By Claire Bancroft ’28
Starting as a Phillips Academy student, Mr. Robinson’s passion for agriculture began when he returned as a faculty member: “I always liked the outdoors, but when I started teaching here [at PA], I started to appreciate bigger systems, like ecology and ecosystems.” After taking over the Environmental Science: Food, Agriculture, and the Future class as department chair, Mr. Robinson helped students dive into the environmental, social, and economic systems behind modern food production. He does this while confronting big, complex questions: How should we feed the planet? What’s the cost of doing so? Who’s paying for it?
The class begins by breaking down the environmental costs of modern agriculture, from industrial farming to pesticide use. “One of the big questions we start with is: how did food get here?” Robinson says. “We trace the journey, from seed to soil to shelf, and then we pull it apart”. For example, one of the first things he instructs students to do is map a strawberry plant’s life. From the growing of the seed to the transportation of the berry, agriculture touches on many levels. Through his course, he breaks down, piece by piece, the different parts of agriculture that influence a strawberry going from a seed to being on your plate.
This course does not shy away from uncomfortable topics. Students explore factory farming, climate change, and environmental injustice within the economics of a society. Yet, Robinson highlights how it is not just about the problems; he challenges students to envision solutions. The focus of the course is on “the future” shows why Mr. Robinson leads students to understand the harsh realities within the food chain. He discusses the economic challenges that the students of the course “all underestimate… I think that one of the biggest things is understanding that the farming industry isn’t doing really well with that either”.
At the end of the term, this course is concluded with a student-led project, where students choose their own topics to investigate. In the past, students have tracked how many apples Paresky Commons uses in a year. Mr. Robinson explains the importance of this project, “…I just made them go through a thought exercise: If we were to take this campus and try to grow food that we used here on it, how much could we grow?… I leave it up to them to draw their conclusions from it, but the exercise of going through and seeing ‘could it be done?’”. Students’ projects are open to variation, with work also involved with the Abbott Learning Garden.
Ultimately, Mr. Robinson isn’t aiming to tell students what to believe – he’s giving them the tools to ask better questions. “Every year, I go into it [teaching the course] with the idea that the students should get some kind of an understanding,” he says. “I want to expose them to a lot of it and have them draw their conclusions so they see the big picture… I don’t want to tell them what they should think.” In Environmental Science: Food, Agriculture, and the Future, Robinson’s goal is simple: to guide students through the complexity of agriculture and let them explore it for themselves. In the end, learning how to think about the food system may be just as important as learning what’s on our plate.
