Transformative Educational Resources for Climate Action
John Foran
Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
Sarah Jaquette Ray
Professor of Environmental Studies
Humboldt State University
Richard Widick
Sociologist — Visiting Scholar
Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
DOWNLOAD: PUBLIC LAUNCH FLYER (Nov. 18, 2019)
UC-CSU NXTerra is a Knowledge Action Network (KAN) and digital platform for climate educators, developed by faculty across the University of California and California State University systems.
Recognizing the severity of the climate crisis, we are driven by profound and renewed belief in the power of education to help reimagine and build a better, more sustainable and environmentally just world, or “next Earth.”
Although the scale of the problem demands that academia, the sciences, business, government, and the public quickly begin acting in concert to achieve the best possible outcomes, decades of inaction rooted in interest-driven policy disagreements have ushered in a new era of environmental and climate policy crises.
The range of possible results includes widely divergent “next Earths” and any number of paths forward.
As University of California and California State University-based educators focused on climate change, critical sustainability, and climate justice studies, our responsibility could not be greater to our students—the generation that will forge the ideas that will determine which “next Earth” will be our home.
To that end, NXTerra produces, curates, and delivers climate change, critical sustainability, and climate justice education resources for educators of every discipline—from the arts and humanities to the human and social sciences and the natural sciences—with a vision of sharing resources to accelerate climate education and action in California and beyond.
College-level educators in all fields who wish to enable their students to apply their knowledge in innovative ways to real-world problems will find here many resources to support them in teaching and collaborating with their students in an ambitious and wide-ranging project—imagining and creating “a just transition to the next Earth”—by reshaping our relationships with each other and the systems and institutions that determine the quality of life today for our own communities and communities around the world.
By foregrounding the work of University of California and California State University educators, NXTerra seeks to further the goals of the Carbon Neutrality Initiative (CNI) of the University of California Office of the President (UCOP).
This is an attitude of “putting our heads together” and getting to work.
Our combined efforts are aimed at driving the deep culture shift both inside our two university systems, as well as outside, in our common broader global civil society.
NXTerra launched in the Fall of 2019 — learn more about NXTerra history and activities here.
