More than 375 sustainability professionals gathered at the University of Notre Dame on October 20–23, 2025 for the second annual conference of the National Sustainability Society. The theme running through every session, informal conversation and keynote address was clear: a just and sustainable future requires the flourishing of both people and the planet.
“It was deeply inspiring to see our participants, representing so many diverse disciplines and sectors — come together here at Notre Dame to share knowledge and imagine new paths toward sustainability,” said Arun Agrawal, Pulte Family Professor of Development Policy and inaugural director of Notre Dame’s Just Transformations to Sustainability Initiative, who chaired the NSS conference committee.
“Hosting this gathering on our campus was an honor and a joy,” Agrawal said. “The ideas exchanged over these few days reminded us that while the challenges ahead are immense, our collective commitment, creativity and care for one another make a just and sustainable future not only possible, but already underway.”
In keynote addresses that ranged from deeply spiritual to rigorously data-driven, sustainability leaders urged audiences to close the widening gap between environmental and human well-being and to see that the same forces that are exhausting ecosystems are diminishing the people who inhabit them.
Closing the inner-outer gap
Lisa Graumlich, a dean emerita of the University of Washington’s College of the Environment and an ordained Episcopal deacon, began the conference’s opening keynote address not with charts or models, but with solemn reflection on the current ecological crisis.
“There is a gap that exists,” Graumlich said. “We are treating a dual crisis — inner and outer — as if it were only an outer, technical problem.”
A professor at Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences whose pioneering research illuminates how human activity reshapes climate systems, Graumlich wove together scientific and spiritual insights, drawing from diverse traditions including Buddhism, Christianity, eco-spirituality, Indigenous wisdom, Islam and Judaism. She also quoted Pope Francis’s environmental encyclical Laudato Si’: “The external deserts of the world are growing because the internal deserts have become so vast.”
Graumlich’s assessment of the current crisis was unsparing: the “violence of speed,” she said, has become a cultural virtue.
“Fast is good. Faster is better. But living systems require slowness to function.” She urged participants to recognize that the idea of a separation — between self and planet, science and spirit, individual and collective — is “ecologically false.”
Graumlich identified five forces maintaining what she called “the gap”: psychic numbing, the tyranny of optimism, the illusion of individual sufficiency, cultural stories that normalize harm and unprocessed grief.
“Grief is not the opposite of hope,” Graumlich said. “Numbness is. Honoring our pain for the world opens us to act more powerfully, not less.”
Graumlich called not for despair but for wholeness.
“Truth-telling and transformation must go hand in hand,” she said. “We must bring our whole selves, slow down enough to feel, refuse false solutions, and do it together.”
In her closing remarks, Graumlich issued both an assurance and a challenge. “The ‘great turning’ is already here,” she said. “The world needs you — all of you. The gap is closing, and the turning is real.”
A conversation with university deans
While Graumlich’s keynote focused on sustainability’s inner dimensions, a panel discussion with deans from the Midwest, the deep South and the West Coast examined its institutional face: how colleges and universities can cultivate a generation capable of integrating sustainability into their studies.
Moderated by Nicole Ardoin of Stanford University, the panel brought together three university deans — Patricia Culligan of Notre Dame, Joseph Messina of the University of Alabama and Christopher Boone of the University of Southern California.
Culligan, the Matthew H. McCloskey Dean of Engineering at Notre Dame, cited the College of Engineering’s mission of “engineering a better world for all.”
“A sustainable world is a world where everybody benefits,” Culligan said. “We have to frame sustainability not as a set of challenges, but as a message of hope.”
Culligan emphasized the importance of care for and education of the whole person, an approach that is often applied to undergraduate students but not as frequently extended toward graduate students — an oversight that Notre Dame Engineering is trying to remedy.
“We cannot care for the Earth well if we are not caring for ourselves,” Culligan said. “At Notre Dame, we talk about engineering a better world for all — that means creating environments where people and planet thrive together.”
Messina, a population and environment geographer, highlighted how embedding sustainability across the curriculum requires navigating political and structural realities.
“We’re at an inflection point in higher education,” he said. “If we want students to understand the importance of sustainability, we can’t just make it a requirement and risk backlash — we have to make it attractive, relevant and woven through every field of study.”
Boone, formerly at Arizona State University and now dean of U.S.C. ‘s Price School of Public Policy, recalled the early skepticism about sustainability as a discipline.
“When the first schools of sustainability were founded, people said students wouldn’t get jobs,” he said. “Now, employers are snapping up these students. The lesson? Doing the right thing can also be the smart thing.”
The conversation turned to the integration of artificial intelligence in sustainability education. Culligan, who previously helped found Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, described AI as “the next level in the big data world” — both transformative and unsettling.
“We can’t graduate students who don’t understand how to use AI responsibly,” she said. “Ethical grounding must be as essential as technical skill.”
When asked about research funding cuts and data restrictions, Messina warned that the loss of open data could “hobble evidence-based policy for years.” Boone added that the reliability of federal data “underpins trust in policy itself,” noting that even the U.S. Census has become politicized.
Farming for a flourishing future
While three of the nation’s deans shared strategies for institutionalizing sustainability, researcher Laura Vang Rasmussen shared a vision for applying it on the ground.
Rasmussen, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the 2024 Science journal paper awarded the prestigious 2025 Frontiers Planet Prize, delivered the conference’s closing keynote. “Joint Environmental and Social Benefits from Diversified Agriculture.” Her address showcased how redesigning farming systems can simultaneously regenerate ecosystems and enhance human well-being.
“Our food systems are transgressing planetary boundaries,” Rasmussen said. “The way we produce food is driving climate change, biodiversity loss, and malnutrition. Fifty percent of the world’s calories come from just three crops — rice, maize, and wheat — and one in three people is malnourished. Something is fundamentally wrong.”
To explore solutions, Rasmussen and a team of 58 co-authors compiled data from 2,655 farms in 27 countries, from strawberry fields in California to maize plots in Malawi. The overarching research question was deceptively simple: What happens when farms diversify — when they add trees, cover crops, livestock or pollinator strips?
The results, Rasmussen said, were “extremely promising.” Farms that employed multiple diversification strategies showed joint environmental and social benefits, including higher biodiversity and better food security.
“The yield trade-offs people worry about didn’t dominate,” she said. “Livestock diversification and soil conservation were especially positive.” Farms that employed multiple diversification strategies showed joint environmental and social benefits, including higher biodiversity and better food security.”
Rasmussen recalled the story of Malawian farmers who integrated fruit trees into maize plots: mango, papaya and custard apple, among other types. The integration did not raise maize yields but improved families’ overall nutrition dramatically.
“When you measure food security through dietary diversity,” Rasmussen said, “you see how nourishment can rise even without yield gains.”
Beyond the data, Rasmussen emphasized the human networks that make transformation possible.
“In northern Malawi, more than 6,000 farmers across 200 villages are experimenting together,” she said. “It’s farmer-led, grounded in local knowledge, and built on trust. That’s where transformation begins.”
Rasmussen connected the study to the conference’s overarching theme: sustainability as the flourishing of both people and planet.
“To transform farming systems,” she said, “we need new ways of thinking and new structures — access to land, credit, training and, above all, community.”
Reflecting on the research process, Rasmussen said the enormous scale of the collaboration had seemed daunting at times.
“Bringing together all those datasets, all those disciplines — it required us to believe in one another,” she said. “Like the farmers who must be brave and resilient in the face of uncertainty, we as researchers must also be brave and resilient. That is how we make progress.”
During more than 70 parallel sessions, participants in multiple disciplines and sectors shared their work in sustainability. Topics covered in panel discussions, symposia and posters ranged from energy transitions, agricultural transformations, humanities approaches to sustainability, the role of AI in sustainability and more.
“The smaller sessions captured much of what made the conference special,” said Dan Brown, president of the National Sustainability Society and director of the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington. “That’s where people discovered shared aspirations, formed new collaborations and recognized that sustainability isn’t just a professional goal — it’s a shared endeavor. The connections and community that were forged made this gathering especially meaningful.”
From the smallest conversations to the largest gatherings, the convenings at the 2025 National Sustainability Society conference formed a collective credo: caring for the people and the planet are not parallel pursuits, they are the same work — and they must be carried out in community.
Originally posted at keough.nd.edu by Renée LaReau on October 28, 2025.