If you are like me, you have been getting some hard questions from students regarding the election results. In conservation biology, the study of maintaining the Earth’s biodiversity, we discuss many environmental and social topics like disparity in wealth, women’s rights, climate change, clean water and habitat loss and fragmentation. Thus, a large majority of the country supporting an anti-science candidate with questionable social ideologies gives them real concern. 

As our future leaders, these students look to us as mentors, so I think it is our job to be truthful and hopeful for their future. This is not easy and it has kept me up at night lately. I finally was able to put my thoughts to paper early this morning, mostly because I had my discussion section in con bio at 8 a.m. and I knew the topic was going to come up again. I needed a good response.

My hope is that my comment below may help communicate to students that all is not lost, that we can be grounded in the social reality of today while still having hope for tomorrow.

I want to address your concerns following the election. Yesterday I was asked by several students how they will ever find jobs in conservation and science. This is a difficult question to answer truthfully and, with a hopeful tone considering the litany of Trump policies, they will exacerbate the very real environmental problems of climate change, habitat loss, access to clean water, disparity in wealth and equality for minorities and women; all while simultaneously defunding efforts to combat these issues.

As we have noted in our ecology and conservation biology classes this semester, closing the wealth gap and empowering women are paths to a healthier environment. Social issues are environmental issues, so the attack on both fronts, the environmental front and social front from this election may make it feel like you have a daunting task ahead, which you do, but you always have, what is different now, is that the mask of deception is off.

The problems are simply more evident than before and this should give us hope that we can now combat what has been openly expressed: that anti-science, racism, sexism and intolerance continue in a substantial portion of our population and can now be openly called as such, the mask is off.

So, after some reflection, I think the answer to how we should act, how we should forge forward, how we should continue to pursue our career in the sciences is quite simple. We keep doing what we have always done. The fight to sustain honesty, hard-work, openness, truth and diversity is not new. Nothing I have done to get to where I am in my career was easy. We have been fighting this fight for a long time.

Today, it is our job to work even harder and smarter. We have always worked to pursue knowledge for the betterment of humanity and we are now at a time when doing so has more meaning than ever before. Simply see this election as fuel for working harder, be introspective and take the blame for what transpired. We as a country of individuals have not worked hard enough to educate and inform about the strengths of diversity and a healthy environment.

Teddy Roosevelt said it best when he noted, “The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem, it will avail us little to solve all others.”

Without healthy, functioning ecosystems we cannot have a healthy economy and we cannot be healthy socially. Similarly, we cannot have a healthy environment without standing up for social health at the global scale, by standing up for those only concerned with finding food and shelter for the day, standing up for women that do not have an education or the capacity to make their own decisions about child bearing, standing up for all that have little way to stand up for themselves.

In a country founded on diversity, a melting pot in a land rich in natural resource and with a conservation legacy and ethic admired by the world; now is not the time to hang our heads, it is a time to seek out and actively promote the truth, work hard, be good to your neighbor and make it a great day, every day, through your actions, despite the actions of others.

So, it is my honest comment today, that you will all go on to make substantial and positive impacts in this world, no matter who is president when you graduate. You will go on to make substantial and positive impacts because it is the collection of actions, not the single, great action of one, but the collective actions of the many that will make our world a better place for tomorrow.

Be the change you want to see. Pursue that career in conservation and science with more passion than ever before. You will have no regrets if you spend your life focused on sustaining a healthy environment and promoting social justice.

Michael Schummer

Visiting Assistant Professor of Zoology