UC-CSU NXTerra Digital Platform

TRANSFORMATIVE EDUCATION FOR CLIMATE ACTION

UC-CSU NXTerra is a Knowledge-Action Network (KAN) and digital platform for climate educators, developed by faculty from the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) systems.

Recognizing the severity of the climate crisis, we are driven by profound and renewed belief in the power of education to help reimagine and build a better, more sustainable and environmentally just world, or “next Earth.”

Although the scale of the problem demands that academia, the sciences, businesses, governments, and civil society quickly begin acting in concert to reduce carbon emissions, decades of ineffective negotiations and mitigation schemes have brought us to the brink of a climate emergency—at least according to the best collaborative science that scholars can offer (see the NXTerra Archive of Breaking Climate Science).

The collective challenge thus presented of crafting adequate and just mitigation, adaptation, and sustainability solutions is immense—and the range of possible results includes widely divergent “next Earths.”

As University of California and California State University-based educators, we are taking up that challenge and putting forward our best collaborative and interdisciplinary work right here at NXTerra.

This means infusing our teaching practices with:

• the most up-to-date science describing the urgency of the unfolding climate crisis
• solutions-oriented and critical sustainability studies that foreground the need not merely for a quick transition to clean energy and development, but for a just transition to a better world
• under-represented voices from every sector of global society — those on whom the heaviest burdens of climate change are already falling (thus climate justice studies)

As educators, our responsibilities include teaching students ways of confronting the climate crisis, for they are the generation that will forge the ideas and do the work that will ultimately determine which “next Earth” will come to be our home.

To this end, NXTerra produces, curates, and delivers climate change, critical sustainability, and climate justice education resources for teachers and students of every discipline—from the arts and humanities to the human and social sciences and the natural sciences—with the aim of sharing resources to accelerate climate education and action in California and beyond.

College-level educators in all fields who wish to enable and empower their students to apply their knowledge in innovative ways to real-world problems will find resources here to support them in teaching and collaborating with their students.  This names an ambitious and wide-ranging project—imagining and creating “a just transition to the next Earth.”  It calls us to reshape our relationships with each other and the systems and institutions that determine the quality of life today, both here at home as well as in communities around the world.

By enhancing and scaling up this transformation of University of California and California State University educators and curriculums, UC-CSU NXTerra expresses its support for and commits itself to achieving the main objective of the UC Office of the President’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative (CNI) — UC carbon neutrality by 2025.

By networking faculty and students from the UC and CSU systems, NXTerra contributes to the mission of the UC CNI, while at the same satisfying a growing demand from teachers and students in both systems to help make their careers and their educations part of the climate solution.

This is an attitude of “putting our heads, hands, and hearts together” and getting to work.

Our combined efforts aim at accelerating the necessary deep cultural shifts both inside our sister university systems and outside, in our shared emergent global civil society.

NXTerra welcomes your interest and invites your participation!

Get in touch and help us reach these ambitious targets:

• UC carbon neutrality in a just transition;
• deep culture shift in UC-CSU education through integration of the climate crisis, critical sustainability, and climate justice studies across the disciplines;
• elevation of the humanities, fine arts, and film and media studies within the emergent discourses of climate change, critical sustainability, and climate justice studies