An interview with Lynne Lewis, an environmental economist and environmental studies professor, on her views on sustainability. 

O: What does sustainability mean to you?

L: Sustainability in economics means being able to maintain some level of wealth essentially forever. Sustainability to me means being able to maintain a quality of life and a quality of the environment over time and leaving something as nice as we have now to future generations.

Sustainability to me means being able to maintain a quality of life and a quality of the environment over time and leaving something as nice as we have now to future generations.

O: Is the current political climate (for example, the anti-environment and science claims) affecting your work or changing your focus at all?

L: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s terrifying. It’s discouraging. It’s maddening. I teach environmental economics as you know and a lot of the material I use in class, some of the data sources, are disappearing; they’re being wiped clean. I have colleagues at the EPA who are not allowed to present their research in public venues. Research is getting deleted and it’s very discouraging to think we are in this place where science is being silenced and I don’t know what to do with that because we are in a scary time. I personally don’t think, and I know lots of people who would agree with me, that the planet doesn’t have four years to mess around. Hopefully, we are not talking more than four years, but we just don’t have time to play these games.

O: How does sustainability apply to your everyday life and to what you do at Bates? 

L: Sustainability is one of those words that, to me, has sort of been overused and it can mean lots of different things, but for my personal lifestyle, we are almost net-zero at home. We have solar energy, all of our electricity is solar, we have installed heat pumps, so we’ve reduced our heating oil use by about 50%; we are trying to do our part there. I personally pay attention to the values of the companies that I buy products from and what they are doing and what kinds of sustainability messages they are sending. For example, Patagonia was founded by a Lewiston resident, Yvon Chouinard, and they are doing really great things using recycled materials and discouraging overconsumption. So I’m thinking about where things come from and I try to bring that into the classroom in my environmental economics courses by just teaching students to have the skills to both be able to sift through the noise that’s happening right now in a lot of the “alternative facts” and being able to learn tools to make decisions and think about how to incorporate environmental values into decision making. It doesn’t always happen, especially in economics, but environmental economics deals with: What do we do now? How do we fix this? How do we address the externalities from what we produce and consume? So I try to bring that to the classroom.

Environmental economics deals with: What do we do now? How do we fix this? How do we address the externalities from what we produce and consume?

O: How could we leverage your expertise to help create actionable efforts at Bates on a personal or college-wide level? If you could do anything to promote sustainability at Bates what would you do?

L: I sort of feel like the environmental questions get labeled as environmental studies or as, “Oh that’s just the Eco Reps,” when I think it needs to be all of us. And so how do we not just use the expertise of people that think about those things all the time in their research and their teaching, but how do we all take responsibility for our actions and not just say, “oh those guys are fixing that,” or, “those are ES courses.”

 

O: Could you think of a way to promote an inclusive group as opposed to it just being the eco reps and the ES people who work on this every day?

L: There are a couple of us that are working on that. We are trying to design maybe some curricular initiatives and some student research initiates that sort of stand alone. There is also the Committee on Environmental Responsibilities thinking about a sustainability GEC. I’m interested in the same kind of thing for climate—having a climate change GEC, that sort of thing. That would be really great to have those kinds of things where we recognize that climate change isn’t just an environmental studies issue, it’s economics, it’s politics, it’s geology, it’s chemistry.

Climate change isn’t just an environmental studies issue, it’s economics, it’s politics, it’s geology, it’s chemistry.

O: If you were given a grant to do some sort of sustainability initiative at Bates, what would it be?

L: Well we are already moving in the directions of the things I would like to do with renewable energy—not fast enough—I think I’d want the whole campus to go solar. So I guess if I could pick one thing, that’s what I’d want to see.

O: What inspired you to become an environmental economist?  

L: I went to college to be a veterinarian, so fast forward a lot, and I was taking some economics courses and I didn’t love it, but I was living in Colorado and Colorado is a high planes desert and there is a pretty significant lack of water and that always struck me as challenging having grown up in a place with a lot of water. I finally started doing some research with an environmental economist and I was just hooked because I was fascinated by the politics, economics, hydrology of water, and I started working on water economics. It sort of fit pieces together that I had been dabbling in.