I teach a course at Eckerd College every Spring semester entitled “Climate Change Communication.” At the end of the semester we talk about our own feelings of hopelessness and loss and how we can move past them. The Global Earth Exchange helps both me and my students feel like we are expressing our gratitude to our ecological community, and it helps us to heal a little bit from the psychological distress we are under with climate change. Our campus is on the water and is extremely vulnerable to sea level rise and hurricanes. My students are young people who have done so little in their own lifetimes to create the climate problem, and yet who will be disproportionately impacted in the future. We all need a little more beauty in our lives, and this event helps us create that.

This year one of my students got in the ocean to look for supplies (mostly empty oyster shells) to use for his art, and that was what inspired the rest of the class to jump into the ocean at the end of class!