HOW THE WORLD HAS CHANGED SINCE I STARTED TEACHING

It is an unexpected honor to be recognized by a Tribute Session at this meeting. It’s not something I could ever have envisioned when I attended my first ASLO meeting in 1979. It has been a great ride and I will forever cherish my ASLOvian friends.  I began lecturing as a tenure track faculty member in 1988, and I gave my last lecture as 2023 was coming to a close, a span of 35 years.  The syllabus said the lecture topic was “Global Ecology” so I chose to create a set of figures about how the Earth has changed over my teaching lifetime.  After class I put those figures into a series of posts on X, which then garnered more than 70,000 views and became a story in USA Today.  In this presentation I will share those plots and add some new ones more specifically about changes in freshwater resources.  One big take away from this experience is how important it is for science messaging to appeal to human nature in order for it to have the broad impact that is so needed today.

Primary Presenter: Robert Sterner, University of Minnesota Duluth (stern007@d.umn.edu)

Authors:

Robert Sterner, University of Minnesota Duluth  (stern007@d.umn.edu)