When she first started learning about the climate change from one of her elders, Fawn Sharp was invited on a helicopter flight over the Olympic Mountains to survey the Mount Anderson glacier. But the glacier was gone, melted by the warming climate. Sharp had a deep sense of loss when she discovered the glacier wasn't there anymore.
Loss is a growing issue for people working and living on the front lines of climate change. And that gave Jennifer Wren Atkinson, a full-time lecturer at the University of Washionton Bothell, US, an idea for a class.
This term, she taught students on the Bothell campus about the emotional burdens of environmental studies. She used the experiences of Native American tribes(部落), scientists and activists, and asked her 24 students to face the reality that there is no easy fix—that "this is such an intractable(棘手的)problem that they're going to be dealing with it for the rest of their lives."
Student Cody Dillon used to be a climate science skeptic(怀疑论者). Then he did his own reading and research，and changed his mind.
Dillon wasn't going into environmental work- he was a computer-science major. Yet, the potential for a worldwide environmental catastrophe seemed so real to him five years ago that he quit his job and became a full-time volunteer for an environmental group that worked on restoration projects.
Six months into the work he decided that Atkinson's class was just what he was looking for--a place where he could discuss his concerns about a changing climate.
Atkinson said she hopes the class helped her students prepare themselves for the amount of environmental loss that will happen over their lifetimes.
"We are already changing the planet—so many species are going to be lost, displaced or massively impacted," she said, "The future isn't going to be what they imagined."
