What inspired your interest in Planetary Health?

As a kid, I spent much of my time exploring the deciduous wetland that surrounded my house. The woods provided a sense of calm for my rambunctious spirit, they were full of curiosities that nurtured my sense of wonder. 

When I became a teacher, I felt it was essential to provide opportunities for my students to experience similar moments of wonder and connection, and to develop love and respect, not just for each other, but for the broader world around them. More often than not, you’d find my class outdoors, elbow deep in weeds, soil, and seeds. Watching my students learn where their food comes from, nurture pollinator habitats, and begin to ask tough questions about how humans impact the Earth’s vital systems strengthened my resolve to ensure all students have access to learn from and about the more-than-human world.

Tell us about your Planetary Health work at JHU

I am currently pursuing my PhD at JHU’s School of Education with a focus on how people learn and grow from experiences with their local ecosystems, how these experiences inform their attitudes and behaviors, and how we can prepare teachers to bring these transformative experiences to the classroom. I recently co-designed a course with my advisor, Dr. Hunter Gehlbach, to prepare future STEM teachers to use topics of Planetary Health and environmental justice to ground their instruction. The course was rooted in concepts from a paper we co-authored with Sam Myers: Education’s Pivotal Role in Advancing Planetary Health. This year I’ve been fortunate to share learnings from the course and our paper with educators in Baltimore and around the globe.

This summer I started a graduate fellowship at the Ecological Design Collective, where I coordinate projects and events with folks exploring socio-ecological issues from a range of disciplines. It’s been energizing to see how people connect to Planetary Health issues through the arts, design, stewardship, and collective action. I’m excited to continue exploring our theme, Antidotes to Toxicity, in this community and see how it takes shape over the coming year!

What excites you about the future of Planetary Health?

I’m inspired by the interdisciplinarity of the Planetary Health movement. Planetary Health doesn’t endorse a specific solution to environmental challenges, but instead offers a space for people to cross-pollinate their expertise and share their lived experiences. As an educator, I’ve learned that what we create together is much richer than what we are capable of alone, and the most generative collaborations are those that include people who see things from very different perspectives. In the U.S., so many of our institutions (especially educational ones) are set up to keep us separate from each other or make us compete for resources. Planetary Health pushes against these false separations, urging us to see how our stories interweave with our more-than-human relatives and (re)connect with our human communities to imagine a thriving future for us all.

More about Lindi Shepard:

Read a preprint of Education's Pivotal Role in Advancing Planetary Health: https://osf.io/preprints/edarxiv/8f7y2_v1

Join the Ecological Design Collective: https://community.ecodesigncollective.org/