Emily Pachoud Discusses Climate Crisis Awareness
The lead tUrn intern shares her senses of passion and urgency for climate activism
Until high school, senior Emily Pachoud was taught that climate change was false. But when she enrolled in her school’s AP Environmental Science class senior year, climate activism soon became a priority.
“As soon as I took that class, it was my number one passion and I just wanted to dedicate everything to it,” said Pachoud.
It was this drive to understand the severity of climate change and interconnecting social issues that led her to join tUrn in the program’s infancy. The climate action project was created by Kristin Kusanovich, a senior lecturer in the Theater & Dance and Child Studies Program, in 2019 to bring climate change into conversations at Santa Clara.
“While there was a lot of talk about the environment and sustainability on our campus, there was not much about the climate crisis,” said Pachoud. “Words like ‘climate crisis’ were not even really used, and it was that lack of discourse on campus that was so serious and inspired Kristin to start this project.”
After attending the first tUrn Week in October 2019, Pachoud reached out to Kusanovich and expressed interest in being more involved in the following iterations of the program. Due to COVID-19, though, on-campus event was delayed until the 21-22 academic year.
Though the transition to virtual tUrn Weeks posed challenges at first, Pachoud noted that this did not affect the participation of most speakers. Zoom’s format proved compatible with tUrn’s international reach.
“In some ways, it wasn’t too difficult since we have speakers from Afghanistan, Nigeria, the Philippines and Canada,” Pachoud said. “For the speakers that would be in person, we asked them to present on Zoom.”
Pachoud notes that her tUrn peers have been instrumental in shaping her understanding of large environmental NGOs, or “big greens,” and their problematic tendencies. The World Wildlife Fund for Nature in particular has been criticized for their human rights violations, causing the organization to be excluded from the tUrn resources page.
“They’re supporting conservation projects in Africa and South America that are harmful to the people there, where [the projects] take land away from people there who aren’t the ones harming it," said Pachoud. “This would result in creating parks for Western interests and promoting ecotourism.”
The NGO controversy reveals a need to take action against climate change on a systemic level, which Pachoud believes tUrn should continue to emphasize. Sweeping political and economic changes may promote equality and democracy and help those who are disproportionately affected by air pollution, for example.
“If we’re going to address the climate crisis, in my eyes, what we really need is system change,” she said. “There’s only so much a consumer can do.”
A holistic view of the climate crisis requires discussing groups particularly vulnerable to climate change.
“Something that is important to me is having tUrn highlight people with disabilities and incarcerated people,” said Pachoud. “I haven’t really heard them come up in my classes or when we’re talking about environmental injustices.”
A tUrn headliner that Pachoud feels made a significant impact featured Mohan Gurunathan, who spoke about the issues of factory farming while promoting plant-based dieting. Gurunathan held the seminar discussing these issues, “The Addiction Threatening All Life on Earth,” for the recent tUrn week.
“The headliner is on how having a plant-based diet is the single largest impact that an individual can have on carbon emissions,” Pachoud said. “An individual’s adoption of that would help us mitigate the [climate] crisis.”
Any opportunity to learn about the climate crisis must be met with a sense of urgency, as emphasized by tUrn. By 2030, scientists believe that greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 45% to keep the global temperature increase to no more than 1.5°C. Staying below that threshold would avert the worst impacts of climate change, according to the United Nations.
“I hope that more and more people get involved with tUrn because we don’t have that much time left,” she said. “The climate crisis intersects with so many other issues, and we can work together with other big groups and campaigns to achieve a common goal.”
tUrn’s current strategy of attracting student interest has been beneficial for the program. Though the program does not rely heavily on social media to gain attention, posting flyers throughout campus and giving presentations in classes have effectively boosted attendance numbers. Pachoud anticipates that these campaigns will promote widespread student knowledge of tUrn week.
“The idealistic goal would be for tUrn week to be a week that everyone knows about on campus and all classes just focus on the climate crisis, whether that means just sending students to their events or just teaching about the climate crisis in their classes”