “Someone who’s pretty good with numbers but isn’t good enough to be an accountant.”
Anderson is well known for his disbelief in climate change and the negative environmental predicament which populates political discussions over the course of the years.
In one of his own articles featured on the Fox News Opinion website last year, he said environmental discussions these days are entirely too focused on the negative.
“Discussions of climate change almost always include terms such as catastrophic, irreversible, and irreparable,” Anderson wrote in the piece. “Rather than despair, we can celebrate Earth Day 2016 knowing that the environment is getting better all the time.”
Students specifically interjected during his denial that data exists supporting the increase of global temperature in a negative way.
Sophomore Stanley Njuguna said he and a group attended the speech after learning from a friend at Greenpeace about Anderson’s upcoming appearance on campus.
“We did some research about his statements, about PERC, we watched interviews of his,” Njuguna said. “We took particular attention to his position on the Dakota Access Pipeline and we thought, this is egregious, this is intellectually dishonest, this is dangerous, this needs to be opposed.”
Anderson’s speech concluded with a chant from Njuguna himself — “IU, who do you think you fooled? Anderson works for fossil fuels.”
