An Amherst student is trapped in her dorm during a severe winter storm. There is no heat or power. The temperature is dropping. What should she do?
In the O’Connor Commons during a warm September day, six students bent their heads together and began talking in low, urgent voices. Could the fictional student, whom they’ve dubbed Julia Julien, get to a car? Start a fire? Rig her own heating system?
For these, and some 28 other first-year students, creating—and then resolving—an environmental disaster scenario was their first introduction to the creative problem solving they’ll experience during the next four years at Amherst.
The session, part of an immersive two-and-a-half-day course in sustainability, is one of several special orientation options available each year to incoming Amherst students. Dubbed LEAP—Learn, Explore, Activate and Participate—these sessions feature topics ranging from creative writing to community engagement, from yoga to social justice. All incoming students participate in LEAP, with the cost covered by the College and by alumni donors.
This is the second year that LEAP has included a section on sustainability and climate change, and the first time such a section has included emergency management training. The change was a direct result of a closer collaboration between Director of Emergency Management Tamara Mahal and Director of Sustainability Laura Daucker.
“I want students to learn about how climate change impacts this area and how we’re addressing it,” Draucker said. “I want to focus on solutions.”
The group would also spend their LEAP session touring a Hadley dairy farm that used an anaerobic digester to create electricity and heat and visiting wind turbines and solar fields at the Berkshire East Mountain Resort in Charlemont, Mass.
First, though, they had to work their way through a disaster scenario. Working in teams, the first-year students picked climate change issues that had personal resonance, invented the profile of someone who might be affected and “pitched” the problem to the larger group.
Students then came up with a long list of potential solutions—as far-fetched and outlandish as they could invent—and prototyped one of the options with construction paper, pipe cleaners and foam.
The proposals included stilts for houses in landslide-prone areas, cities with domes to prevent pollution and, for the resourceful Julia, an igloo rigged to provide water and a radiant heat supply.
It is just this sort of creative thinking that makes solutions to real problems possible, Desiree Matel-Anderson, an expert brought to campus to work with the LEAP students. Matel-Anderson is founder of Field Innovation Team, a Utah-based nonprofit that focuses on disaster preparedness and problem solving.
“I love working with colleges,” she said, “Students are the big thinkers.”