Dear Environmental Studies alumni community,
I hope this finds everyone safe, healthy, and doing as well as you can. I recognize that the letter I write to you now as part of our latest ENVS alumni newsletter strikes a very different tone from the one I wrote in the previous newsletter in December 2020. However, my message as ENVS Director comes from a place of honesty and sincerity.
Last month's mass shooting at King Soopers on Table Mesa here in Boulder, not far from our beloved CU Boulder was been a horrible tragedy. Beyond the devastation of friends/family directly impacted here, anyone connected to the community – past and present – is experiencing trauma. That may include you. My heart goes out to any of you who may have been affected by this absolutely unacceptable and senseless act of violence.
I too have felt trauma through several pathways. One way is that my older son Elijah (a CU Boulder freshman) works as a cashier at the King Soopers on Arapahoe and 30th. Three of the ten people who were killed were King Soopers employees. If my son Elijah was working at the Table Mesa location that day I would be shattered beyond words. Reflecting on this makes me realize how others are shattered now beyond words.
Since the shooting, I have learned that one undergraduate ENVS major worked at the Table Mesa location but thankfully was not working there that Monday. I have learned that an ENVS graduate student was shopping in the store when the shooting began. I have learned that a co-worker's nephew also was in the store shopping when the perpetrator entered (both successfully ran out of the store). These are just some of the many ways this threads through the current ENVS community, and likely impacts each of your lives and communities as ENVS alum.
This has been a challenging time here in ENVS, across the country and around the world. Through these challenges, at best some of us have been inconvenienced. Yet many of us have been directly impacted by challenges including COVID-19, wildfires, drought, climate change, environmental injustice and public health. As we all worked hard to address these issues, we also have found more humility, greater resilience and enhanced appreciation of the importance of community: community like ours here – both past (as alumni) and present – in ENVS.
This has been an intense period of loss but also learning:
- We have seen a resurgent recognition of how we as individuals are inextricably enmeshed in collectives.
- We have experienced a renewed awareness of the importance of better understanding interactions at the human-environment interface.
- We have felt how trust and distrust in science, in information, in each other can contribute to productive as well as destructive work in this world.
- We have increasingly confronted how patterns of institutional and systemic racism have inhibited progress in all interrelated areas of our lives.
- And we have acknowledged that conditions are made and not found; therefore, conditions can be re-made or made differently through the opportunities we all have to contribute to positive change in what we more readily accept as a fierce urgency of now.
As we continue to move forward in 2021, I am grateful for the strong community and outstanding work here in ENVS at CU Boulder. Our efforts continue to reflect our shared commitments to better understand and then improve the multiple dimensions of environmental change, integrating scientific understanding of human-environment interactions, practical responses to environmental problems, and the values that shape our decisions and behavior.
We continue to work to better connect with you as ENVS Alumni. If you’re not yet in touch but want to learn more about our ongoing work, start a conversation by sending us an email at ENVStudies@colorado.edu. You also may email me directly at boykoff@colorado.edu. Also, if you’re on Twitter follow us at to learn of the ongoing work of our ENVS faculty, staff, and students.
Warm regards,
Max Boykoff
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Director, Environmental Studies
Professor, University of Colorado Boulder
