professor robert thorson’s office is overflowing. every shelf is bending beneath the weight of books, and almost every inch of his desk houses another rock sample.

neither item is surprising. after all, thorson is a professor of geology and a self-described bibliophile. the paraphernalia isn’t just for show either. he can give a synopsis of every book he picks up and a different sample joins him in class every day.

prominently featured by his desk are what thorson refers to as his “office mates”: a colorful globe and a large sample of the rock gneiss, a common sight at the university of connecticut where thorson teaches.

thorson points out that not only in each book, but in each stone, there’s a story to be told. more importantly, he emphasizes that each story is a part of the much larger system that we call home. 

from the midwest to new england

thorson calls himself a midwesterner by birth, a northwesterner by training, and a new englander by choice. although he was born in wisconsin, he spent part of his childhood on a family farm in north dakota, a place he called a “little house on the prairie kind of a homestead.”

although he said he didn’t enjoy high school, thorson applied to college to get a deferment for the vietnam draft. he had always felt at home in the outdoors and, and he was becoming invested in environmentalism as the movement was only just entering mainstream culture. he quickly fell in love with geology in college. that’s how he ended up going between alaska and washington doing field work.

this was when thorson met his wife. before they had even met each other’s parents, they were getting married atop a mountain in washington, followed by a reception of “peanut butter sandwiches and orange juice in your water can,” a typical lunch for field work.

“we got married on mount rainier, above the nisqually glacier, and then got on a greyhound bus and took it all the way to portland, maine, and met her parents,” thorson said.

after the birth of their two sons, thorson and his wife moved to new england to settle down in 1984. he got a job teaching at the university of connecticut, where he is a professor to this day. through his storied life all over the country, his love for the earth has been the thread that connects each journey. he recalled his investment in being environmentally friendly going back to 1970.

“that may seem like an eternity to you, but that’s when i sold my gas guzzler and bought a bicycle. that’s a long time ago. […] i was reading thoreau in late high school and in the lead-up to the first earth day,” thorson said. “i’ve been pretty committed since then and i’ve had good years and bad years. i try to keep my carbon budget as low as i can.”

interviews and field trips

thorson is a jack of all trades in uconn’s earth sciences department, teaching everyone from first-year to ph.d. students. he also holds meetings with students so he can get to know them and get into the “nuts and bolts about how to make the class work better for them.”

“every student that i have comes into my office for a 15-minute intake interview,” thorson said. “who are you? how can i help you? do you have any questions about me?”

within thorson’s own classes, students are treated to a more hands-on experience than they might be used to in a college classroom. an honors class he teaches, “geoscience and the american landscape,” goes on field trips around campus to connect with the geological history of their very own campus.

“we looked at the different buildings and the topography of uconn, and then he explained to us how different formations that happened millions of years ago is why the school is built the way it is today,” one student recalled.

‘lots of hope’

from explaining why a building looks a certain way to delving into the history of the area’s lakes, thorson’s students said the field trips give them a different perspective on the things they see every day.

“you know these objects, these locations, because you’ve been here before for a class,” another student said. “that’s what makes it significant when you walk by.”

however, thorson tackles the big topics in his classes too. in a first-year experience class for freshmen, he puts a spin on climate change that the students may not have heard before.

“students have a lot of pessimism and i try to counteract that with lots of hope,” thorson said.

students in his first-year seminar class said the class was a new perspective compared to the climate anxiety they had learned to harbor in other environmental classes.

“he tries not to put an emphasis on the fear surrounding climate change,” a student said, “because he’s trying to kind of shift our philosophy away from being afraid of it to more action-based.”

a dose of reality — and optimism

although he avoids the doom and gloom, thorson isn’t afraid to call out the problems with our current climate mindset. he pointed out the amount of time we have known about the effects of climate change versus our lack of action to stop them.

“they came up with a report in 1979 that pretty much predicted where we’re at today,” thorson said. “and then this report was revisited just last year by the national academy, and they had five or six different groups looking at it, studying it as history. and they said, ‘yep, they pretty much nailed it.’”

however, he emphasized that action, or rather stopping destructive actions, is still possible. the ozone hole becoming a crisis, he said, was solved by countries committing to the montreal protocol, an agreement to lower ozone-depleting chemicals.

“it was just an international agreement that we have a common enemy called the stratosphere,” thorson said. “and the most important thing is that protocol didn’t fix the stratosphere, it’s just that humans decided not to wreck it.”

offering a change in mindset

thorson also isn’t afraid to diverge from the way universities teach climate and earth science. specifically, he said the messages of words that are used without a second thought in environmental science can create unintentional bias by prioritizing one area of focus over another.

for example, thorson said the word “ecology” is considered interchangeable with environmental science. although he likes ecology as a field, he said that this downplays the other earth sciences such as meteorology, geology, oceanology, hydrology, and more.

thorson even warns his class against the common refrain of “going green.” he said it “prioritizes botany over zoology subliminally” when students should be balancing the importance of all these areas of study.

nor does thorson cater to an anthropocentric (human-centered) or ecocentric (environment-centered) view of the environment. instead, he teaches his students to think of all these systems as part of the greater unit, comparable to our own human bodies.

“by the time you’re finishing high school, you know how the body works. you know that it has a boundary, and you know that it has a digestive system that is very different from a reproductive system, which is very different from a nervous system,” thorson said. “those are various systems and you know how they work together. you don’t know that about the planet.”

more than just ‘local’

when it comes to the future, thorson says that while the idea of thinking globally and acting locally has value, now is the time to both “think globally and act globally.” 

moreover, he said the divisions between local and global were not as clear as people assume. rather, “the local comes from global, and global is the sum of local.”

“i mean, there’s no way that we would be breathing the air out here if it weren’t for what’s going on in the amazon. and in volcanoes leaking in sumatra. and the fact that i’m here at this latitude, this distance from the sea, is a consequence of the previous history,” thorson said.

beyond the classroom, thorson hosts a podcast, called the “climate underground,” and is a published author. his next book, an exploration of henry david thoreau’s “walden” as a formative environmental text, is in the final stages of publication.

he also created the stone pavilion project and the stone wall initiative, endeavors that encourage people to look at the history within the stones of new england. 

“i’ve been teaching college since 1979. and i have a lot of energy still and a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of projects going,” thorson said.

through his teaching, projects, and writing, his whole-earth philosophy continues to inform everything thorson does.

“the be-all end-all is the system itself,” thorson said. “it’s the comprehension of the totality.”

editor’s note: a correction was made to clarify thorson’s time on a family farm in his formative years.