The climate crisis is not in some distant future. It is being felt around the world with storms, floods, heatwaves, droughts, and most dramatically with the wildfires in Southern California. Our hearts go out to the residents who face the tragic loss of lives, homes, schools, and entire communities.
Who is responsible? It’s fossil fuel companies and electric utilities, who lied about climate science for decades. . . .
The fact is that L.A. County, more than 80 percent of it is under extreme drought. And we’re looking at the driest 20-year period in 1,200 years.
And the other thing that climate change is doing is it’s leading to more extreme precipitation in some times, and then more extreme dryness. Last year there was an enormous amount of water that fell in Southern California. That led to a lot of new fuel being built up. You know, all the chaparral, the bushes, they grow. And then, the next year, which we’re in right now, the October period starts that rainy season. When no rain is falling, all of that new fuel it builds up, it dies. And then, when these massive hurricane-force winds hit during January and you have this period of dryness, that overlap of these extreme winds and that dry landscape, that parched drought landscape, that’s what creates this tinderbox situation. And so, that’s what’s really creating such a dangerous situation for people.
Journalist John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, says the Los Angeles wildfires should be a wake-up call. Vaillant stated:
[The] frankly suicidal loyalty to the status quo of keeping fossil fuels preeminent in our energy system is creating an increasingly unlivable situation . . .
What we’re living in right now is an increasingly shrill dissonance between the fact of climate change, the science of climate change . . . and the governments who . . . [serve] the petroleum industry and the investors who are dependent on keeping them in business.
The climate crisis threatens all our students’ lives. As media limits references to climate change, it is time to break that silence in classrooms so that young people study the climate and learn how to organize for a safe future.
Teach Climate Justice
Below are free lessons and other resources.
Green New Deal Lesson for Middle and High School Students
As we rebuild, we must restore the Green New Deal promise of public land and water use. — Kaniela Ing, Green New Deal Network
From “A Message from the Future,” illustrated by Molly Crabapple.
We offer a free lesson on the New Deal of the 1930s, which opens students’ minds to the possibilities of a Green New Deal today. The lesson, “From the New Deal to the Green New Deal: Stories of Crisis and Possibility,” is by Suzanna Kassouf, Matt Reed, Tim Swinehart, Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, and Bill Bigelow.
Teaching Guide
A People’s Curriculum for the Earth is a collection of articles, lessons, stories, poems, and graphics to breathe life into teaching for environmental justice.
The book features some of the best articles from Rethinking Schools magazine, alongside classroom-friendly readings on climate change, energy, water, food, and pollution — as well as on people working to make things better.
#TeachTruth About the Climate Crisis
Illustrated by Erik Ruin. More of his work can be seen at erikruin.info and justseeds.org.
Legislators in at least 44 states have passed laws — or are attempting to pass laws — to prohibit teachers from putting racism at the center of their classroom inquiry about the nature of U.S. society. It is now a crime for a teacher in Iowa, for example, to suggest that the United States is “fundamentally or systematically” racist.
But the hailstorm of legislation attacking anti-racist education has a less obvious target: teaching about the environment and about climate change.
Continue reading this Rethinking Schools article by Bill Bigelow.
Books for Young People
Teaching for Change’s Social Justice Books offers a carefully selected list of books for pre-K–12 on the environment and climate justice, and teaching guides.
Share Your Story
We want to hear from teachers who have used Zinn Education Project resources to teach about climate change in any subject.
Thanks to donations by an author and publishers, in appreciation for your teaching story, we will send you a copy of Paradise on Fire by Jewell Parker Rhodes, The World We Need: Stories and Lessons from America’s Unsung Environmental Movement by Audrea Lim, or We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth.
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