I am so pleased to be joining the Center for a Sustainable Future as a Sustainability Fellow this year. I work in environmental sociology with a focus on children. After becoming a mother nearly six years ago, my worldview shifted and I realized that the cliché, ‘the children are our future’ (thanks Whitney for that one), really helped me to find hope and desire to work towards change for the future of our planet.
As a graduate candidate in sociology at Notre Dame, my research focuses on uncovering kids’ understandings of nature and their attitudes towards the natural world. Many of the comments from kids in my research project give me hope in our environmental future. Learning about The Natural Step last year from Mike and Krista also gave me hope that there is a way out of this mess. It is my plan this year to become more familiar with the Natural Step and to strategize how this approach to sustainability can be incorporated into schools and other youth programming.
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Jessica Mikels-Carrasco
PhD candidate
Department of Sociology
GLOBES, NSF-IGERT graduate fellow
University of Notre Dame
Sustainability Fellow
Center for a Sustainable Future
IU South Bend
“We cannot solve our problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”
-Albert Einstein
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