Forum urges new environmental mindset

LYNN – Omar Carranza wants to be a social worker, but he didn?t feel out of place attending a Thursday morning-long North Shore Community College forum on the environment.?The environment affects food security, which affects social justice, which is social work,” Carranza said.Finding solutions to damaging climate changes and other environmental challenges won?t happen until people around the world see how these changes and challenges affect their lives, forum organizers said.?We have to appeal to people?s sense of their own importance, their children?s importance and humanity?s importance,” Dr. Frederick Altieri told about 100 people attending the forum.Both sides in environmental debates “tend to think of the world as our waste basket,” Altieri said, but he warned against using simple arguments to come up with realistic solutions for environmental problems.Forum keynote speaker Janot Mendler de Suarez, a Boston University visiting research fellow, echoed Altieri?s view, urging her audience to not automatically think of environmental slogans like climate change as “all doom and gloom.”She led the crowd of students and North Shore instructors through exercises aimed at assessing their ability to weigh environmental problems and solutions. She said countries like Mali, located in North Africa, must balance rainfall forecasts with farming needs to predict economic needs stretching 20, even 50 years, into the future.?Taking care of our planet means disaster risk management: It is our challenge but also our opportunity,” she said.North Shore student Leanne McGuinness helped organize the forum to expand student interest in the college?s “green curriculum.” Forums like the one hosted Thursday are a North Shore tradition dating back 20 years, with tolerance serving as the consistent theme linking the discussions from one year to the next.North Shore offers liberal arts-based environmental science programs designed, in part, to allow students to expand on what they learn in the two-year school if they decide to go on to a four-year institution.Carranza said Thursday?s forum underscored his involvement since high school in urban gardening sponsored by The Food Project. He said that interest could lead him to combine his social work studies with an environmental science degree.?It?s always important and uplifting to see professors feel so strongly about this,” Carranza said.