From your OS4Future friends: Maria Pilar Acosta, Joel Bothello, Giuseppe Delmestri, Gabriela Gutierrez-Huerter O, Stefanie Habersang, Elke Schuessler
Helen has left us. She lost a long, brave fight against cancer. We all thought, hoped, prayed she would beat the disease, and it seemed like she would. But now she’s gone, suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving behind a loving husband and two wonderful children. We mourn the loss of a beautiful person who prioritized the common good over the private, fought insatiably for a fairer society, and urged so many of us to resist the materialistic orgy of consumption and biodiversity destruction which undermines survival on this planet. Helen did this because she loved life and all living beings.
When we first learned about her illness, we were very confident that Helen would make it through. Even during the most difficult times, she kept an optimistic outlook on life. This is why we were not prepared for her departure. There was hardly a person more alive, more full of energy, and more driven. As a semi-professional tennis player, she had honed focus and knew how to battle against adversity. She applied these skills whole-heartedly towards making the world a better place, igniting a spark, passion and the hope that it would be possible to save the planet in everyone she met. She certainly did so for us.
Helen was unsurprisingly the driving force behind OS4Future. As a bridge-builder, she was frustrated that the climate activism she saw in the natural sciences was absent among many scholars researching sustainability, climate and other “grand challenges”. But, as was typical for Helen, she did not leave it at that – she took matters into her own hands to instigate change and to inspire those around to accompany her on the journey. EGOSbyTrain is a typical example. When the idea to bike to Edinburgh in 2019 proved too challenging, Helen proposed to take the train instead, stopping in London to recruit more participants. The morning of the seminar at King’s College London, Gabi had a coffee with Helen and was immediately moved by her conviction that we, as scholars, have the power to change things before it is too late. Gabi then could not resist joining what would become a movement. Steffi also remembers her first meeting with Helen in London, where she was struck by Helen’s inspiring vision for change and her warm, welcoming, and enthusiastic personality that brought everyone at the foundational seminar together. Giuseppe remembers that in Edinburgh, during a break, Helen took him and, opting to skip a sub-plenary, they together designed the OS4Future webpage. Staying with Joel, who volunteered to create the website after the conference, Helen asked “why not do it right now?” Elke remembers how Helen chased her down through several afternoon/evening events during a workshop in Rotterdam, until they sat down together to talk about what they could do together and inspiring Elke to join OS4Future. Pilar joined a couple of years later. She was in Colombia seeking to imprint sustainability across her school; inspired by the work the group was doing, she reached out to Helen. Helen was immediately accessible, open to share her vision and welcoming people who strived for transformation.
Helen took her role as an educator very seriously and considered it as one of the most direct and powerful mechanisms to instigate change. She not only developed innovative teaching but she shared all these learnings with us and the community to make us and our students think and feel differently. A clear example of this was the “Climate Fresk”, a workshop with the aim to transform negative emotions into positive emotions to help create energy for action. She was a pioneer in this area at the time when very few were interested. It was fascinating how she engaged students in impactful hands-on activities, and how she always made an effort to share her knowledge, e.g. during the EGOS sub-plenary in Vienna on “Transforming curricula for the Anthropocene”. Pilar especially remembers Helen’s deep conviction of transforming our relationship with nature. She had the privilege to teach one course based on the teaching certificate about the ecological transition Helen had developed. That program reflected her vision of how experiencing sustainability matters to understand the cross-roads humanity faces. From finance to communication, she strived to integrate nature in all aspects of management teaching.
Helen also connected research communities, from EGOS and the Academy to the Impact Scholars Community to Gronen and to climate scientists, aiming to forge a group of scholars not bound by disciplinary boundaries that together could contribute to fundamentally transforming our research and educational practices for the good of the planet.
The Covid-19 pandemic changed all of us in many ways. For Helen, it gave her even more impetus to change the status quo for various reasons. On the one hand, it highlighted more than ever the urgency to take action and stop the degradation of our ecosystems, on the other hand, it demonstrated how communities came together to help each other and it showed that it was possible to live sustainably and create and imagine new socio-economic systems. She shared with us these visions while also reminding us that as academics we have the responsibility to contribute to these changes and make our work relevant to society, using our collective intelligence in better ways than accumulating publication and citation points.
While many of us write and reflect about impact, Helen had an impact. In our lives, in the hearts and minds of her students, our profession, her local community , and – through all this – on the planet. With a charming persistence that was unique to her, Helen made things happen. Her message was serious, but always positive. She was leading by example in a way that made the impossible seem possible. She had a clear vision that we had to and could save life on our planet, and she would not give up, encouraging people to come along.
Helen is and will remain a source of inspiration for all of us in carrying forward the projects and ideals she left us with. At OS4Future, we already missed Helen’s positive spirit, her ideas and her energy during her illness. Knowing that she will not come back is unbearable. She is a prime example that one person can, in fact, make a difference. That one person can inspire a group, a family, a community, and lay the foundation for systemic change. Maintaining this legacy, especially her energy, passion, and love for life, will be a great challenge for all of us. Let us make sure Helen’s message lives on through us: we can make our world sustainable, as long as each one of us steps up and makes a difference. Let us continue her fight, because we owe this to her.
Helen shared with us some personal thoughts shortly after she received her diagnosis, as we were working together on an essay about system collapse and its implications. Among it, she wrote: “In such a situation it is suddenly very easy to focus only on what is essential in life. A blessing that comes with this dramatic situation. An invitation of life to drastically change everything that we have done before in order to act only with love and gratitude.”
Helen, let your voice and spirit guide us, always.
(Pictures by Giuseppe Delmestri)
OS4Future 