Paul Treadwell
And welcome to extension out loud, a podcast from Cornell Cooperative Extension. This episode of extension out loud is the first in the series introducing the purpose and potential impact of critical issue leads. I sat down with Andy Turner, Director of CCE and Associate Dean both the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Cornell human ecology, to talk about these campus appointments and their impact on the work of CCE in our communities. After that short introduction to the role of critical issue leads, I talked with David Kaye, senior extension associate in the Department of Global Development and newly appointed critical issue lead for Sustainable Energy and Climate Change at Cornell Cooperative Extension, David and I talked about what he sees as the opportunities and challenges in his new role, and how that might play out. What is critical issue lead and what is the role of critical issue leader.
Andy Turner
The idea of the critical issue leads is to create a strong leader and liaison between our associations and program areas and all the work going on out there in the counties, and connecting that back to campus. It's the start of a broader effort to rebuild more dynamic connections between Association programs, plans of work, and our resources and support here on campus, it gives us some real thought leadership for those areas. And perhaps this is a beginning of something that can grow into a more robust, reimagined kind of structure that supports the activity in the counties and also connects to emerging leadership and ideas and new research and evidence here at Cornell as well
David Kay
I am David Kay. I'm a senior extension associate and the Department of Global Development. I originally came to Cornell as a graduate student in 1978 and what was then called the Department of Agricultural Economics. And in interim, I spent many years in Cornell's local government program, and after that, in Cornell's Community and Regional Development Institute, the title I now have is critical issue lead for Sustainable Energy and Climate Change.
Paul Treadwell
So as a critical issue climate change, and you bundled sustainable energy in there. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like for Cornell Cooperative Extension?
David Kay
Firstly, I'll start with the cooperative extension part. I think that sustainable energy, particularly energy efficiency questions. They were actually one of the reasons I first came to Cornell. Because I came to Cornell for just before the Iranian, around the time of the Iranian, where we thought of in those days, is Iranian oil crisis. There had been the earlier era oil embargo. So energy issues. What I'm trying to get is energy issues, energy efficiency and a lot of different versions of how you frame it. They've been a policy issue of significance for many years and extension, has had a role in responding to how to educate about those issues with our various constituencies for literally decades, in various ways, when we've always had community development work, we have all these other program areas that may have intersected with some of these things, but this is a new designation as a critical issue of climate change. So so we're trying to figure out, essentially, and I'm trying to help figure out, in my role, how does our system shift, if you will, its attention and resources and constructive ways to be able to address the issue which more and more people are concerned about, and it's coming. The concern comes primarily from the research that is being done and has been being done that is the scientific community saying, Hey, we really this is something that we have to take very seriously. There was some contention around the issue of climate change, scientific research and what, but there's a very small number of contrary opinions. It's I'm I've never seen any issue where there wasn't a small number of contrary opinions. So I think for someone who's not an expert like myself, in the where can I go with? I can go with the vast majority the scientists agree this majority of human cause change, which is really dry, and it has mostly to do with carbon emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions. So to get back to what you're saying, now that's a different question than how to how do we talk about it? So I am a social scientist, and I am concerned primarily. Also with an extension about how do we communicate with people? So when we get to thinking about this, my community development gut tells me, if I want to be a good educator and communicate with someone about something, I'm gonna find out what they care about the most and then try and figure out what resources can I bring to the table that would help them make informed decisions about the issues that they care about the most. I believe the science is solid, but I don't necessarily believe that the best way to get to get into a conversation or an instructive situation, particularly with adults, not in a classroom setting. I don't believe the best way to do that is to say I have the right answer for you, and this is what science says, and take it or leave it, because a lot of times are going to leave it. Is this a discrete program? Is it integrated into other programs? In some ways, it's a discrete I'll also mention, I'm also Chair at the national level of the national extension Climate Initiative, which I would encourage any educators who are not members of to join. And why do I say any educators? Because it relates to what I wanted to go on to next, which is like I believe, and I think there's a very strong case to be made that actually, everybody in the world who cares about anything has to care about climate change to some degree, because we're all being affected by it in various ways, and we're all going to be even more affected by us, that's what the science tells us. So if that's true, the question then becomes more strategic about, how do we educate about this? And I'm increasingly convinced that we need to have both a special issue, a critical issue lead, which is the role I play on climate, but I also think the reality is it affects how our natural resource educators need to think about what they're working with. They don't need to become critical issue weeds on climate. They need to do what they're doing, but they need to incorporate the relevance of climate change to the work they do. The same for our ag educators. They're safe for our nutrition educators, and all the way down the line, because we're all in a world that is already on a day to day basis, despite looking at the paper, not everywhere, not always in Ithaca, New York, but in New York State, routinely, things are changing in ways that science would like back to climate change. So we all made a bit tempting for that, no matter what our discipline is, in different ways too.
Paul Treadwell
Back in the 70s and early 80s, when we were talking about renewable energy or sustainable energy, there was often a vision of it being connected to houses. Solar. Was always a vision of on the solar now we have we transition to this sort of post modern environment that we're living in now, and solar is suddenly this massive deployment on agricultural land. Is that the best way to go. And I realize, well, I'm asking you for value judgment
David Kay
As an extension educator and a researcher, that's not for me to decide whether that's a social decision. So to even think about that, I have to think what's the criteria for best. And not everybody's going to agree about what all those criteria are, but I will say the state of New York, the legislature has passed legislation which puts for and often local governments have done various version of this. Have passed legislation that commits us as a state to decarbonization goals, right, which I personally think is an important thing to do. So that's a value judgment. If you don't believe in human caused climate change, you won't agree with that, but I do believe in it. As I said earlier, I'm totally upfront. I believe that educators should ground their education in the evidence base which is most compelling. And I think this is the most compelling evidence base. When we do that, we need to say we need to do something. So then what is it right that we can do? And right now, I said in something called the NYSERDA agricultural Technical Working Group, which is an advisory body to NYSERDA, which is trying to figure out if we need a lot of renewable energy to decarbonize the grid, I will also say, I would consider this pretty close to a indisputable fact is that we can't fully decarbonize the grid only by having rooftop solar, and we can't fully decarbonize in it by finding other, what are called low impact sites. So we need to put it somewhere. Where are we going to put it? At the scale that's needed to decarbonize and meet our policy goals. Doesn't need to go on farmland, but it needs to go someplace. The reason there's a lot of pushback against siting on farmland is because that's where it tends to be most desirable from the perspective of a developer, to put it under the current set of rules. And one of the things we're trying to do in this group is to say, let's figure out, how do we incentivize developers in the system? We have to stay away from prime farmland. But we're also trying to say, let's also stay away from forest land. We're also saying, let's stay away from wetlands. We're also saying, how much opportunity is there to put 100 acre facility, let's say in Manhattan, or even in suburbs. So it becomes a difficult problem. And what I wish would happen more as I wish, at the local level and at the state level, there's a lot more proactive thinking about if we're going to do this, where should this go? How do we overcome the barriers, depending on where we think it should go, as opposed to the way our system really works, is the developers out there makes a proposal, and then a lot of people say, well, it shouldn't go there. So a thing that's in all seriousness, reason debate is something that we need to have around these critical issues. Yeah, so what is the role of Cooperative Extension in, let's say, facilitating or hosting those dialogs that need to happen? So now you're hitting on a topic, which you and I, going back a few years, talked about there's a tradition in extension called public issues education, p, i, e, and if you look at the journal extension, there's dozens of articles about that, including some relatively recent ones. And what it is really suggesting is there are some kinds of issues where if you want to be a good educator, you need to think less about the presentation mode of like, I'm the expert and I have the facts, you need to think more about having essentially a dialog that invites people with different perspectives to kind of come in and your role as an educator. Sometimes you can be both the presenter of the information and the facilitator of the dialog. But maybe often it's like maybe you're the facilitator and some of your colleagues are more of the presenters, because the more controversial the topic is, the harder it is to do both. Right? So public issues education gives a framework for educators to think about, how do I think about the educational process more holistically, and what are all the different roles that somebody needs to play to make sure that education happens effectively? And whether these controversial topics are very complex topics, it's often the case that you can't just assume that going in and providing information is going to be enough to be effective, right? And I would also add, so I think about these other approaches which are more dialog based, is, I think it's part of our responsibility as educators to not only think about how do I deliver information in an effective way, but how do I create context in which learning can happen.
Paul Treadwell
Shifting to more dialogic educational mode really calls on a different skill set, right? So how do we facilitate the development of the skill set that is necessary? Because you can very unskillfully facilitate a conversation that, right, that has negative implications, right?
David Kay
Couple answers to that, so I would. So I'm not the economic vitality critical issue lead, our colleague, Vicki Girotano, is that lead and I, you know, we haven't even met as a group yet. So, like, I don't really know about how our whole system is going to think about, how do we address the, you know, the capacity building kinds of questions that you're you're talking about in new ways, which I hope we do. So I'm gonna, this is a process. This is not a program that's going to be deployed. It's a process of development for everybody who's involved in extension work, right? And, you know, I would say everybody that's involved in extension work. The process affects everybody. Not everybody needs to become a skilled facilitator. However, I would argue that everybody ought to be thinking about to what a degree would becoming more competent as a facilitator help me in my job, right?
Paul Treadwell
Quickly flipping through some of the past papers we've written and stuff, and there was a issues brief, I think you did with Robin Blakely about, yeah, trust in federal versus local officials. And there's some interesting things in there about a higher degree of trust with local officials. So does it make sense to think about extension and our presence in each community as being a more trustworthy because we're more locally embedded organization than if we were a centralized push it out and let it go? Thing,
David Kay
I would say absolutely, if you just use logic about this or think about in terms of politics. You think about it in terms of private extension and the ability to be responsive to the community, which in some sense, everybody's trained to do in those kinds of roles. So if you have a smaller community that's more homogeneous, it's easier to be responsive in ways that make them happy, right? The more local you are structurally part of the game that it's it's easier to do that. And I think our system of extension in New York is, some people would say, the most county centered in the entire country. So we have more of an ability to do that. So the only caveat, and I think it is an important caveat, to put on that, is, are you only part of your county community? How do you define the community? If I'm in Tompkins County, what about the people in Schuyler County? Do I not care about them at all? So I also think extension, in terms of its structure, does have for a number of reasons, the need to think about at least what extent should we be doing programming and offering services at the statewide, national and regional level?
Paul Treadwell
One last question I wanted to ask you, David, can you think of any current extension programs that maybe exemplify some of the spirit of the work that you're trying to accomplish?
David Kay
I can think of several. And the only reason I'm I'd be most hesitating, is because I hesitate to name some others, I'll tell you one that that's not so much, because it's really exceptional in some sense. But just to show like because I was unaware of it until about a year ago, and exemplify something that I think it's really important that we talked about earlier. So there is a group of folks at the national level and at the local level whose their extension work is essentially helping household members think about household finance. So I had no idea that there was a whole group of people already engaged in thinking about, what are the implications of climate change in terms of and by the way we approach these folks initially, because I'm doing some research with some colleagues, flood insurance questions that are kind of we were like questioning, is there anybody out there who might be in our extension system, who could help us think about how households make decisions about financial questions that would involve their homes and flood insurance, obviously very important topic for a lot of people. Discovered there's this whole group of people already on that topic. So I was, like thrilled to hear that, because that's not an area that I worked though,
I'll give you one other one then. And the only reason for that is because, very close to what I personally work in, which is so we now have a center for agrivoltaics, okay, at Cornell, probably five years ago, we had almost nobody. Nobody even knew what that word meant, which is just in case, nobody knows. Some people don't know what it means. It's really trying to think about is agriculture compatible? And if so, how with large scale solar development or even small scale solar development? And the answer to that, I would say, scientifically, is not in yet. There are some specific examples of things that work in certain ways, but we don't really have satisfying, comprehensive answers to that question yet. So we have programs that range from the group that I lead with Guillermo mats here in Tompkins County in Extension educators thinking through all of those kinds of issues. And we have the research community. And I think one of the things that others I'm going to hold it up as I think in good ideal is because I think we've worked that and had some success in trying to I would call it almost re bond, the on campus research community with the county based extension community in ways which Are the model of what extension is supposed to be, but in reality, is often at best, very least bond, because there are different incentive structures facing people at the county level of people on the campus, and it's often hard to make those connections. I'm lifting that up because I think we're increasing the strength of those connections through that program, or
David Kay
look forward to more programs like that coming out of your work. David, I would love to see that. All right. Thank you very much for taking your time. We'll talk to you again soon. Very good. Always good to talk to you.
Paul Treadwell
Paul, thank you for listening to this episode for more information about this episode, including show notes and. Transcript. Visit extension out loud.com and be sure to subscribe to extension out loud on your favorite podcast directory. You.
