December 2022 - Matthew Mellor, Pembroke Development Director, offers some reflections on the Environment, this blog series, and 2022.

Last year we celebrated our 25th anniversary with a monthly Climate Rescue blog series, inviting corporate partners, colleagues and collaborators to share their thought-leadership on climate rescue initiatives. This year, we continued our monthly blog series and refocused our lens on Environmental Engagement and Leadership. In our final blog of 2022 our Development Director, Matthew Mellor, offers some poignant reflections on the past year.

Compared to the others who have contributed pieces this year, I am a very long way from being an expert in the topic of climate change. However, I am a witness to it, like all of us who are paying attention.

For me, climate change feels like an unstoppable, looming, indeed present crisis and I am certain that, subliminally at least, my mental health is affected. While I haven’t perhaps come close to throwing my hands up in despair and declaring defeat, morbidly I feel that this is somewhat because I will have shuffled off the mortal coil before the very worst of it ravages the Earth.

However, if it is affecting my own sense of well-being, then what is it doing for my children’s? I have three, and they range from 15 to 24 years old. Like so many people of this age, they are at times either fiercely (literally sometimes) independent of their parents or at others completely dependent. 

As well as being Pembroke’s Development Director and Steward, and a parent to my children, I am a tutor. This means that I have some forty or so students who can talk to me about issues they’re facing – emotional, financial, practical – and sometimes I can help. Listening to them, and to my own offspring, has given me a particular insight into the way they think, the way they plan and, significantly, the ways in which their times are different from mine.

It is not new, or news, that my generation, and that of my parents, are not universally great at understanding the concerns of young people. Cambridge as a university finds itself unwillingly at the centre of a network of culture war battlegrounds: often brought erroneously under the banner of “woke”. 

I am on record as imploring those who deplore what they hear is Cambridge’s weak-kneed approach to dealing with these issues (insert definition here) to take time to talk and listen to our students and try to see things from their perspective, not from the lofty, distant and often ignorant essayists of our printed media.

I have had the privilege of listening and talking to students for over twenty years now, and it’s absolutely true to say that attitudes have changed. In my own, cod-psychological way, I first attributed much of this to the introduction of tuition fees at their current (now not remotely sustainable or helpful for anyone) level. I used to think that the imposition of a dramatically increased fee from 2013 was a natural prompt for resentment, and a brake on the life progress of our young people, burdening them with debt that many will never pay off, but most will worry about.

I still think some of this is part of the problem, but surely, climate change has something to do with a vastly increased state of mental ill health (both for older and younger adults) and of questioning the norms that I and the baby boomer generation grew up with. Impending doom cannot be good for the soul.

So why does my, and my parents’ generation, lose its collective rag at the exploits and rebellions that they perceive their children’s or grandchildren’s generations are getting up to? Again, the cod-psychologist in me would like to posit the idea that we – yes, me too, absolutely – feel subconsciously guilty for the abominable state we have carelessly left the world in. We choose noisily to mistrust and demonise younger people, to claim that they are not fit to inherit the Earth, so as to mask our own shame for the damage we have done. What are they meant to do, to clean up our mess? They don’t have the money to do it (the first generation in many to be worse off than their parents and grandparents), the freedom to do anything about it is diminishing as democracies are imperilled all over the world by embedded or recovering patriarchies, and the fires and floods have already started. Shame on me, shame on us.

The most grotesque thing of all is to see people “skiing” (Spending Kids’ Inheritance), like there is no tomorrow (recognising, depressingly, that there isn’t one), while their own children and grandchildren spend inordinate time and funds just getting by. We really have to do something, and this starts with listening to – and helping as far as our nature enables us – people who really are trying to right our wrongs.

I am so glad that the evidence of this year’s blogs is that such people exist – they’re thinking, planning and working to improve the world. Let’s join them and not accept defeat!

Matthew Mellor, Development Director