Bounce back or bounce forward?: This Way to Resilience springs out of Chico State sustainability conference

CHICO — For more than two decades, Mark Stemen has been a town crier of climate change. A Chico State professor who’s served on various versions of city sustainability boards, he’s long sounded the alarm about impacts forecast by scientists that have become new norms.

Hotter days? More flooding and less snowpack? Species decline and migration? Stemen amplified these and more, notably through 17 years of the university’s This Way to Sustainability conference — relaunching this week in a new format as This Way to Resilience.

He takes little pleasure in validations of his message; rather, Stemen said, “it causes me a whole lot of anxiety.”

The reflection came on a sunny afternoon outside Colusa Hall, where the symposium will run Thursday evening and Friday (see infobox). Stemen noted that Tuesday’s high of 84 hit the 99th percentile of March 19 temperatures that state has tracked since 1991.

“Everyone was celebrating the beautiful days this week,” he continued, “and I was wondering about the future temperatures.

“Midwesterners talk about ‘tornado weather’ — we have ‘wildfire weather.’ A warm breeze coming from the northeast makes me anxious.

“And my students (feel climate anxiety) as well.”

Stemen works to integrate climate change into the curriculum at schools across the California State University system; in that effort, he connected with Britt Wray, a Stanford researcher and author (“Generation Dread”) featured in a documentary titled “The Climate Baby Dilemma.” So far screened only in Canada and at film festivals, the movie will make its international university premiere Thursday, complete with a red carpet.

Friday’s expo will feature workshops and informational tables from groups such as the Climate Action Corps and the Butte Resilience Collaborative. Stemen distinguished the symposium from its predecessor conference because it’s smaller and, he quipped, “symposium is Greek for ‘We feed you’.” (Admission is free and includes pizza.)

“We like to say in the resilience world, ‘We don’t want to bounce back, we want to bounce better’,” he added. “This is our attempt to bounce better and envision what we should be doing. This Way (to Sustainability) had a great run, we learned a lot, and now I think a lot of resilience work is trying to put that into practice.”

Collaboration

The reincarnation of This Way traces to Stemen and a former colleague, Nate Millard, who now works for the American Red Cross as a regional program manager focused on reducing communities’ disaster risks. He’s also an organizer of the Butte Resilience Collaborative, a collection of local agencies brought together thanks to grant funds from the Red Cross and the North Valley Community Foundation. The organization percolated for two years before forming in earnest last August.

The collaborative was the first under a pilot program through which the Red Cross now supports 15 groups. After the symposium, BRC will meet April 5 at the Dorothy Johnson Center in Chico from 9 a.m. to noon.

Millard compares resilience efforts to a stream: Refilled by rainfall, “it bounces back to what it was. There’s this real understanding that for some people, for some communities in our county, there’s no bouncing back to something; it’s never been good. So how do we bounce forward? How do we move beyond?”

That’s where This Way to Resilience comes in. The film screening will feature a discussion afterward to examine the theme of existential dread so severe that a growing number of young adults hesitate to bring children into the world. The expo will present potential solutions.

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“Butte County has so much need,” Millard said. “Even though we have the highest ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) in California, with all these hazards, the ways that we already work together is making us able to move so much faster and so much beyond what I see a lot of other counties and parishes across the nation doing.”

Stemen hopes symposium attendees come away with the same feelings of encouragement.

“One of the things that provides the most anxiety for my students is when they think they’re alone in these things,” he said. “And they’re not. That’s part of this — I think (attendees) will realize they’re not alone.”