Abstract
Established amidst the bloodshed of the Civil War, land-grant universities, together with the associated agricultural experiment stations and cooperative extension services, have played a crucial role in democratizing scientific knowledge and addressing intertwined educational, environmental, economic, and democratic challenges within the USA. Indeed, they have arguably pioneered the idea of “usable science.” Today, the urgent challenges of the Anthropocene demand a more robust relationship between scientific research and on-the-ground action, strong networks sharing local lessons globally, and channels for injecting global, long-term perspectives into the noise of short-termism. The land-grant experience provides lessons for “Anthropocene universities” seeking to tackle these challenges, including the importance of (1) establishing or expanding university-based boundary organizations akin to cooperative extension, (2) incentivizing the integration of engagement into the university’s research, teaching, and service missions, (3) centering values of democracy, justice, equity, and inclusion in engagement, and (4) cooperating across institutions and sectors. Given the urgency of fully engaging academic institutions as players and connectors in the real-world challenges of addressing climate change and biodiversity loss, there is little time to waste.
Highlights
Established amidst the bloodshed of the Civil War, land-grant universities, together with the associated agricultural experiment stations and cooperative extension services, have played a crucial role in democratizing scientific knowledge and addressing intertwined educational, environmental, economic, and democratic challenges within the USA
Over the course of the last two centuries, humankind has become one of the principal drivers of many of the central processes of our planetary home: from climate and ecological change to sedimentation and the nitrogen cycle. Increasing recognition of this role—and of the footprints this role is leaving in the geological record—has led to a recent effort by the International Commission on Stratigraphy to formally identify a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene (Zalasiewicz et al 2011)
Drawing on the lessons of the land-grant model, higher-education institutions can play a crucial role in tilting the scales toward the good Anthropocene
Summary
The land-grant universities, together with their associated agricultural experiment stations and cooperative extension services, have played crucial roles in rural development and the democratization of scientific knowledge within the United States (Gavazzi and Gee 2018); they have arguably pioneered the idea of “usable science” (Kopp et al 2019). The land-grant experience provides insights into how to leverage higher-education institutions to address problems with intertwined educational, environmental, economic, and democratic facets. Today, these land-grant lessons can inform a crucially important, global mission: driving usable Earth system science that links researchers and educators to communities and decision-makers, in order to enable society to tackle one of the greatest challenges of our century—humankind’s new role as an increasingly self-aware, planetary force
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