Serving as Director of the Environmental Policy Major continues to be one of the great privileges of my time at WashU. Each spring, as another cohort of exceptional students crosses the finish line, I find it impossible not to feel a renewed sense of hope. This year we are proud to graduate five motivated, thoughtful, and talented young people. Their paths forward are wonderfully diverse, spanning careers and opportunities across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, yet they are united by a rigorous, interdisciplinary foundation in environmental policy. Our graduates leave WashU genuinely prepared to take on the defining challenges of the moment: confronting climate change, advancing environmental justice, stemming biodiversity loss, and building a more sustainable world.

This has also been an exciting year for the major beyond the classroom. We welcomed two outstanding young scholars of environmental politics — Victoria Shen and Juan Dodyk — to the department, both of whom are already teaching new courses that expand the major’s curricular offerings and deepen its political science foundations. Their arrivals reflect the department’s commitment to building a program that takes seriously both the science of environmental challenges and the politics of addressing them.

The broader political environment makes it tempting to feel discouraged about these challenges and others of our own making. But I encourage you to draw optimism from the same source I do — the environmental policy students moving on from WashU this year, and the terrific colleagues now helping to shape the major’s future. The world is better for their time here, and better still for the work they are about to do.