Unity: Education, Search & Rescue #287

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

The idea of what does this degree, what is it worth? Right? Becomes as important as going to college. And with the changing demographics within each United States first generation Americans, an increase in demographic changes, the very value of what it means to go to college is changing.

Mick Womersley:

We can provide a large number of students that are sufficiently trained and sufficiently fit, and the fit part is perhaps the most important so that the warden service doesn't have to worry about having a bunch of students in the woods. They've got the background, they've got the training, they've got the map reading the navigation and they're young and agile and so they can clamber over rocks and gullies and trees and rivers and streams without necessarily getting hurt quite as easily as I would.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine radio show number 287, unity education search and Rescue, airing for the first time on Sunday, March 19, 2017. For more than half a century, Unity College has provided a high quality, innovative and yet practical education to students in the field and sustainability. Today we speak with unity College President Dr. Malik Peter Cory and with Professor Mick Womersley, faculty advisor to the Unity College Search and Rescue team. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

My next guest is Dr. Malik Patreon. Peter Cory, who is president of Unity College. He started at unity in 2012 as the senior Vice President for External affairs, following positions at Upper Iowa University, Culver Stockton College, Paul Smith's College, and the University of Maine at Fort Kent, among other places. I understand you've been all over the place.

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

Yes, it's been a wonderful career in higher education.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But you started your whole life out, your whole life journey in Sierra Leone.

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

Yes, I was actually born in a small country called Sierra Leone in West Africa. I grew up in a small country called the Gambia, which is known as the Smiling coast of West Africa, to a Lebanese father and an English mother and spent a little bit of time in England before coming to the States. So been all over the world.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Why did you decide that higher education was your calling?

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

Well, growing up in West Africa, the perspective of higher education or education as a whole is so different from that in the United States. I mean, it's such a privilege that only a few get the the ability to get an education. So once I got in the ability to get an education, I realized that I would like to dedicate my life to making sure that anyone who wants an education, who deserves an education, should get one. And so looking at the higher education system in the United States, it's probably one of the most forward thinking industries in the world. And what better way to spend your life than to continue to work within that industry to make sure that anybody who wants an education gets one.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What is it specifically about higher education that appeals to you?

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

Absolutely. I think that as a society the world is getting smaller with the advent of technology, the whole idea of global citizens, it becomes very important that in addition to learning how to do a skill, an individual needs to understand where their place is in the world, being able to communicate cultural competency. And so the idea of a well rounded individual comes as part of higher education. The liberal arts and sciences are a really good base for everyone who wants education. So you get that, you learn a skill and you become a well rounded individual who is a global citizen and able to basically function in a world that's getting smaller, where cultural competency is a key element in basically the survival of our planet.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Unity is a very unique place. It's a very unique college. It's only been around for 51 years, so it's relatively young and it's in the center, roughly the center of Maine.

Mick Womersley:

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you have really quite the diversity of things that you offer students for such a small place.

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

Yeah, I mean, we are America's environmental college. Our entire curriculum is based on the very concept of sustainability science, which means that, you know, everything we do is designed to be relevant in the green economy. Right. We understand that no matter what you're going to do in life, there is nothing, no job that you're going to take, no career that you're going to have that does not interact with our natural resources. And so whether it's in agriculture, in energy, in conservation, law, in policy, we understand that our students need to have that baseline education. So we focus on environmental sciences. We're very proud of that and we've got an array of majors within that. But our job is to make sure that these students grow up to be like, I love saying this, global citizens. And that is our mission in life. It's adding that concept of theory and application, the liberal arts and sciences and the career into a student, whether they're going to go to grad school or get a job in their industry.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What type of student do you tend to attract to Unity College?

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

Sure. I mean, right now we have a national draw. About 70% of our student population is from out of state, but predominantly anybody who really wants to work in the environmental career. We've got a lot of conservation, law enforcement students, captive wildlife care and education students, outdoor recreation, adventure therapy, a lot of first generation Americans, first generation students, sorry. And folks who really want to be kind of work in a tactile environment. We're highly experiential, we're highly immersive. We really believe that our students need to not just learn from a textbook with the hard sciences, but apply that within the field. And so a lot of students who really want kind of that immersion of both the theory and the application get to be attracted to Unity College.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

When you describe a first generation student, you mean a student who is the first in their family to go to College.

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

Yes. About 85% of our student population actually are first generation students. So they're the first to go to college in this field. It's actually a. A real feather in our cap as a private school. There is the misnomer about affordability and we are very proud of the fact that compared to our peers on the national scale. Our tuition is very, very affordable. We give some good scholarships for those who want to come there. But most importantly, the value that families have in investing in going to a college like Unity is paid off. Because if you were to look at our alums, we're very proud of them working in federal, state jobs as entrepreneurs. And so families understand that going to a private school, they get a high touch, highly immersive education, and it's really applicable into an industry. And our placement rates into grad school to get into careers is quite high, which is a value proposition for us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Have you noticed over the time that you've been in higher education that families are expecting more that their children will come out and be able to get a job and have this investment that they've made in their children's education pay off?

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

Absolutely. I think it is that the entire industry is wrestling with that a little bit too, because I would say until about 20 years ago, it was just, you get to go to college. And the experience of being at college was in many ways enough. But with the introduction of the GI bills in the late 70s, the more that the concept of higher education has expanded to all Americans because back then less and less people went to college. It was really for a special few. The idea of what does this degree, what is it worth? Right. Becomes as important as going to college. And with the changing demographics within the United States, first generation Americans, an increase in demographic changes, the very value of what it means to go to college is changing. And so one of the things I think that Unity College has been able to do over the last 10 years is show family that you don't have to choose between a career and being a well rounded student. So the way we teach students really gives them a sense of what they're going to be doing. And families really respond to that because they're not just sending their students to Unity College in order to just get the experience and whatever happens after that happens, but really with a focus on what is my daughter, what is my son going to do after they graduate? Which is why Unity College, we are very proud of the fact that for a small college like Unity, we have one of the largest environmental career fairs in New England. Just a few weeks ago, we had over 100 organizations come to Unity College. It's gotten so popular, we're now opening it to some other colleges. We're opening it to the local community for people who are looking for jobs. So we understand that every family that sends their daughter or their son to Unity is either looking to go and work in a career in environmental sciences or they're looking to go to grad school. They are not just coming to Unity for the idea of going to college. And I think our mission, our dedication to that outcome is why I think we are doing the things that we're doing right now in where we're investing in our faculty, where we're investing in our partnerships and why I think, well, I know that families from all over the country are coming to Unity College for their children to go to. We are also beginning to expand in our master's program where we have a number of individuals in middle management jobs across the country who are looking for that master's degree. So we introduced the concept of a professional science master's degree in natural resource management sustainability science. And so we are expanding that market as well because there's a lot of folks out there, adults who can't come to the traditional four year but really want an education.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You've talked about developing Maine as education land.

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

Yes. What does that mean? Absolutely. Well, you know, as an individual who is a first generation American and living in vacation land, it's really interesting for me that Maine has three climate. Our natural resources is abundant. I mean, from, from the coast to the northern Maine woods to the, you know, the urban lifestyle of Portland, we have such a beautiful landscape that it's, it's surprising to me that with, you know, just, I think last year over 4 million tourists drove up Route 1 to Bar Harbor. Why aren't they dropping their kids off to go to college? I mean, why isn't Maine the center of natural resource education across the world? If you look at what we have to offer as a state, I don't think any state should be able to compete with us. We are resource rich. Mainers are hard working, the landscape is beautiful, we have wonderful colleges here. And so in my mind, as much as I love Maine being vacation land, I think that if Maine could become education land, we would jumpstart yet another economy where it's not just a few that come to Maine for education, but anybody who wants to learn how to work in the environmental century. And so for me, education land means if we're going to, I think Portland Press Herald a couple of years ago printed an article that we had like 48 million visitors to Maine. I don't know how, you know, I'm assuming those numbers are right. I didn't fact check them. But why are they dropping off their kids here? And why isn't Maine one huge education line where students are Learning firsthand how to work in what is becoming global issues. Energy, agriculture, forest management, conservation, preservation. It's a perfect state for it. For me, we are already at Unity College, making Maine our classroom. Our students are in all four corners of the state of Maine learning how to apply their craft as part of the education. For me, it's just surprising that the entire state does not just adopt that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So what are the barriers?

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

I think higher education has a very. It's a very old industry. There's a way we do things, and sometimes we enjoy teaching what we want instead of what folks need. I think the very concept of education, the industry right now is in flux. I know that the public trust on education is. Is it valuable? Like to your earlier question, I think the entire model was built on historically, where it was designed with a model that no longer is valuable in my mind. So I think a lot of colleges are trying to reinvent themselves, but I think we're stuck within that cycle of this is what we do. I think for me, one of my biggest fears is if we, as an industry, I'm talking higher education, does not really reinvent itself to remain independent, but relevant to the folks who hire our students, then we are going to lose out because education is always going to be there. But the very nature of our industry, I think needs to be reinvented, because spending four years of your life, or two years of your life or six years of your life at a college needs to be more than just an experience, but a value added that prepares you for the world. So I think the model needs to be looked at, which is why at Unity College, we've started to ask the question, how do we remain independent but yet remain relevant? And how does the very idea of this idea of. I hate this adage. They say, those who can't do, teach. And that bothers me. As a lifelong educator, I want to tell the world, no. My faculty, they can teach, but they also do. When my biologist professor gets done in the lab with her students learning about a specific tardigrade, for example, as part of the. They go out to the ocean and actually two years ago discovered a new species of tardigrade.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And what is it?

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

A tardigrade is a microscopic. Sea creature that basically lives off the coast of Maine. And so in my mind, faculty, they are the ones who carry the innovation. They are the ones who basically bestow knowledge on students. However, with the creation of technology, you can get information out of your phone right now. So how do we take the information that's readily available the technology that is there and teach students how to be global citizens. And so for me, that's the answer is that we have to design a new model so that the public understands that going to college is more than just what you see in the movies. And they reduced it down to just an experience, but more about preparing yourselves to becoming a responsible global citizen within a global economy. And so I think what's stopping us is the model hasn't been built yet. What we are trying to do is figure out what that model is. It's an industry that needs to reinvent itself a little bit. Now don't get me wrong, there's a lot of colleges out there doing this, so it's not like it's a novel concept. But as an industry, we have some work to do.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Do you have ideas on how to build this new model?

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

We are actually right. We have a lot of ideas how to do that. And I think what makes Unity College really special is we are small enough, we are nimble enough that we are a great incubator for this idea. So right now Unity College is going through a multi year market research about how students want to learn. What are the trends in the environmental sciences? We are working on this idea that why do we have to separate the concept of a good education with practical applicability of what students do? So we have for example, a team on campus right now working on the first and second year experience. Because as a private college, we've got some flexibility in what does a student need to learn as a baseline for the 21st century. What is the core learning? Because if you, I mean a lot of folks talk about the liberal arts and sciences and if you trace it back to its roots, you know, it was, the concept came from Greece, it was adopted by the Romans, they added military service to it and it was then co opted by the United States higher education. And the idea for the liberal arts and sciences is what is the core that every citizens should know in addition to their career? Maybe it's time we took a really hard look at that and see what does a 21st century student need to learn in this modern society as the rules continue to change. But at the same time, while knowing that, how do you connect that to a global economy so that when students graduate, they have a career that is relevant, that is fulfilling, but it's not at the expense of just knowing how to do something, but understand why. So those are the conversations that we are having with the first and second year. We are looking also at this idea that in higher education, there is a concept of you learn in a vacuum. You go do an internship, then you go to a job, and then they got to reteach you. How to. Why are those elements separate? Why aren't institutions partnering more rapidly with organizations? Corporations where by the time a student graduates that they've got an opportunity to have actually experienced it, not just in one semester, but as part of the very ethos of how they learn? I mean, I would love to see at Unity someday where every career that we offer, every major that we offer, we have a living enterprise that is a manifestation of that. For example, we have a sustainable agriculture program. About 10 years ago, the only way we thought that is we had a mock greenhouse, a small patch of land. Now we have a real life farm. We have 25 students working there as work study. We have a farm manager. We have faculty members doing research there, whether it's reviving chestnuts in the Northeast or how to use a greenhouse to be more efficient because of some of the energy concerns. So all of a sudden we are blending this very idea that you've got an industry and you've got higher ed, and we're using this both commercially because our farmer is selling food, selling produce, sorry, but at the same time, we are a community based center where local folks sell their products there, but it's also an educational facility where our students and our faculty get to experience. So you all of a sudden are blending these worlds that are historically separate. Why not do the same for all of our different careers? And so for me, the idea is how do we take the wonderful majors that we have and really have living manifestations of them that are sustainable enterprises, not just an active. I want to debunk this idea of it's an academic exercise, which ultimately means nothing happens. Two, it's an academic exercise means it's an innovative idea that manifests itself into a sustainable enterprise. So for us, that is the work that we're doing right now. And it's a risk. It's a change in philosophy. Some of the truist kind of go, whoa, this is not how higher education needs to work. But we are small enough, we're dedicated enough, we're passionate enough that if we are successful, I think we will partner with major organizations across the state of Maine, across New England, across the country, and our students get the best of both worlds and graduate ready to be the next employee, the next innovator, the next entrepreneur that is working in the green industry. And that is our goal.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Considering that you were born in Sierra Leone. And you've been really all over the place. Why would you choose to spend so much time in Maine? Why would you choose to have this be your home state?

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

I've said this a few times before, it's a bit of a hokey story, but I can't help it because it has the benefit of being true. You know, I grew up in the hospitality industry with my father. We. And after work, I would wait, stay up late for him to come home, and we would always watch episodes of mash. And for me, there was this Hawkeye Pierce who used to write letters to his father in Crabapple Cove in Maine. So when it was time for me to go and go into the world, I fell in love with the concept of Crabapple Cove. Now, granted, it's not a real place, but after seven years of watching MASH with your dad, I just fell in love with the concept of Maine. So I came to Maine and really fell in love with the St. John Valley. I moved up to Fort Kent. It is a beautiful small town, very well insulated, very friendly. The entire town adopted me, not just the university. And I started, I coached in Fort Kent. So I got to travel all over the state and I really fell in love. So the idea of what happened with Hawkeye Pierce and his father manifested in my life as I communicated with my father in Gambia, because I was in the states and just fell in love with the state. And there's everything in the state of Maine. I mean, there's the ocean and like I said earlier, so I could not think of another state I'd want to live at. And when I decided to move on for career, my hope was always to come back. Originally, I was going to go for about three years, and six and a half years later, I got the right opportunity to come back to Unity College. So for me, barring any unforeseen issue, I'm hoping to die in Maine. I fell in love with the state. And I think as a first generation American, as a first generation Mainer, I have an appreciation for this state. I have an appreciation for the Four Seasons. I have an appreciation for everything that this state has to offer that I think just some of my peers and my colleagues take for granted. So for me, it's not just I love Unity College, it's not just I love higher education, but I get to do it in a state that actually met the expectations of my dreams.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have a lot of interesting ideas about higher education and also about Unity College. Where do you hope to see? Where do you Hope to see yourself, let's say 20 or 30 years. Where do you hope to see Unity College? Do you think you'll be in the same place?

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

Why not? I mean, for me, I think that this concept of the grass is always greener is not necessarily a real thing. No matter where I go, I am going to be trading one opportunity for another. One problem for another. If I could work with my faculty and my staff and my trustees in my community at Unity College and turn Unity College into a model of what small private higher ed needs to be in the next 25 years with the resources to allow for innovation, yet the practical application in partnering with industry in 25 years, I could see my direct reports. I could see myself really using the model that we built as a way to infuse that into higher education across the country. I would love to be a destination in which people can come and see all of our sites across Maine, all the partnerships we have with other businesses, businesses, all of the innovations that we have in preparing students as a living embodiment of how other small private colleges and other colleges could use pieces of what we have created as a way to keep this industry sustained. So for me, success is Unity College becomes the model with which different schools get to adopt to keep this what I consider a very, very critical piece of our society, higher education, alive and well. Because one of my concerns is I'm beginning to see us losing this notion that a lot of the world wants, which is the very concept of higher education, liberal arts and science education based with a career. We're getting sometimes into too much credentialing and not enough education. And there's a lot of rhetoric out there as if it was an either or. Either you are this out of touch with liberal, where you learn to think and can't do anything, which is a stereotype I don't agree with, or you are a widget fixer and God forbid you know why you're fixing the widget. I think those two stereotypes is what's wrong today with society. And we need to really go back to our roots, which is combining the liberal arts and sciences while preparing folks for a career or graduate school. So for me, if Unity College, using our framework of sustainable is science to merge theory and application and relevance, comes a new model that I'm hoping that for me, in 25 years, I have built something that will stand the test of time. And that for me is a definition of success. If every student in the world who wants an education can get one and they get an education not just a credential, not just a gpa. And one of the major issues that we're dealing right now in higher education is tuition. If we can find a model that makes tuition manageable, where this concept of just keep increasing tuition until it's out of reach for the people who need it the most, then I think I would have been successful. And you can't do that with the traditional approach where students come, learn and go, because the old adage is you get a huge endowment. Not every college has that opportunity. So how do you keep tuition manageable so that the students who deserve an education do not not have it because they can't afford it? And that's a very complex situation that deals with the relevancy of education and the practicality of its affordability. And that is the model I'd love to, I am working on that hopefully can change the industry over the next 10 years.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Tell me about your model just a little bit.

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

Sure. I think right now we in higher education really have been experts in siloing the different aspects of what we do, whether it's disciplines, whether it's what we define as education. So for me, the model is going to be creating some sort of partnership and flexibility within the curriculum that does not affect the core of what you have to learn, but allows the students the flexibility to not have to stop their life for four years or two years. And one of the ways that that has been manifested right now is through the concept of online learning. But even then, the online learning has become almost a separate entity from the traditional education. And I think that a merging of the two, the creation of flexibility, the working more with organizations and corporations and government in order to find out what they are looking for in a workplace and giving them those students, not having to choose between the worker and the thinker, but really the well rounded is the model that I would like to create. And so one is changing sometimes even the definition of what it means to be a faculty. Because right now some of the best faculty in the world, including some of them at Unity, they don't just teach in their class, but they're out there with their students. They're connecting them to, they have partnerships. For example, our agriculture faculty member, he has personal relationships with different farms. And our agriculture students get to work with real life farmers on a day to day basis. He's not just some academic who's sitting in a classroom teaching from a book, going out to a plot of grass and then saying to the student, go and figure it out for yourself. So how do we create that connection? Because what I'm beginning to see even in large corporations is that they are beginning to go back to the old apprenticeship where they're training their own people for jobs. But if we let that happen, we lose a core element of our society which is the well rounded student. So how do we merge that? There's also become a blur in the US between what is the role of a for profit, of a private school, of an R1, of a four year school, of a community college, of a trade school. There's a huge blur. So the market is confused about who should go to what and why and what are the benefits and the like. Creating that clarity, making sure that we all do what we do best for our society is a complex conversation. So for me, I think it is partnering with industries outside of the traditional norm of higher ed to create something that does not exist today.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I'm 100% behind what you just said.

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And having had many, many years of education myself, I'm hoping that you are going to be leading the charge or part of the forefront dealing with higher education issues. I've been speaking with Dr. Melek Khoury who is the president of Unity College starting in 2012 as the senior Vice president for External affairs and then following additional positions in multiple places really across the state and the country. You're doing good work. Keep it up.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

pleasure to have with me Dr. Michael, also known as Mick Womersley. And I'm sure that I'm mispronouncing your name. Apologies.

Mick Womersley:

I think she's pretty good.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Okay, good. Who is a professor at Unity College and the faculty advis to the Unity College Search and Rescue team. Well, thanks so much for coming in.

Mick Womersley:

You're very welcome. I'm pleased to Be here.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You are telling me that the reason that your last name is a little unique is because it's actually, it's English.

Mick Womersley:

I'm British. I'm from Yorkshire. And that's a Yorkshire place name, actually. So there's a small town called Womersley in Yorkshire.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So one, I guess the first obvious question which I'm going to have to ask is, how did you end up in Maine?

Mick Womersley:

Well, I just was getting done. I was in the last couple years of my PhD in environmental policy, and I needed a job. My research funding had run out, and so Unity College was looking for people to teach in its general education program. And I landed the job before I quite graduated with the PhD. I was ABD, as they say, all but dissertation. And so I found myself at Unity College, and I've stayed there ever since.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Unity College is a really. It's a really unique school here in Maine. We have a lot of great educational institutions.

Mick Womersley:

And Unity, I like to think it is unique. I like to think of it as a unique institution on a nationwide level and sort of a hidden gem of Maine's colleges.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So tell me what it was about Unity, besides the fact that it offered you a job, but what was it about specifically that school that drew you?

Mick Womersley:

Well, I was very interested in getting a place that allowed me to express all the different aspects of my personality and interests. And search and rescue is something I've done since I was in the Royal Air Force. I've been involved in search and Rescue since 1979. And Unity College, having a search and rescue team was quite important. But, you know, it was also important for me to teach at an environmental college that had a progressive and activist approach, and Unity College meets that definition as well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

For people who aren't familiar with the term search and rescue, what does that actually mean?

Mick Womersley:

Well, search is when you're out there looking for people that are lost, and rescue is after you find them and you get them back to safety. The rescue part is actually the easy part. Generally speaking, that's emergency medical technology and also evacuation technology. Search is very difficult, particularly if you have an awful lot of ground cover. And Maine is big and we often have an awful lot of ground cover.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So one would think that one would not necessarily think of a college that's known for environmental education is also having this search and rescue aspect to it.

Mick Womersley:

It's not necessarily a natural connection, but a big facet of the Unity College. One of the most important degree programs at Unity College is our conservation law enforcement program, and that prepares students for work in. In the uniformed law enforcement agencies that deal with wildlife protection and essentially rangering around the country. And those students need a background in search and rescue. Our big connection is of course, to the Maine Warden Service, which is another national treasure. I'm very pleased to have spent these last 17 years working regularly with the Maine Warden Service and in fact to have placed quite a few of my students in the main Warden service since we've had Northwoods. Laura, we've actually seen the Warden Service on tv and so we know what they do firsthand, or at least from the tv. It's a wonderful job they do, and it's a very important job. They have over 500 search and rescues a year. For comparison, Unity College might get involved. Unity College Search and Rescue Team might get involved with four or five of those. So they do the bulk of the work. We get called in when they need extra people to do large scale searches, and that's our specialty. And we can provide a large number of students that are sufficiently trained and sufficiently fit. And the fit part is perhaps the most important so that the Warden Service doesn't have to worry about having a bunch of students in the woods. You know, that they've got the background, they've got the training, they've got the map reading, the navigation, and they're young and agile, and so they can clamber over rocks and gullies and trees and rivers and streams without necessarily getting hurt quite as easily as I would. And that's an important facet for the Maine Warden Service.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But you also began this when you were young and agile. You joined the Royal Air Force when you were 17.

Mick Womersley:

Yeah, that was a long time ago. I didn't start. I had a year of technical training before I joined the Royal Air Force Mountain Rescue Service. But I did spend five and a half years in Royal Air Force Mountain Rescue, and I'm still heavily involved with the ex serviceman's group that belongs to Royal Air Force Mountain Rescue. But I've been in this country since 1986 now, and I've actually been on more American search and rescue and mountain rescue teams than I ever was on Royal Air Force Mountain Rescue Team. So I've been doing this for a long time, even in this country.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So what is the draw? How does one become interested in doing search and rescue aside from doing it with the Air Force? But I would imagine you wouldn't keep doing this if there wasn't something about it that appealed to you.

Mick Womersley:

I think perhaps I have a inflated sense of duty and it might be a mistake. Some of the time you find yourself out there in bad weather and wondering what it is that you're doing and why you signed up for this. But somebody has to do it. And so let's think about this. Your, your organization promotes travel to Maine. And, and so people are going to come to the state of Maine and some of them are going to go in the woods and some of them are going to get lost necessarily. And the great state of Maine has the Maine Warden Service. And a big part of their job is to rescue people, search for and rescue people from the woods and waters of the state of Maine. But they simply can't have enough people. It's not cost effective for them to have the several hundred people on standby that it would take to run a very large area search using grid searching technique. Some of the bigger searches that we've been involved in, you know, might have upwards of 200 people from all the different volunteer search and rescue organizations in the state of Maine. We have an umbrella organization, Maine association for Search and Rescue. I've been part of that now for a long time. And so we're very sure to work with Maine association for Search and Rescue and to do all the things that we need to do to certify students and to be part of the system, to be a productive, responsible part of the system.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We've had Kate Braestrup on the show a couple of times and she's a chaplain who works.

Mick Womersley:

I know Kate.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You know Kate. So she has spoken about and written about as an author, some of the circumstances when the rescue isn't a rescue, it's. It's a retrieval. And the difficulties surrounding that you're bringing college students into

Mick Womersley:

it can be tough. It can be very tough. We've had more than one occasion where our students have been first on the scene to find someone who passed away. And you know, on the one hand, you worry about having to protect students, particularly the younger students, from the kinds of shocks and even post traumatic stress disorder that can occur if you have an awful lot of that. But on the other hand, those students that are going to go do this for a living, it's probably the case that the sooner they get exposed to some of the sadder events, the better we have to teach them how to deal with that. And a big part of my job as the advisor, you know, I do occasionally go in the field still, but as you can probably guess, that's not a most effective role for me. My most effective role is making sure that the students are ready to go in the field. And part of that is, are they mentally ready? Particularly when we know that we're probably looking for someone who's, you know, if someone's been out there a long time, if the weather's been really bad a lot of the time, you may not say it out loud, but you kind of know that you may be looking for someone who's already passed away. And that can be very sad. And it's pretty important to make sure the students are prepared. I have kind of a pep talk that I make sure and give them and get them ready for that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How does one become trained in this field? What are the different facets of training required in order to do search and research?

Dr. Melik Peter Khoury:

You.

Mick Womersley:

Well, the basic skill is can you hike in the woods and the hills? And so you have to be fit enough to be able to hike. We use a fitness test as a, you know, as a basic test to find out if students can manage that. Then we need to be able to navigate using map and compass across the woods and fields and to be able to in particular, since the Unity College search and rescue team is most frequently doing the kind of search that we call a grid search or a line search. That requires you to be able to take a bearing across a piece of wooded terrain and to hold to that bearing, particularly on the left and the right sides of the line so that you sweep across and then you pivot and sweep back in the direction. And you don't want to have a whole lot of overlap between those two. So you need to be able to walk on a bearing pretty well. You to need to be able to use a gps. We need them to have at least the basic first aid and cpr. We like it when students go out and get more advanced first aid and CPR skills. We like it when they get EMT or paramedic. And quite a few of our students are also members of our local volunteer fire department, so they often get those qualifications as a result of their other volunteer work with the volunteer fire department. We also run something called Wilderness First Responder, which is a proprietary first aid course every year or so at the college and students will participate in that. And this hasn't changed since I first got involved in this in 1979. The first qualification is, are your legs and your back strong enough that you can do this without getting hurt? Unfortunately, that's no longer true for me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, we all have a role, right? So your role is also as important as when you are starting to do this as a younger person.

Mick Womersley:

I Had some very good team leaders when I was young, and I still remember them, and some of them are still very good friends of mine, and they were mentors to me. And I try to be. I try to pass that on to the students that I'm responsible for.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

At the same time, we've been talking about all of the stuff that you do with search, engineering, rescue, but you also have a very rich and quite interesting academic background.

Mick Womersley:

Well, that's nice of you to bring that up. Yeah, I mean, I'm a climate policy scientist. I work in climate policy and in economics, and I run or I'm responsible for a degree program in Unity College that trains students to become involved in the renewable energy business, which is one response to climate change.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So have you found there to be any crossover between the work that you do in one area and the other?

Mick Womersley:

Well, there is, and this is the way. And you'll only get this from someone who teaches general education at a college. Right. But what is your understanding of the good society? What kind of a society do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a society where volunteering is recognized and important, where there are organizations that will come look for you if you get lost in the woods, where you wouldn't necessarily get billed for an expensive rescue, as might be the case in some other countries and even some other states in the Union? And you can take that same idea, the idea that there is some greater understanding of a good society that we can talk about and you can apply that easily to climate policy. I have a young daughter. She's two and a half this month, and I want to be sure that she grows up on a planet with a stable climate that isn't going to descend into the kind of chaos that when I'm long dead, she. You will have a good deal of trouble dealing with? And that's the connection that I make.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You wrote your dissertation on American religiosity and climate science acceptance.

Mick Womersley:

There was a moment in American politics about 16, 17 years ago when I just got done with the dissertation, where it seemed like religious groups might get involved in climate change politics. And they did, to some extent. There's an organization called the National Religious Partnership for the Environment still exists today, and they were trying to get all of the churches, particularly the mainstream churches, the Catholic churches, Anglican, Presbyterian and so on, involved in lobbying for good climate policy. The organization still exists. I'm afraid I made the mistake of thinking in my PhD dissertation that it would be more powerful than it was.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Do you think it's still possible that that could happen?

Mick Womersley:

Well, I think one has to think about, again, the kind of society you want to live in. And I think religious organizations are very much under this responsibility as much as any of the rest of us, particularly academics. They share. Religious organizations share with academics the responsibility for promoting a vision of the good society. Science tells us that the climate is going to get a lot more difficult for people to live with over the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years, and that by the end of the century, Maine will have a climate that is more like Virginia's than the climate that we have right now. I don't know about you, but I don't think that Mainers feel would feel good about living in a state that had the climate of Virginia. They signed up to live in Maine, not Virginia. That's, you know, if that's. If we don't do better at mitigation and adaptation, we'll face that possibility. And that's what the science tells us. And so I think it's incumbent upon those organizations in society whose job it is to think about how a good society is constructed. And I would include religious leaders, academics, politicians, radio show hosts, anyone who is part of the fabric of society. That's part of. Of the way that society ponders such questions. I think it's incumbent upon us all to think about it. And to my mind, the connection between search and rescue, and planetary rescue, if you will, is pretty clear and straightforward. One of the reasons I left the British military and I cut my career short was because it was pretty clear at the time that we were not heading into a good place as far as the global environment. In the 1980s, we were just starting to become aware of global environmental problems, and I felt like I needed to get involved in those, and I have, but I've still kept my interest in search and rescue.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Is there some aspect of the work you're doing, maybe an attempt to do something really very practical and very concrete in the face of this very almost amorphous and difficult conversation about climate change where, you know, we can't just recycle and compost and then we're going to bring the temperatures down?

Mick Womersley:

I think it is a very difficult problem. And so as a result of that, a large number of people in the United States and around the world just kind of give up on it. It's what we sometimes call in academia a wicked problem, which is a good use of that old New England term, wicked. But it really is complex and difficult, and a lot of people give up on trying to understand it. Without even trying. Part of the problem, I think, is that whilst there are simple, straightforward things that we can do, they're not necessarily easy. It's hard to use less fossil fuels, particularly if you have, for instance, a home that is heated with oil, if you have a family that you need to look after in that home. If you can't afford to buy an electric car, or in many cases in Maine, electric cars are impractical part of the year, it's difficult to know what to do. And you know, scientists, we love complexity. I mean, we deal in complexity. And there's nothing I like more than being able to understand complex systems. And, you know, I'm naturally predisposed in the same way that I used to be predisposed to figure out the innards of a jet engine. I'm naturally predominant, disposed to figure out how the climate system works and how climate policy works. And we like that kind of complexity. But it doesn't help us when we have to explain things to ordinary people. And I think that's part of the problem. For nearly a generation now, climate scientists have been trying to avoid something that we sometimes call runaway climate change. And this is the situation where our climate begins to spiral out of control. It's no longer easy to understand where it's going to end up. And internationally, we've set a goal of 2 degrees Celsius global warming. And we're trying to limit anthropogenic climate change to 2 degrees Celsius global warming. And we've told ourselves for pretty good scientific reasons, then if we can do that, then we're going to avoid this very dangerously destabilizing, runaway climate change. I don't think we've done a good job of communicating the potential horror of dangerously destabilizing climate change. Most people imagine, I think most people that are thinking about climate change in the United States States imagine things are just going to get a bit warmer. And they probably will. More than likely, that's what happens. Things just get a bit warmer. Maine finishes up by 2050 with a climate more like that of southern New York State. By the end of the century, with a climate more like that of Virginia. If we don't do anything, if we don't mitigate. But what's really scary about that is if you allow that to go forward, if you, if you don't mitigate, if you don't reduce fossil fuel emissions, then you stand this increasing chance of encountering this runaway situation, this dangerously destabilizing climate change. Scientists are naturally reticent and conservative and we don't like to do what politicians do, which is to scare people with scary stories that make them vote for politicians that are, that have simplistic views of things. Scientists have avoided talking about dangerously destabilizing climate change, but everything we're doing internationally is based on the attempt to avoid runaway, dangerously destabilizing climate change. And it may only be a very small chance. Maybe it's, you know, maybe what happens is the climate warms and then it warms a bit more, and then it warms a bit more and it doesn't really get to too terrible a situation and it sort of levels off and there's a good chance that that might happen, but there's also a good chance, and we know this from some of the work that some of my colleagues have done, even with some of my colleagues at Unity College, that there are built in feedback loops in the climate system that allow it to spiral out of control. I have a colleague, Kevin Spiegel, who goes around the country looking for times in geological history where we've had rapid climate change. He uses lake sediments, palinigraphy, pollen analysis of lake sediments on the basis of pollen and other variables to try to figure out when those things have happened. And they have happened. There have been times when the planet's climate has warmed dramatically, as much as 10 degrees Celsius over a very, very short period of time, a few decades. And human society is not organized to deal with that kind of change. It would be very, very difficult and it would lead to a lot of civil and social unrest, if not war. And we need to do what we can to avoid that. And as I mentioned at the beginning, I don't think climate scientists, I think climate scientists have typically avoided talking about the potential for a dangerously destabilizing climate change whenever we've had the chance to talk to the media. You're giving me an opportunity today to talk to the media. We've tended to stick to the straightforward, well, Maine is going to finish up with a climate more like that of Virginia in 100 years time if we don't do anything to reduce fossil fuel emissions. There are probably some people out there that are thinking, you know, Virginia's got a nice climate. I'm not worried about that. And it's entirely possible to think, you know, to be a reasonable human being. And perhaps if you're not that interested in things like forests and habitat and moose and links, you know, perhaps if you don't understand about those things, you may not think it's such a bad Thing you might think, well, it's going to be warmer. That's nice. I can grow tomatoes out of doors without having to worry about it. But it's that small possibility that in addition to that kind of warming, we risk dangerously destabilizing or runaway climate change. I think that's the thing that we have to avoid. And the way to avoid it is to reduce fossil fuel emissions. It's unfortunate that there are an enormous number of wealthy people around the world who owns, have ownership rights in fossil fuel and they're just naturally going to do whatever they can despite the fact that they have children and grandchildren. Somehow they believe that either the climate science is not correct or that perhaps they'll be rich enough that these horrors won't fall on their children and grandchildren. Is that what they're thinking? I don't really, I mean, I don't get to talk to that many rich people. But it beggars belief that anyone who really anybody who was an intelligent person who wasn't, you know, wasn't afraid of ideas, who had studied climate science, who had children and grandchildren. It beggars belief to me that they would be unwilling to adopt sensible mitigation technology, especially when, and this is what I find is very important. I've been involved in. I'm primarily an economist, a policy, A policy Wonka policy. Ph.D. is primarily an economist. And I can demonstrate quite easily that renewable energy is now as cheap as a lot of fossil fuel and getting cheaper all the time. And so it's not even that this would really cost us anymore. Luckily there are plenty of commercial interests that are on the side of climate change. The insurance companies, the big tech companies who don't have ownership in fossil fuel. I think this will sort itself out in the long run. The question is, will it sort itself out in time? That's what worries me. That was a lot. You got quite a lot. You got a few large paragraphs there with just one question, didn't you?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I think it's exactly as you said. I think if you're willing to come in here and talk to us about what's actually going on from your standpoint as a scientist and as an economist, then it's worth listening to.

Mick Womersley:

Well, thank you for that. You know, I thought I was coming here to talk about search and rescue, so it's great that I got a chance to talk about the rest of the.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

My work do searching and rescuing the planet, I think is also at least rescuing. I think we've already found it. From what I can tell yeah, we

Mick Womersley:

know where it is.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We know where it is.

Mick Womersley:

Further up from the sun.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

There you go. I've been speaking with Dr. Mick Womersley, who is a professor at Unity College and the faculty advisor to the Unity College Search and Rescue team. You've given me a lot of things to think about and I really appreciate your coming in today.

Mick Womersley:

You're very welcome. I'm glad I could be here.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have been listening to Love Maine Radio show number 287, Unity Education Search and Rescue. Our guests have included Dr. Melek, Peter Khoury and Professor Mick Womersley. For a preview of each week's show, sign up for our E newsletter and follow us on Facebook.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

For a preview of each week's show,

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

sign up for our E Newsletter and like our LoveMain Radio Facebook page, follow me on Twitter as DRLISA and see our LoveMain Radio photos on Instagram. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think. Love Maine Radio, we welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Bellio. I hope that you have enjoyed our Unity Education Search and Rescue show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.