Sunday, October 21, 2018

Climate Change Education: Maybe Too Little, Too Late?

I've been teaching about climate change since I started teaching in 1991. Back then, most students just laughed, and I came across as a crazy person. I was fine with that mainly because my favourite teacher from high school was also seen as a bit looney. Thinking the bearers of bad news insane is a handy defence from a difficult reality.

In the early 80s, my old history teacher, immersed as he was in details of war, turned his basement into a bunker with 2' concrete walls and a two year supply of food and water, just in case. He'd show us, on a globe, that Canada was smack dab in the middle of the U.S. - U.S.S.R. conflict, and if we lived through a nuclear strike, we'd be scrounging for clean food and water for years. The fear of that potential sat at the back of my head until the mutual disarmament started. Whew! Dodged that missile! (Except, not so fast....) I wasn't openly troubled at the time, but I do continue to blame Reagan's election for my teenaged drug experimentation. How could we possibly make it with that cowboy in command? In hindsight, it could be argued that he wasn't nearly as bad as what we're dealing with now. That's not good news.

In the early 90s, most students thought climate change was a hoax despite my well researched and carefully compiled data to the contrary, and some tried to soothe my concerns, genuinely worried that I had been sucked into a conspiracy theory. It was 15 years of slogging through a sea of profound disbelief until Al Gore's movie finally opened some eyes. An Inconvenient Truth changed everything - for a little while. We had the smallest of windows to get things going, and we failed. When the time was finally ripe for action, we had Bush and Harper at the helm.

And then that moment of belief and concern and burgeoning action largely went away again for about a decade. Since the widespread sharing of the most recent IPCC report that suggests we've got about a dozen years to turn things around before we're completely out of options, lots of regular people are suddenly paying attention again.

Some students still think that climate change is a myth started by companies to sell green products using the same methods Nestle used to sell water bottles: they convinced the masses that we don't absorb any water from food or beverages, so we need to drink 8 glasses of water a day but never from the toxic tap in our homes. They created a multi-million dollar scam that most people fell for. Some people still won't drink tap water despite the reality that it's far more regulated than the bottled water industry. But people with any wherewithal or common sense could look up reputable studies on necessary water consumption and tap water regulations and easily see the lies. This is different. The top climate scientists in the world agree that we have a serious problem. People can easily look up the research.

Yes, absolutely, some companies are using this current reality to try to make a buck. But most reputable scientists will tell you we can't buy our way out of this problem, that consumerism has to stop and that includes greenwashed products. No company would propagate a myth that we should stop buying anything that's not absolutely necessary. It's definitely the case that companies are making products to profit if off climate change, but that's not evidence that climate change doesn't exist. That's evidence of corporations benefiting from a traumatic event, something we should be used to by now. And absolutely any shift in consumerism that actually takes place will affect the economy. We didn't always follow an economic growth model, and we can't continue on this way. There are alternatives.

Now that we're at a very critical point of no return, if not completely past it, teachers have finally been sent curriculum and lesson plans, from Ingenium, to help talk to students about climate change. The lesson plans start with brainstorming what we think we can do about it. If my classes are any indication, many people really think littering is a significant contributor. I hit the last straw (ha!) when someone used examples of littering as mitigating factors on a test, and I wrote and posted a poem to help them remember, but they still forget (or just can't possibly hear it). The Ingenium site links to a useful site that demonstrates flaws in the denialist arguments. As a proponent of direct instruction, I'm not big on all the brainstorming and word cloud creations, but at least this huge dilemma is becoming a bigger part of our lessons.

More importantly, for the first time ever I feel like I have overt permission to discuss this in class. I have had students question my discussions because it can be upsetting just to consider the idea that, as George Monbiot suggests in Heat, this will be the last generation to luxuriate in long, hot showers. Just considering the privations we'll have to attempt is too much for some teenagers. I don't even much touch on what the world will look like if we don't. Now I feel like I can.

I think, for students, it will be like it was with me in the cold war. I largely ignored it, but there was a tiny bit that got in and made me worried. If I avoided the news it would quiet down a bit. In the 80s, ignoring it all was fine. We no longer have that luxury. All the legal pot and free beer won't mitigate that reality.

Here's the thing: some scholars think we have to abandon any misplaced notion that we can still avert disaster. The best we can do at this point is to postpone the inevitable. However, prolonging our future for a few more decades isn't nothing. Jem Bendell's "paper’s key point — that the velocity of climate change appears to have shifted so dramatically upward since 2014 that its progression is no longer 'linear' — aligns with other mainstream research." We had a window that closed, and now we have to deal with the consequences. We've ignored it too long for the option to turn it around through GHG cuts or technological fixes, and our only option left is Deep Adaptation:
"He has a three-part strategy in mind. It starts with that “resilience” component that everybody is already behind — seawalls and reinforced roofing, etc. . . .  a second stage of “relinquishment” (giving up treasured things that make climate chaos worse, like present-day living standards and homes that overlook the ocean). And then a third: “restoration” of cultural values and practices “that our hydrocarbon-fuelled civilisation eroded”: Examples include re-wilding landscapes, so they provide more ecological benefits and require less management, changing diets back to match the seasons, rediscovering non-electronically powered forms of play, and increased community-level productivity and support."
A reporter from Australia describes the corporate and political system that got us here as a form of crimes against humanities:
"A small number of insanely wealthy individuals and immensely powerful corporations are making out like bandits from the business of pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They don’t much feel like stopping. . . . if human civilisation somehow survives this existential threat, climate-change denial will come to be thought of the way postwar Germany conceived of holocaust denial; an intolerable danger. . . . But time is running out. Twelve years, according to this latest IPCC report. To put that in context, we have a lot less than half the time The Simpsons have been on air before we may as well just give up and start lobbing nukes at each other over the last few drops of clean drinking water and arable land. But they have to stop, or be stopped."
If this weren't bad enough, we're also running out of oxygen. We've got several centuries left, so it's not as urgent an issue, but the quality of the air we're breathing sure is. I once wrote a short story about four elderly residents of a retirement centre who were the last survivors in the area because they were all breathing from oxygen tanks. I'm horrible at story writing, and I failed to finish it because I got too swept away researching what the world would look like with too much sulphur dioxide and not enough oxygen in the air and whether or not solar panels would continue to work to continue to have electricity in the centre and how oxygen tanks even work, but it was really going to be a vehicle to explore various philosophies of death and dying. I'll make a comprehensive chart one day (that's more my speed), so we can each identify our attitude of choice for our remaining time here.

And then there's the fact that mammals can't evolve fast enough keep up with the extinction of the species.

Absolutely, we should be discussing this in schools, and, much more so than my old history teacher, we'd be very wise to take some real life precautions, but I'm in a different place on the climate change education curve. I'm not sure it matters that the next generations mind maps their thoughts on some pretty images, or play some games that explore their individual footprint. They should definitely aim to reduce their own impact: forgo that pivotal first car purchase as a measure of adulthood, learn to tolerate the heat instead of blasting the A/C, and understanding the importance of meat-free meals. It would be really useful to teach them all how to grow and preserve their own food and how to fix their own clothes (and the general attitude that fixes things instead of throwing them away). But most importantly, we need to teach them how to take to the streets to force a much more pivotal change in the direction we're headed. If we can't get Trump and Trudeau to really get involved, then I can't see how we'll possibly turn this corner.

ETA - And then I just read activist Bill McKibben's article about getting death threats. I'll give him the last word:
"It was, in this case, a public call for someone to murder me, and not long afterward another commenter, 'Carbon Bigfoot,' supplied my home address. All of which stopped me cold. I thought I was inured to social media abuse. But this was something new: a calm public discussion about how to find me and what to do to me. . . . 207 environmentalists or defenders were killed last year around the world. . . . What does it say about a society when people just routinely call for the killing of those they disagree with? . . . A society in which critics fear death is a society with fewer critics, and hence with fewer chances for change."


The Mound of Sound said...

An interesting course curriculum that focuses on the merits of mitigation but apparently overlooks the equally important matter of adaptation. It seems that adaptation has become the poor cousin of mitigation. Our governments certainly flee from the mention of the word. Perhaps that is because adaptation is more costly and disruptive than a meagre and ineffective carbon tax.

Climate change impacts are a function of our ability to cope with them, resilience. What could be bearable in one community could be catastrophic to another, less resilient society. As I watch this slow-motion calamity unfold I am struck at how little we're doing to prepare ourselves to deal with it. Much of our already aging and decaying infrastructure will be expected to function in a far more difficult climate just a decade or two distant. How will it cope and what will we do when essential communications networks fail? If our bridges, roads and overpasses begin to fail us, we'll be in a pretty awful predicament. Unfortunately we live in the era of "everyday low taxes" so governments no longer have the full graneries that the pharaohs knew to keep full just in case. Today "just in time" has displaced "just in case."

Perhaps we should be introducing our school children to concepts of self-sufficiency or living in a world in which everything you may need won't be available on Amazon Prime. How about a class on basic vegetable gardening? It's not unthinkable that those could become critical life skills during their adulthood.

Marie Snyder said...

I'm all for classes on basic gardening. I really believe some of the skills we've lost will be essential to survival in the near future. I fear we won't prepare at all, though. We'll just put out fires as they happen and be baffled that this could ever happen to us.

Dustin Vinland Jarl said...

Marie, I have lived in the USA my whole life, and I find that my experience was the opposite. In 1991, I don't remember anyone who denied global warming. I'm sure there were deniers out there, but I don't remember anyone specifically. As for school students, they (we) were made aware of global warming, and I cannot recall even so much of a single instance of a student saying "this is a hoax". The denialism started later, and I don't believe that denialism is a conspiracy created by Fox News and the Kochs. I believe that denialism came out of something far deeper, which is the human tendency to procrastinate and deny, deny, deny when a major problem requiring bigtime solutions comes knocking. And there is something about human nature that the louder the problem knocks, the greater the human tendency can be to deny, deny, deny, which is why the denialism came later, at least in the USA.

But I for one refuse to give up on saving this planet.

Marie Snyder said...

Dustin, I'm not sure if you're just sharing your own experiences, or if you're trying to convince me that my experiences didn't happen.

What I've seen might not be the norm, and I didn't do a comprehensive study. It's just anecdotal evidence from a small sample of students from one school. A colleague had a student, just the other day (which partly inspired the post) insist vehemently that climate change is an invention of the corporations to sell more stuff. It is what it is.

But beyond the anecdotal, if it's the case, as you suggest, that nobody denied that climate change is real and human caused back in the early 90s, then why didn't all the world powers change their policies to reflect that belief, and why wasn't it taught and discussed in all science and social science classes? If you want more tangible evidence, this article suggests that the denial movement has had centre stage since the early 80s, specifically in the U.S.

Dustin Vinland Jarl said...

Dear Marie,

I am not in the least trying to convince you that your experiences didn't happen. I am simply sharing my own experiences, which seem to be different than yours. At my K-8 school, it was absolutely taught in our classes. We had a great environmental science and biology teacher who taught environmental science grades 1-5 and biology grade 6. He was an avid, avid environmentalist made sure we were all aware of the threats facing our planet. Also in high school, our biology teacher who taught biology for all freshman students, and who was also the headmaster's wife, was an avid environmentalist who once again made sure we were aware of all the threats happening to the environment. I'm aware that this was only 2 schools, but this is my experience.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. I really care about the global warming issue and I'm glad you're writing about it.

Marie Snyder said...

Thanks for the clarification, Dustin.