The Yale Blue Green Initiative
By Dick Riseling, Y62 Communications Team member
I’m eager to tell all of my Yale ’62 classmates about the Yale Blue Green Initiative that’s gathering strength and is worthy of classmate support. It is a Yale alumni organization already operating out of the Yale School of Forestry and Environment which seeks to provide guidance to Yale and national leadership on the plan to make Yale one of the leading global examples of and sources of expertise on human conduct in the Age of the Sixth Great Extinction.
I’m concerned that the horrific coronavirus pandemic, with its very visible lethal and grievous destruction of life, huge negative impact on economy, and massive cost is taking vital resources of talent and finance from the greater task of successfully addressing the ecological crisis that threatens to end life for the human family. The coronavirus crisis needs to be addressed within the over-arching challenge of the ecological crisis.
The Yale Blue Green Initiative is a new vehicle for making this essential transition. YBG has a proposal you can access here. Regional chapters are functioning in Washington, DC, New York City, San Francisco, Chicago and Denver, and many other regions in the process of organizing. All chapters are actively recruiting leadership for a wide number of organizational committees. A lot of work has been done.
However, much more work lies ahead, to strengthen the quality and extent of Yale’s commitment to provide leadership and a better learning experience on campus, and a quantum leap in cooperation at a global scale, to arrest the destruction of the future and move toward greater prevention — not just adaptation and mitigation strategies. We cannot avoid seeing, daily, the tragedy of how we operate now, but also the opportunity to learn new ways of organizing society, our relationship to each other and the non-human communities of life on which we depend. As we continue our journey with the coronavirus pandemic, I hope you will read the YBG proposal, consider signing it and become an active member of your regional chapter.
For more information about YBG, visit yalebluegreen.org.
We invite your comments below.
Hi Dick –
Briefly, to me this pandemic necessitates some tectonic changes in the great American life-style and how colleges feed into that. Instead of me the individual, and especially me the privileged individual who is immune from many diseases which may affect others, now we need to think of me as first a member of a community; and as that member my concerned questions are: will every member of this group be medically protected, and will insurance no longer be connected with job security. I’d love to see an institution like Yale and its students adopt a town and gear at least a significant part of its ivied education to dealing with the town’s welfare. And wouldn’t it be nice if somehow the farm played some kind of a role in that education. The days of providing exclusively for each of us individuals is now over. But the cynical side of me sees so many forces fighting against these kinds of changes that I’m tempted to laugh at my own words. But I do feel this way strongly.
I accepted the offer to get notices. Interested in how the initiative works out