Fisheries and wildlife associate professor Geoffrey Habron lectures his class Tuesday morning in Anthony Hall. Habron was a driving force behind creating the sustainability specialization at MSU.
As a child, Geoffrey Habron wanted to be like Martin Luther King Jr. or Jacques Cousteau when he grew up.
“From the time I saw the ocean, I was interested in it and (Cousteau’s) television shows made it so cool to be interested in the water,” Habron said. “That was it — I was going to be a marine biologist.”
However, because of his early consciousness of social justice and as a black man, Habron said he strongly identified with King and later Bob Marley.
“There was this huge influence that was running right along side of (marine biology), and I didn’t know how to put the two together,” he said.
Habron, a professor in the departments of both Sociology and Fisheries and Wildlife, was one of the pioneers as well as the program director for MSU’s sustainability specialization, which officially launched this fall, includes a branch of social equity.
After receiving his undergraduate degree in Florida, Habron became involved with the Peace Corps and worked on the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean.
“It was the perfect fit — being interested in marine biology and Bob Marley,” Habron said.
Habron said volunteering in the Peace Corps revealed the possibility of combining his passions — social justice and marine biology — as well as cementing the ideas of sustainability of which he always had been conscious.
“When you live on an island, you can’t be singular about how you approach things,” Habron said. “Everything you do affects another component of it and you can see it really clearly.”
Habron said being interested in the welfare of both people and the environment always has seemed as if it was the right thing to do.
“The environment is a beautiful place; why wouldn’t you want to protect it?” Habron said. “And yet, you can’t protect the environment and ignore the people.”
Habron’s father worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development, a federal humanitarian organization, which resulted in Habron living in Thailand and Nicaragua for his early childhood.
“Who I am right now is a function of spending nine of my first years living in different cultures,” he said.
Living in various locations and societies gave Habron a respect for diversity and awareness for justice issues across the world, including income inequalities he observed as a child.
“My dad had a great job and we were American,” Habron said. “I never wondered where my next meal was going to come from, and yet you saw other people around you (who) have those kind of problems.”
Terry Link, former director of the Office of Campus Sustainability and executive director for the Greater Lansing Food Bank, said Habron has a strong desire to learn and understand thoroughly.
“He’s very much about thinking and having (students) think deeper and more connectedly, not just facts but the relationships between the different ideas,” Link said.
Although his education gives the picture of a strong background in fisheries, Habron said he also embraced interdisciplinary studies and integrates sociocultural topics into his classes.
“(Students are) not necessarily interested in the people that come along with it, but you have to confront those things,” Habron said.
“If you weren’t doing something for the people, that just wouldn’t seem right to me.”
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Habron is teaching the first introductory course of MSU’s new sustainability specialization this fall, for which the interest has been very positive, said Laurie Thorp, program director for the Residential Initiative on the Study of the Environment and assistant director for the sustainability specialization.
Thorp said she and Habron have been colleagues since she first came to MSU and have had past opportunities to co-teach.
“He’s very interactive with the students,” Thorp said. “He cares very much about undergraduates and undergraduate education.”
Habron’s concern for social equality is common among those interested in sustainability issues, Thorp said.
“I certainly know that social justice is, as it is for all of us in sustainability, a big piece that is typically forgotten,” Thorp said.
Link said he believes the world has too many specialists and not enough wholistic thinkers, such as Habron.
“The world needs that kind of connected, relational thinking and approaches that sustainability offers,” he said.
Habron’s enthusiasm for sustainability reaches beyond matching his academia, and he said it extends to who he is fundamentally.
“I told the students this semester, ‘I hope I don’t overwhelm anybody with the level of passion, but I think it is really important,’” he said.
