Cameron Cobb, a second-year graduate student in the Climate Mitigation and Adaptation concentration at the Patel College of Global Sustainability, didn鈥檛 know what to expect when she began her journey at PCGS. After enrolling in Envisioning Sustainability with Dr. Thomas Henry Culhane, everything started to click. Concepts that once seemed abstract began connecting to her own life, turning everyday experiences into reflections of global sustainability.
Here's her story
"I just wanted to take a minute (and a few paragraphs) to thank you for designing "assignments" that somehow made me connect my random collection of houseplants to planetary consciousness theory. When I first read about relating my personal experiences to Envisioning Sustainability, I was, admittedly, a bit skeptical--how exactly on Earth was I supposed to make my solar generator philosophically compelling? Turns out, quite easily, thanks to your approach.
Your class topic suggestions pushed me to see patterns I鈥檇 never noticed before. My post-hurricanes solar setup wasn鈥檛 just emergency preparedness...it became part of Buckminster Fuller鈥檚 Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science. My 30+ houseplants weren鈥檛 just expensive oxygen producers...they turned into a living lab for biophilic design. Even neighborhood chats about renewable energy started to look like case studies in collective intelligence and the noosphere. And don't get me started on how I managed to weave in my recent experience with a neighborhood feral cat (as a TNVR personal "project") with sustainability as a whole. Who knew my suburban experiments were basically systems thinking in disguise?!
The theatrical thought piece in one of the class Modules was especially enlightening (and slightly terrifying). Writing that solar adoption script forced me to wrestle with my own environmental contradictions through the Shadow Self character. Strangely enough, putting those doubts onstage made them less paralyzing and more like productive tensions to navigate. As someone lucky enough to be translating science for public audiences in my day-to-day life, I also loved how your framework showed that sustainability communication lands best when it鈥檚 grounded in lived experience--my neighbors may glaze over at carbon sequestration, but they'll surely light up when my solar fan keeps running during outages.
Most importantly, your course has, so far, helped me realize that 鈥渆nvisioning sustainability鈥� isn鈥檛 about dreaming up some distant utopia...rather, it鈥檚 about noticing the sustainable systems already emerging around us and participating in them more consciously. Whether through solar tech, community conservation, or just growing air-purifying plants, the future is already unfolding in small, distributed ways that add up to big change.
So thank YOU for sparking creativity I didn鈥檛 know I had and for making sustainability feel less like a global crisis and more like a collaborative storytelling project--one where even houseplants and solar gadgets get starring roles.
Looking forward to whatever sustainable yet mental gymnastics await in the next "assignments"! "