By Alda-Balthrop Lewis
May 7, 2025–Florida State University’s Religion Department offers courses designed to help students learn how religious traditions both reinscribe and transform established commitments, values and practices. In my role as an Associate Professor, I have the pleasure of teaching undergraduates about ethics, including environmental ethics.
In my environmental ethics class, one of my key goals is to offer students diverse examples of people invested in ecological flourishing across the professions. In that context, my Spring 2025 class was lucky to host a visit from the Apalachicola Riverkeeper, Cameron Baxley, a couple of weeks ago. In preparation for Cameron’s visit, the class read about ongoing controversies over oil drilling in the Apalachicola River floodplain and prepared questions to ask Cameron about the Riverkeeper’s work on behalf of the Apalachicola and the communities that rely on it.
When students have the opportunity to see the work that people like Cameron do on behalf of the River and the Bay, they get a better sense of how other people live out their ethical convictions and they have the opportunity to consider their own commitments and how they might enact them.
