Equipping the younger generation with environmental awareness and a deep fascination for nature might be our best bet at keeping the planet livable for the foreseeable future. We don’t see a lot of people doing that right now, but those who do are doing it in incredibly innovative and inspiring ways. Today’s guest makes such an impact in this regard. Frank Sesno is the executive director of the GWU Alliance for a Sustainable Future, a bold university-wide initiative that will form a collective front against the threat of climate change. He’s also the director of strategic initiatives at the GW School of Media and Public Affairs, and previously spent 21 years at CNN where he served as White House correspondent, anchor, and Washington bureau chief. Join in as Frank talks about the role of education, the impact of experiential learning, and the importance of fostering curiosity and resilience in students. Tune in and learn how positive forces in society are winning the bid for a more sustainable future.
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Fostering Environmental Awareness Through Storytelling, Education, And Experiential Learning With Frank Sesno
Welcome. With us, we have Frank Sesno. Frank is the Executive Director of the GW Alliance for a Sustainable Future, a bold university-wide initiative that will form a collective front against the threat of climate change. He’s also the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the GW School of Media & Public Affairs. He previously spent 21 years at CNN where he served as White House correspondent anchor and Washington Bureau Chief.
He has covered a diverse range of subjects from politics and conventions to international summits and climate change. He has interviewed five US presidents and thousands of political business and civic leaders, ranging from Hillary Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Microsoft Founder Bill Gates and broadcast legend Walter Cronkite. He’s an Emmy Award-winning journalist and the Creator of Planet Forward, a user-driven web and television project that highlights innovations and sustainability.
Welcome, Frank. It’s so good to have you with us in the space. I know Bonnie and I are very excited that you’ve said yes.
What else would I say? I want to be with you, so I look forward to the conversation.
It’s wonderful. The way I think of you is you’ve been in the business of asking questions all your life. You’ve been at CNN for 21 years. You were at the GW School of Media & Public Affairs as their director for eleven years. You’ve stepped into this new space at GW as the Executive Director for the Sustainability Consortium. Both Bonnie and I are very curious. What are some of the questions that you’re living with?
I’m living with so many questions. We’re officially calling it the George Washington University Alliance for a Sustainable Future, and the word future is the key to it. What is our future going to be? The questions I pose to myself, the students, and our faculty who are doing amazing research is, “What do we need to do across the broad spectrum of activities to create a truly equitable, sustainable planet? Can we move fast enough? How do we mobilize ourselves? How do we keep hope active and vibrant even amid all these challenges and what seems to be a parade of gloomy bad news?” That’s important too. It’s vital.
For the questions I ask my students, I start with, “What year were you born?” When we do the math, we will see that most of the students will live out the better part, if not the entirety of the 21st century. This century of change and challenge is theirs to shape. From that question, pretty much everything else follows, “What will you do? How will you define your success? What difference will you make? Where and how can you contribute? How can you motivate and inspire others?”
I have a question for you that came from watching one of the students who won the StoryFest trip, the one who went to Galápagos. It was a biology student, I believe, who was talking about how there’s no amount of school learning, class learning, theory, or lab work that can convey what this is all about more than being inches from an animal, having the whale watching expedition, or all the different touch, tactile, and experiential things that they got to have on that trip.
Not everybody can do a trip like that. I know part of the reason for taking these winners on a trip like that is to give them experiences to tell those stories and try and convey that back. It occurred to me while you were talking about, “What are you going to do? What do you want your future to look like?” Those are good questions. They’re daunting questions. How can the we-live-with-nature experiential questions start to help students answer the more abstract questions?
We recognize this. We talk with our students when we’re in the Galápagos, Iceland, or on these grand prize storytelling expeditions that we take with them that this is a very rare field experience. They understand that. The equivalent is walking in the woods. The equivalent is getting out in your own figurative backyard to be with nature, listen to its sounds, and take in its scents. It’s sometimes hard to do that. It depends on where you live. It depends on what your resources are. Overwhelmingly, most of us have in our capacity, whether it’s a park, the city where we live, or a walk in the rural environment where we travel or live, to be there and be present in that nature. That is the experience.
I’ve watched it with students again and again, taking that time, being mindful of where they are, and connecting with the world around them that helps them appreciate that, “I can have a piece of this.” One of those questions I posed early on was, “What are you going to do? What difference can you make?” That may be at a global scale. Some of these students may be a president, prime minister, or the UN Secretary-General one day. They may be a community activist. They may be a partner in a family. They may be able to change their own behaviors, that of their family, their neighbors, or a larger community. They may work at a company or an organization where they can make a contribution as a bold, creative thinker, and move a dynamic that way.
One of the things that’s so important to convey to young people and to all of ourselves is we all have the capacity to have an impact in different ways. We define that. We create that we define our own success. Recognizing that contribution and creativity can come in so many different forms and are dynamic over our lifetimes. That will change too.
What we want to do as 18-year-olds will be different from what we can do as 38 or 58-year-olds. That’s something that, as I’ve worked with these young people and as they wrap their brains around that, a lot of them walk in the room understanding that. I see it. I give them some inspiration and some hope, and that’s a great thing.
To your point about getting out and learning, it reminded me of something my mother always used to say, which is, “Never let school interfere with your education.” I say that guardedly because I work at one, but there isn’t anything, and that’s why I love being a journalist, like getting out, seeing, experiencing, hearing, and listening to learn.
There is nothing like getting out, seeing, experiencing, hearing, and listening to learn.
Touching and feeling. I’m with you.
Art And Sustainability
It makes me think about your whole point that in different spaces, everybody can do it their own way or see a way to contribute. I was reading through some of the stories as well in your Planet Forward initiative. What got my attention was this guy named Moses Kizza. He’s from Uganda and from the Kampala Film School. He created this little short movie about a dance. He calls it the Okussa.
The question he poses is, is it possible that practicing such dances makes us more attentive to the needs of nature? He says the problems of climate change can only be solved together and art can help. It has the potential to support the search for such answers. It makes me think about creativity coming in different forms, which is exactly what you said. Arts also has a role in it. Can you say more about maybe one of your experiences, creative experiences, or that you might have learned from your students?
I’ll start with the students. I had the students a few years ago capture an artist who was doing a mural about bees. It was portraying bees in this mural. The purpose was to raise awareness and attention to the challenges and, in some places, the crises that our bees confront because of a variety of challenges from development, chemicals, pesticides, and all these other things that we know so well.
The point that the artist was making and then the point that the students picked up in the storytelling about the art was creating a connection through this imagery. It was creating characters that kids could relate to. Rather than throwing science at people and throwing data at people, and that’s very important that they understand the science and data, first, he was conveying this expressive, impressionistic sense of this community that shares the planet with us.
When you see that and you see their beauty and then learn that they are threatened or dying, you have a different connection, an empathetic connection, to these creatures that don’t speak our language. What little kid doesn’t start in life by storytelling with crayons or drawing their own? I really appreciated that because the imagery that the artist was sharing on the mural and the students were conveying in their story cut across demographics, ages, and language.
We’ll be doing a concert at our Planet Forward Summit this 2024. It will be a musical piece called Sacred Places. We are doing that quite deliberately to bring in another level of art and expression. We’ll hear from the music director who will talk about how music and art, in many ways, connect head and heart. That’s such an important thing as we think about how we communicate and how we tell stories to recognize that these stories and this communication come in a lot of different forms and a variety of art forms.
I know, Bonnie, you might have more to say about this. I’m thinking about the imagery work. It also makes me think about these aesthetic moments because what art does or what creativity does is it opens our senses so we can feel more and connect more deeply. It made me think about Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut. This is captured in the overview effect. When he got to see this blue planet hanging in space, he had a completely different appreciation for the planet. He ended up coming back and starting the Institute of Noetic Sciences and studying that connection.
Coming from that perspective, a colleague of mine from the doctoral education program said the first time he was in Alaska and he got to have this connection with an iceberg, it was so much in his body that he never forgot it. He, at that moment, shifted his understanding and perception of nature. I was wondering, Frank, if in your own life you’ve had perhaps such moments or any of those moments?
Living Poetry
Yes. As I think about this and where this all comes from, I’ll start with when I was a teenager, my mother sent me out to a camp in Colorado, which was a backpacking and horseback riding camp. It was adjacent to the Franklin Roosevelt National Forest. It was a completely uninhabited area. There was no electricity that came into this camp where we were. There was a generator that got shut off at 9:00 at night, and then all you heard was the stream passing through the camp, the sounds of this beautiful moment on our planet.
I, on horseback, discovering remote places, in silent nights staring at brilliant starry skies, taking care of these animals that were so strong and were both our form of transportation which we pulled pack horses with our food, camp, and supplies, it was this defining experience in my life that was its own spirituality. That has continued. For example, it was when I took students to the Galápagos.
One of the magical things about the Galápagos is how close you can get to the animals, all of them, because they have no predators. For whatever reason, they don’t care if you’re standing right there. There we were at 6 feet because you’re not supposed to get closer than 6 feet to the animals to a sea lion who had given birth to this pup. The umbilical cord was still attached. Birds were pecking the umbilical cord. It’s one of the ways that it gets detached.
There were all these creatures sharing this remarkable, intimate, and miraculous moment with us standing there. That creates a connection and a spirituality that you cannot get any other way, not looking through the bars in a zoo, not seeing pictures in a book, or not seeing the best, most beautiful documentary that you can imagine. It’s being there. Every one of those students who were there commented on that. That was life-changing for them. My experiences have spanned a lifetime. I am sorry to go on so long, but I’m quite sure they started in those mountains in Colorado.
It’s living poetry.
It’s very touching. We’re back to experience again, the experiential, but also the relationship that builds a relationship with the horses, the sky, the stars, and each of the things that you commented on. It’s interesting that we keep repeating these moments of relationship with nature and how that is so life-changing.
I think about what you said earlier, Frank, about how everybody has access to that in some way. It could be to get very quiet and notice the butterfly that’s right there in a park, not having to go millions of miles away to have dramatic events, though the butterfly in the park is dramatic. I’m curious about something you had said earlier. You asked what year your students were born. You define that as being part of this century and how that’s different. Talk a little more about that. Why this century and why is that so different?
The Grandma Game
I play a game with the students. This is how I get at this. I call it the grandma game. I ask them in a room, “How many of you have a grandma?” The hands go up and I say, “That’s great. You’re so fortunate. I wonder who here has the oldest grandma? How old is your grandma?” We’ll go around. They’ll say 78 or 88. One said in class, 98. I said, “Wow. 98 years old. You come from an amazing family. You have a great gene pool. If you live to your grandma’s age, what year will that be?” I joke that this is how I always know I don’t have math majors in the room because it always takes them a moment to do the calculation. It’s getting easier though because many of these students were born in 2002, so 2002 plus 98 equals 2100.
What’s going to happen between 2024 and 2100? In 2050, it’s estimated the world’s population will hit close to 10 billion people. The computer models that model out what’s going to happen with climate change spin around 2050 and 2100. The goals that many companies and others are setting for themselves are around 2030 or 2035.
We have charted and scoped out this century against this phenomenal challenge of climate change and growing population, which is going to drive so many things, like demand for water, migration, the need for food, or more energy. By 2100, we will need close to half again as much food, energy, and water if projections hold. My conversation with them is, “Over this period of time, which is your life or your lifetime, so much is going to change.”
I point out that on the day I was born, there were about 2.7 billion people on the planet. If I lived to my father’s age, and he made it almost to 95, there would be nearly 10 billion people on the planet, 2.7 to nearly 10 billion in one human lifetime. Wrapping our brains around that story and the questions that arise like, “How will we get there? What will this be like? How will we accommodate this many people? Can we provide for them and not destroy everything else?”
A silly question that isn’t so silly is, “Who in the room here is going to get rich by providing an answer?” Sometimes, that’s the motivation, and maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it’s a crass way to put it, but in the all-hands-on-deck moment that we face, we better put every brain to work to figure this out. We have to. The question is can we do it fast enough? This remarkable story is going to play out over this generation’s lifetime. That’s the grandma game that I play with them. It’s for people to realize how real this is, how much is going to happen in their single lifetimes, and how much influence they can have on it.
The Role Of Education
I was thinking about the quote that you said to not repeat but it stuck with me, which is what your mother said. It was, “Don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education.” I know you are in the education space. I know that what the alliance will be doing at GW is going beyond the boundaries of education, being very multidisciplinary, bringing different perspectives, and so on. I wonder what would be the two important questions to ask around the role of education in the context of the story where we’re in. What’s the role of education in this?
The role of education is huge. It should provide students, young people, with the tools, capacity, creativity, and resilience to be doing what they’re going to be doing and doing it well to equip them with the ideas and the integrity to do it honestly. In many ways, the model education or higher education is brilliant, wonderful, and all the rest. In other ways, we are stuck so deeply in the past and our feet are in cement.
The way we need to be thinking and the way young people relate to their education is, “What big problems are you going to solve? How are we equipping you to solve problems? What tools are we giving you to have context, empathy, and understanding in an increasingly complex and diverse world? How are we imbuing you with the risk-taking that you are going to need to have if you are going to address the challenges that you’re going to face, stand out amongst your peers, and be a leader if that’s what you choose to do to create?” Bonnie, I know you work a lot around this notion of dreaming. Dream big, but don’t dream so big that it becomes a nightmare because you can’t achieve it. How do we define success and chart a path for ourselves? That’s what I’d like.
I wrote this book on questions. My idea of a successful graduate is someone who graduates asking more questions than they came to school with and does that for the rest of their life and remains a curious, engaged person who walks around with more question marks than exclamation points. We have too many exclamation points. We have too many assertive and declarative statements. We could use more questions. I don’t know if that really answers the question, but education is a magical place. It’s a place to come and say, “For this next period of time, whether it’s weeks, months, or years, my brain is a sponge and I’m going to fill it.” That’s an incredible gift that too few people have.
A successful graduate is someone who graduates asking more questions than they came to school with and does that for the rest of their life.
It’s interesting because education is a gift. It opens a lot of doors in the mind. I had a student in class who talked about how her first big memory in life was when it clicked that she knew how to read. She understood that these symbols make a word and make a sentence. She talked about how it blew her mind. At the same time, you’re talking about people being very curious, but also, I’m hearing the ability to push back in questioning.
The negative about the educational system is it conveys this idea of, “These are facts. This is it. Somehow, we know this.” There are discoveries on a daily basis. We don’t know as much as we often like to think that we know. We don’t know very much at all. This idea of the imagination, getting curious, and not being stuck in this fact, which is what you call the explanation point, is so critical. It’s a very interesting thing. I think about it frequently in the educational system of teaching facts versus teaching how to be curious, how to explore, how to figure things out, or how to learn.
That’s where we could take such a valuable life lesson from science and the sciences. When I was writing the book and talking about questions and different things, I spent some time looking at science and something that sets science and scientific questions or research questions apart. One of those things that’s baked into science is uncertainty. It is the notion of uncertainty.
Understanding that science is a cumulative enterprise. We learn incrementally. We add and try to disprove our hypotheses. Think about how different that is from the typical culture and discourse that we’ve got. I can’t think of a politician who’s run on a platform with, “I’m not sure about this, but I think my platform will be this.” There are these yes-no binary choices like, “This policy is going to solve this problem.” That’s not the way the world works.
Helping people, especially young people, understand that discovery unfolds and there are these beautiful a-ha moments and also setbacks, and that uncertainty is baked into the process and should be is an incredibly valuable and inspiring roadmap to life. Show me a life where somebody hasn’t said, at least if they’re an aware person, “I didn’t know that,” or, “I thought I knew this and now, experience has shoved me in the other direction.” That can be very upsetting, but it also can be incredibly enlightening. If we’re talking about discovery, which is the magic sauce if we think of education and human progress, that’s an important element and trajectory to understand.
It’s a big piece in our program on not knowing. We really focus on, “What is it that we know? What are we open to not knowing and unlearning?” We focus on being a space of curiosity and discovery. We’re coming to a close. I would like to ask one last question to you. What keeps you in the flow?
Ideas, People, Stories
Ideas, people, stories, and new things. I’m getting ready to go with a group of students out to Detroit to visit the Ford Motor Corporation and the F-150 EV Lightning assembly plants. We’re going to meet with engineers. We’re going to meet with designers. We’re going to meet with people who are working on this really interesting notion of the just transition. If we’re moving to electric vehicles, what happens to the workforce? What happens to the business model? How do we make sure that all economic brackets and walks of life can afford these vehicles or can find places to charge them? There are all these fascinating challenges built in.
What keeps me going is that I find human beings fascinating. I love people and the work people do, the challenges they confront in their lives, and the way some people can make poetry out of their lives. I also am very mindful of the pain, suffering, difficulty, and challenges that people face. I have lived some of that with some things in my own family.
I have a sister with Down syndrome. I have watched a person throughout her amazing life be as independent as she can be. I realize that maybe this is one of the things that led me into journalism, this idea of giving voice to the voiceless and the beauty that takes place there in that struggle and that resilience. What keeps me going is this human enterprise of invention, creativity, connection, and love. That sounds corny, but you asked me the question and I’m answering as honestly as I can.
It’s beautiful, and it comes through. Thank you, Frank, very much. This has been wonderful.
Thank you, Frank.
It’s been a pleasure being with you. Thank you, Bonnie, and thank you, Ina, for all that you do.
Thank you.
Important Links
About Frank Sesno
Frank Sesno is the Executive Director of the GW Alliance for a Sustainable Future, —a bold, university-wide initiative that will form a collective front against the threat of climate change.
He is also the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the GW School of Media & Public Affairs and served at its as director for 11 years. He is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and creator of Planet Forward, a user-driven web and television project that highlights innovations in sustainability. He hosts and facilitates the Planet Forward Salon Series focusing on topics such as energy policy, green jobs and food production.
He has moderated events for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Bayer CropScience, Land O’Lakes Foundation and National Geographic, among others.
As SMPA director, Sesno led a faculty of nearly two dozen world-class professors who research and teach journalism, political communication and the impact of digital media in international affairs. Sesno taught classes on environmental multimedia reporting, ethics in journalism, documentary and “the art of the interview.” Inspired by his mother’s experience with Hospice, Sesno hosted the Hospice Foundation of America’s Continuing Education Series for seven years.
Sesno’s diverse career spans more than three decades, including 21 years at CNN where he served as White House correspondent, anchor and Washington Bureau Chief. He has covered a diverse range of subjects, from politics and conventions to international summits and climate change. He has interviewed five U.S. presidents and thousands of political, business and civic leaders — ranging from Hillary Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Microsoft founder Bill Gates and broadcast legend Walter Cronkite.
Before joining CNN in 1984, Sesno worked as a radio correspondent at the White House and in London for the Associated Press. He has won several prestigious journalistic awards, including an Emmy, several cable ACE awards, and an Overseas Press Club Award.
Sesno is a member of the board of trustees at Middlebury College, a member of the National Advisory Board for the Poynter Institute, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a board member at the National Council for Science and the Environment and at AmeriCares. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in American History from Middlebury College.