(upbeat pop rock music) - Hello, and welcome to "Prairie Pulse."

Coming up a little bit later in the show, we'll see the final episode of our "Black Histories of the Northern Plains."

But first, our guest joining us now is Dr. Ken Foster, a professor from Concordia and also the director of Community Engagement at Concordia.

Dr. Foster, thanks for joining us today.

- Thanks.

I'm glad to be here.

- Well, as we get started, tell the folks a little bit about yourself.

- Well, I grew up in Rhode Island, that's the first thing to know, and moved all over the country.

I spent some time living in China and Taiwan, and then came to Moorhead for Concordia.

And Concordia drew me 'cause of its liberal arts tradition and the role that they had was just perfect for me.

So I came here in 2007 and had the great chance to raise two kids here in Moorhead where I live.

And at Concordia, I do a number of different things.

My main thing is professor of political science, and then, as you mentioned, director of Community Engagement.

Outside Concordia, I'm on the Minnesota Environmental Quality Board as a public board member, and then am a board member of Wild Ones, which is a national nonprofit that promotes eco-friendly landscaping.

And that's what I really love is pollinator gardening with native plants.

- Well, sounds like you stay busy.

Well, let's cover a couple more things, maybe a little more expand.

What all do you teach?

You said political.

- Yeah, I teach political science, and my specialty is on the politics of other countries.

So I don't get involved in American politics, thankfully.

(John chuckles) I get to talk about politics of Nigeria, Indonesia, China.

And we do things like politics of democracy and authoritarianism.

I teach about socioeconomic development.

And I teach a course on climate change and a course on environmental policy.

And the environmental policy one, I do focus on the US.

- Well, you are here to talk about climate, the Action Plan of Concordia.

But first, what is your role as director of Community Engagement?

What does that mean?

- Yes, that's a part-time role that I was given I guess two years ago now.

And that is in Academic Affairs, and that relates to Concordia's focus on getting students outside the classroom, helping students to connect with community partners, doing projects, trying to meet needs in the community.

And so in my role, I facilitate connections with community partners.

If a professor wants to do a project with their students off campus, I can connect them with people.

If they have questions about how to build that into their course, I can help them with that.

So it's really all about promoting student learning.

- Mm-hmm.

So as I said, we're here today to talk about the Concordia's Climate Action Plan.

You told me a lot of universities are going to this now.

But what is that?

What does it mean?

- Yeah, I know, it's one of those big terms, and it has been a national movement for the past 10 or 15 years, universities and colleges across the country developing a climate action plan.

And the Integrated Climate Commitment that Concordia assigned to launch us on this role, that is run by an organization called Second Nature.

And they give resources and facilitate organizations for developing a climate action plan.

And a climate action plan, really, at the core of it is about developing a plan to get to carbon neutrality, which we can talk about later.

And but a climate action plan for Concordia is all about student learning and about the educational experience.

And so we have focused on this Climate Action Plan because we wanna reduce carbon emissions, but also because we wanna do what we need to do to prepare our students for this world in which climate change is a real problem that we need to address.

- Yeah.

Well, with that said, why did... Well, you just told me why.

But when did you finalize the plan and when did you launch the plan?

- Yeah, and the why is a great question because it's a question some might ask, why would Concordia have a climate action plan?

And my answer is always the first answer is that we wanna take care of the Earth, which is our home.

And a destabilized climate is not good for anyone and not good for the Earth on which we depend.

The second reason we really decided to do it was because we wanted to step up as a responsible institution in our community to be part of the solution to climate change rather than just ignoring it.

And the third reason, as I mentioned, was that we see addressing climate change as a way to authentically lean into our educational mission.

So we worked on the plan for quite a number of years, did some studies about how we can best get to carbon neutral status, and then March 30th was when we officially launched the plan.

And we had some students speak at that launch and had, I spoke, President Craft, and it's really been a great journey that we got to the end to now.

And I will mention that President Craft, who's leaving Concordia, I think June 30th is his last day, this was really something that he was passionate about.

And when he arrived at the college, he said he wanted to do things for sustainability.

And so I really am glad that we were able to get this done before he left, before he leaves.

- Mm-hmm.

Now you said just earlier, it is a national integrated climate commitment that the college signed, or?

- Yes, that's right.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, we signed onto it, like with other colleges.

And the signing, it pledged us to do three things.

One...

It pledged us to develop a climate action plan.

That involves three things, charting out a path to carbon neutrality.

Second thing is working with community partners to build ideas for how we can promote resilience in the face of climate impacts that are surely coming.

And then the third part of it is to weave educational action throughout everything we do.

And so we really committed to producing a climate action plan and setting a date for carbon neutrality.

And so the production of the Climate Action Plan fulfilled our commitment there.

And now we've made a commitment to ourselves and is posted nationally that we're gonna continue to make progress on each of those three areas.

- Mm-hmm.

Well, you mentioned carbon neutrality two or three times now.

What exactly does that mean?

- Right, I know.

(John chuckles) It's one of those buzzwords.

And carbon neutrality means that essentially for an organization to get to a place where the organization's operations don't emit carbon on a net basis.

So if some carbon is emitted, there are things done to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

So for example, we reduce, if we don't use fossil fuels, if we use solar energy, wind energy, geothermal, then maybe we don't emit any carbon as part of our heating or electricity.

Maybe we use electric vehicles, zero carbon vehicles.

There may be some areas where we still emit carbon.

A carbon-neutral campus will then perhaps use some funds to help promote planting of trees or the development of new solar farms or that sort of thing.

And so for me, really, it's not about carbon neutrality in this big goal.

It's about reducing carbon as much as we can, reducing the emissions as much as we can.

And frankly, for me, if we don't get to zero, that's okay.

For all of us, all of humanity, we need to reduce carbon emissions so we can slow the rate of climate change.

And so carbon neutrality is kind of the big phrase and the goal given to us.

And we've set the date as 2050, which is a long time from now.

And that's because we're not gonna set an unrealistic date.

We're gonna say we're gonna work towards this.

And in order to achieve carbon neutrality, we need advances in technology.

We need more government incentives and programs to lead the way to that.

And so in the meantime, we're gonna do our best to promote behavior change and to do what we can on campus to reduce carbon emissions.

- So with that said, how difficult is it to reduce carbon emissions?

- Yeah, it depends on the sector, right?

I mean, financially, it can be difficult.

It's easy to reduce carbon emissions by changing things like the heating systems.

If we were to set the temperature in the winter a little bit lower, two degrees lower, that saves quite a bit of carbon and quite a bit of energy cost.

In the summer, set a little bit higher, saves energy.

Electric vehicles, if we can build in as we replace the fleet by electric vehicles, put in charging stations, we can move toward that without a lot of additional cost.

The hardest thing I'll tell you is in our climate is heating because we heat with natural gas here.

NDSU heats with coal from what I understand.

That's difficult 'cause you can't use wind and solar easily to just, unless you electrify heating.

And so our plan to deal with heating is to move toward geothermal, kind of a heat pump system.

That's in the future because that's expensive.

And so it is difficult to change our heating system to a geothermal system.

It's the way to go, but it's difficult, and that's why we've built our plan so that that's gonna come a little later after we have time to move on that.

- Mm-hmm.

So what's been the reaction to the plan thus far?

'Cause obviously, it hadn't been that long, but... - Well, of course, I would say have a very positive.

Haven't gotten any negative feedback.

I will say the one thing is that students have waited for this for a long time.

Many years ago, students did this big cardboard sheath, like the size of this table, and they all signed it, urging the president to sign the climate commitment.

And he demurred at that time.

That was after he first came.

Later, they lobbied again, and he signed it.

Students these days are very well-aware of the climate challenge, and they're eager to see the places they work for, their schools, to do something, to show that they're doing something to address climate change.

So students, as I said, two students spoke very eloquently at our event.

One of them was from the island nation of Maldives.

And she spoke about how, if climate change keeps going, her island nation will not exist anymore because of sea level rise.

And students across campus have been very excited to get going.

I spoke to the Student Government Association last week and they're excited to partner with staff and faculty to start moving forward and implementing the plan.

- Yeah.

When you look at our region and coal industry, how difficult is it and how quickly will changes take place?

Do you think, incrementally, it'll start getting faster or what?

- Well, I hope so.

Yeah, I think incremental is the way to think about it.

Incremental but decisive 'cause we need to work in the realm of reality.

A place like North Dakota, or Montana, Wyoming, they have some difficult challenges because of the coal-fired plants.

Those do need to be retired in the future.

However, a place like North Dakota, I mean, with all the high tech that is here with the drone activity, the collaboration on drone production, the carbon capture technologies, there's a lot that North Dakota could do to pivot to new forms of economic activity.

So I think it's going to happen.

And Minnesota, of course, has been on the forefront of trying to set some ambitious goals.

It is difficult.

Any change like this requires organizations and people to decide we're gonna make change from the status quo.

When I was a kid, and probably you, too, my first car had leaded gasoline.

Lead was in paint.

It was extremely important, but we phased it out, and companies found new things to use.

And so we can do the same thing with the energy sector as well.

- Okay.

How is the ELCA involved in your plan?

And how are they getting involved?

- Yeah, so the college is a college of the ELCA.

And in doing this plan, it's more like Concordia has been, in some ways, catching up with the ELCA, is that the ELCA has a strong commitment to environmental sustainability, and the ELCA has also been working on a plan to address climate.

And so the college has worked with the ELCA moving forward there.

We haven't had a working together with the ELCA on this plan.

But one of the core reasons that we're doing this plan is that we are a college of the church and we care for God's creation and we care to do the ethical and the right thing, and that is to help to stabilize our climate for the good of people.

And I'll mention that one of the big issues with climate change are the injustices that come as a result of the changing climate, poorer countries, like Maldives and others.

And so the ELCA prizes promoting God's justice on Earth and so does Concordia.

- Yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about I guess a re-evaluation on the plan?

Think it's been every three years you're gonna look at it.

- Yeah, yeah, thanks for asking that 'cause one of the things that we've noticed with other climate action plans is that they set the plan and it's kind of set in stone, but then after five or 10 years, things have changed.

So we conceive of our plan as a living plan, and that's why we haven't committed that we're gonna do geothermal for sure.

We're gonna commit to re-evaluating as conditions change and to try to look and see what's possible.

So every three years, we're going to look at the plan, see what new technologies have come, what is the economic situation, what are the next-generation ideas for what we can do, and adapt our strategies in the plan to that.

So setting goals but also being a living document where we can adapt it over time.

- Yeah, to people out there might be skeptical of this, why would you say climate change is real and what does the data say?

- Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I was cleaning out my basement and I found an old textbook from 1987 when I took environmental science, and it had a chapter on climate change.

So climate change is not a new thing.

I think, I mean, the science is very clear.

I think we're all very proud of the scientific establishment that we have built up in the US in particular.

And just as we trust the scientific establishment on so many things, climate change, the science is unequivocal.

It's unfortunate.

I'm in political science, so certain economic sectors and ideological and political interest have tried to stir controversy about climate change.

I've also... We've invited a Republican group to campus a couple times and they advocate for action on climate change because they see climate change as an opportunity to put Republican free enterprise principles into action in addressing this generational challenge.

So I would say just try to look at your view of science and I think climate change is an opportunity.

NDSU uses coal.

And when I go to the symphony, I walk by a lot of coal on the ground and coal dust.

It'd be much nicer to have a very clean geothermal plant there instead of coal.

So there's a lot of reasons why we can benefit from moving away from fossil fuels, which have been great for us, but we know now that they're causing this change in the climate.

- Yeah.

Can you talk about working with the community on the plan a little more?

I mean, how much are you involving and working with the community?

- Yeah, when President Craft and I looked at what we're gonna do, we were tasked with devoting a section of our plan to resilience.

And so we reached out to, we decided to focus on Moorhead, and so we reached out to partners in the city of Moorhead, and we developed a group called the Moorhead Community Resilience Task Force, which is now known as Resilient Moorhead.

And so over the past three years, we've worked with those partners to understand what do we need to work on to create a truly resilient community.

Whether it's climate impacts, economic shocks, pandemics, we need to have a community and a college that can adapt to kind of absorb the negatives that come and move through them with strength.

And so that's a key part of our plan, which is the community resilience part.

And I just give a big shout-out to city manager, Dan Mahli, and others in the city, in the private sector, nonprofits, who've really grabbed on to this challenge of thinking about how can we promote resilience in our community.

- Real quick, you have plans for thermostat and lighting control upgrades?

You have maybe an answer for that?

- Yeah, that's the tech...

The thing I'll say about that is that's a great example of our Facilities Management, Dallas Fossum.

They looked into, what can we do behind the scenes to reduce energy use and reduce carbon emissions?

And they figured out these techniques that, for example, I think one of them turns the air handler off for 15 minutes at a time.

And it's amazing how much that saves.

I don't remember the numbers.

And you don't notice it in the room.

And they've also reduced the temperature in the winter in classrooms.

No one notices, but it saves energy.

So those are some of the examples of the behind-the-scenes work that's being done.

- Yeah.

Can citizens get involved with this?

How can they?

- Well, I think citizens can be involved because, I mean, one way directly with Concordia is if you're in a company, or a nonprofit, government, and you would like a group of students to do some research for you or to do some work with you around climate change, climate impacts, how can you reduce energy use, we would love to provide those students.

Secondly, just say everyone can kind of just be an advocate for smart climate action in our community.

- Yeah.

Well, we're about out of time, so if people want more information, where can they go?

- They can go to Concordia's website, cord.edu, or concordiacollege.edu/climateactionplan, and that'll bring you to the page that introduces the plan.

And you can read the full 70-page plan if you want some light reading, so.

- (chuckles) Well, Dr. Foster, thanks so much for joining us today.

- Thank you.

Thank you very much.

- Stay tuned for more.

(upbeat pop rock music) Episode four of "Black Histories of the Northern Plains" tells the story of William Thornton Montgomery, a former slave who ended up in the Red River Valley, where he became a successful farmer and even founded a small town.

(gentle folk music) - [Matt] Following the Civil War, the Montgomery family of freed men and women operated an early Mississippi farm co-op out of the family plantation of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.

As the federal government abandoned Southern institutions and Reconstruction came to an end, Davis was freed from prison and pardoned for his crimes.

He resumed control of the home through Southern courts.

Facing eviction, some of the Montgomerys and their neighbors tried lands elsewhere in the Mississippi.

Others took part in the Great Exodus to Kansas.

One, William Thornton Montgomery, migrated to the Red River Valley in Dakota territory and turned a successful wheat farm and elevator into a small town named after his mother.

- In a May 1967 interview with NBC News, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. reflected on what he viewed as a disparity of opportunity on the new frontier following the Civil War.

"America freed the slaves in 1863 through the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln but gave the slaves no land or nothing in reality, as a matter of fact, to get started on.

At the same time, America was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and Midwest, which meant that there was a willingness to give white peasants from Europe an economic base.

And yet it refused to give its Black peasants from Africa, who came here involuntarily in chains and had worked free for 244 years, any kind of economic base."

In this episode, we'll explore how free men and women set their sights for the Northern Plains and took part in the agricultural revolution that reshaped the landscape in the 19th century.

I'm Troy Jackson II with Prairie Public, our narrator is Matt Olien, and this is "Black Histories of the Northern Plains."

(gentle folk music) - [Matt] After the violence of the Civil War had calmed, the final decades of the 19th century on the Northern Plains were still marked by tumultuous change.

The Indian wars had moved into Dakota territory, opening the region to further American settlement.

However, this wave of immigrants had been set in motion years earlier by several key legislative acts.

When the slaveholding conservatives among the Southern Democrats seceded from the Union in 1861, the radical Republican elements of the Northern states consolidated their power in Congress and passed legislation, like the Pacific Railway Act and the Homestead Act.

The first of these acts created railroad charters, providing corporations huge swaths of federal lands to help fund the construction of transcontinental railroads that would connect America's east and west.

The Union Pacific was the first railroad chartered by this legislation.

The second was the Northern Pacific, which broke ground in Duluth in 1870 and began carrying settlers into Dakota territory two summers later.

Many of these settlers purchased their land directly from the railroad or federal government, but a significant minority made use of the 1862 Homestead Act, a revolutionary piece of legislation that created federal subsidies for agricultural settlements in the West.

Though some historians have criticized the program, citing failure rates, fraudulent claims, and other abuses, the Homestead Act succeeded in expediting America's westward expansion and provided new paths of economic mobility for the nation's growing working class.

Unfortunately, as civil rights leaders, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., later argued, the program failed to address standing racial inequities and other barriers of entry, and few African Americans ever took part.

In Northern Plains communities, African American populations remained low, usually constituting less than 1% of the population.

And most of these men and women came north with few resources to work in service industries and general labor.

However, a few hundred Black settlers and families still stake their claim on homesteads in the Northern Plains, including William Thornton Montgomery, perhaps the most successful to do so.

Montgomery came north from Davis Bend, Mississippi, where his family had been enslaved by brothers, Joseph and Jefferson Davis, wealthy plantation owners influenced by the utopian ideals of Robert Owen.

On the Davis plantation, enslaved men and women were allowed greater freedoms than was typical within the confines of their bondage.

They were educated, relatively well-fed, and compensated.

And William's father, Benjamin, was trusted to manage plantation business.

He also developed reputation as a machinist and engineer.

Yet when the Union Army marched through Davis Bend in 1862, the Montgomerys joined their ranks to fight against their former owners' Confederacy forces.

After the war, the Montgomerys purchased the Davis plantation for $300,000.

William also served in public office, one of the first in the Reconstruction South.

By 1881, cotton prices had fallen and Jefferson Davis regained ownership of the plantation.

So William moved north to grow wheat as a bonanza farmer.

He arrived in the North with considerably more money, education, and experience than most of his Red River Valley peers.

And as a result, his years in the region were marked by relative wealth, comfort, and social standing.

William landed on 640 acres in Richland County, two miles from the Red River.

The Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul rail line, connecting Fargo and Breckenridge, ran through his land.

The additions of a general store and grain elevator in 1888 soon gave form to a small village of Montgomery's neighbors and laborers called Lithia.

His later land purchases and Homestead and Timber Culture Act claims added to a thriving operation of more than 1,000 acres.

At the turn of the 20th century, nearing 60 years of age, William returned to his family in Mississippi.

He died in 1909, having taken one of the most impressive journeys to the North and back.

Some of Montgomery's successes were shared among the other few Black settlers in the Northern Plains who found community at the end of the 19th century.

However, his return to Mississippi also foreshadowed a steady outmigration of the region's Black population that would continue until the 1960s.

New histories will tell their stories.

- Thank you for joining us for a look at the early years of the Black experience in the Northern Plains.

We hope you continue to explore, learn, and even share the many threads of our unique histories.

As Sojourner Truth once said, "Truth is powerful and will prevail."

I'm Troy Jackson II with Prairie Public, and this has been "Black Histories of the Northern Plains."

(gentle folk music) - Well, that's all we have on "Prairie Pulse" this week.

And as always, thanks for watching.

(upbeat pop rock music) - [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.