Transcript
What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. I'm Jeff Chanton. I'm a Gulf Coast native, and I teach in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science here at Florida State University. I love the water. I love the coast, and I love the wetlands. And I just love watery places. And so to be able to study those and learn about them, and to be able to tell other people about that, and communicate my enthusiasm to them, is just really, really satisfying. When you talk to a student, and tell them about changes that are happening on Earth now, and why those changes are happening, they get it, and they can see it themselves. And what do they need to do? Well, they need to mobilize as a group to do something about it. All these individual actions are not gonna be enough. And we have to act as a society to make these changes, and not only that, we have to act as a global society. So we only have this one planet, and we're not gonna go live on Mars. And if we did, we'd be living in little bubbles, and not being able to go outside, and is that what we want for this Earth? In this class that I'm teaching now, I take these kids out, and we did the Wakhaelus Springs boat tour, and just to watch them looking at the birds and animals, they're also happy. And people that are in any kind of distress, they turn to nature, and it soothes them, and we need to maintain our connection with that. I think we just have to find an interaction with younger people that are more enthusiastic than we probably are at my age. And so I live off of those students. I need their enthusiasm to carry on. I'm Jeff Chanton, I'm a mud doctor, and I'm doctor in the Earth. You're listening to voices that inspire.