Climate Change — A Teacher’s Responsibility to Protest
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Snow covered the Midwest of my childhood, but this past winter, nothing of the sort came. Snowball fights maintained their ceasefire; snowmen remained wispy daydreams; and a nauseating discomfort continued to brew.
Within the next decade, per the warnings of our undeserved academics, we are going to make our potentially last great decision: will we stay the course, careening toward abandon and clinging to the vestiges of an unsustainable lifestyle, or will we come together to avoid the destruction of collapsed ecosystems and famine, compounded by an onslaught of increasingly-severe storms (“Summary for Policymakers…”)? Will we change our environmental policy to save the world?
Environmental degradation looms over the young American psyche, and our leaders are faltering — Judge Judy has retired, Oprah has gone on to richer things, and Dr. Phil’s license has long since been revoked — the reverence for authority dissipating on every respected channel. Who will we turn to? Who could possibly have the answers? As it turns out, there is a group that, try as we might to rid of them, has remained an incessant fixture in American life: the public school teacher. It is the job of the educator to prepare our children for the road ahead, to equip students with the skills suitable for a world rife with change, and in doing so, it is imperative that we consider what that road ahead will look like.
States full of these overworked educators laboring in understaffed schools are indicative of one very American ideal: an obsession with short-term profit at the expense of a healthy future, which, unsurprisingly, coincides with our students’ stark lack of climate awareness (Harmon). Teachers cannot possibly stand for this negligence. If we continue on our current trajectory, if teachers continue to waste away in their burrows of ungraded papers, the ecologically destructive future will have arrived, unimpeded, with the unceremonious pomp of severe weather and a burning west coast, and the hours spent scribbling feedback will have meant little to a generation of students who have been robbed of their future. Our legion of educators, in states helpless to staff underpaid, underappreciated positions — this is where our long-awaited environmental revolution will take place. This is where an environmental protest must take place lest we anguish in the sweltering heat of inaction.
Refuse to enter your classrooms — virtual or otherwise — until the Green New Deal (https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf) is passed and Obama-era EPA regulations are put back into place. Decisive action at the federal level is imperative in curbing the effects of climate change, and our local-level pedagogy (see below) can only do so much. This is no dubious battle for we know, empirically, what is right, and more than ever that means standing up to the federal government’s failure to act on climate change. Teachers, in their positions of power, are entrusted to know what is best for their students — and protesting is exactly that. Our politicians have favored profit over prudent legislation. Our self-serving “representatives” have time and again failed to uphold our values and keep us safe from the environmental destruction that pounding at our door. The Black Lives Matter protesters have set the ball rolling in the direction of progress, and it would be wise to make use of that inertia.
Unlike the aforementioned protests that have been plagued with rioters and a frequently violent police force, our movement can only be peaceful. We are not in opposition to the state. In fact, a thoughtful approach to environmental policy could save the world an estimated $145 trillion in the long run (Nuccitelli). A refusal to enter the classroom is not a refusal to teach. It is perhaps the only lesson worth teaching — that real, individual action is necessary to make a change. The government, however, will be limited in its response. Any punitive action taken against protesting teachers is an egregious denial of the immediacy of our concerns; refusal to comply with our demands is to neglect our students’ education; and the longer that it takes to comply, the longer our students will suffer their neglect and benefit from the example of our protest.
Climate change, for all its faults, is perfect in its ubiquity. It is a common enemy manifested in thousands of different ways, affecting the country in equally as many. Whereas Americans in the Midwest have to contend with soil depletion and impending crop failures from an increase in rainfall(Gibbens), those on the Gulf would be more concerned with coral bleaching (Watkins) and rising sea levels. John Dewey, the progressive pedagogue, the teacher of teachers, would jump at the opportunity we have in front of us: the opportunity for students to engage in meaningful projects that have direct effects on their lives — our students only need us to guide them there. While we protest, we will not be idle. We will be curating the revolutionary curricula that we previously did not have the time to do; we will be designing projects that engage our students with the community and foster the sense of belonging that is needed to bring about local-level action, projects that have a direct relation to our students’ daily lives, work that they can see themselves in, work that allows them to creatively solve social and environmental problems in their community, and perhaps most importantly, work that changes their role in the world. In adapting our curriculum to focus on local-level, actionable projects, our students can supersede their previous position as passive observers, and in becoming a part of this system of change, they will not be defined by the world around them but, in acting on and with the world, become a larger part of it. Our revamped approach will take into account the true diversity within our classrooms (and, thus, communities), and students representing traditionally marginalized groups will be able to contribute their own part. As we move toward action-oriented pedagogy, the power will be given back to the youth — the same group that stands to suffer most from the damaging effects of climate change.
This will benefit teachers as much as it does students and bring the power back to the educators. If the 50–60 hour weeks are not enough to prove our worth, then what else can we do but change our approach? What else can we do but protest for our students’ future and show the world what happens when schools are left without us? Teachers in Chicago are well aware of the power of their protest, and it is time for the rest of us to recognize the same. Moreover, a third of teachers are at a higher risk of severe COVID-19 (Camera), and it would be dangerous to even go back to school any time soon. Bring the country to a halt so that we might keep moving forward.
I can anticipate your trepidation: what about the students who show up to school bloodied and bruised? What about those students who use school as an escape from an unwelcoming home? Or maybe your concerns are more personal. What will happen if your job is threatened, your life uprooted? But, perhaps more importantly, we should ask ourselves what will happen if we fail to act? What if our unfettered production continues, if corporations are not held in check? What happens when, within the decade, our fate is sealed and the damaging effects of CO2 production cannot be reversed? What happens when we are assuredly too far gone to save? How small will our complaints seem then? The current state of affairs has given us a glimpse of that future — civil unrest, supply chain shortages, an unwanted familiarity with death — and it is not alarmist to envision life to be any different when the effects of climate change take full effect. Teaching in the face of the impending death of humanity will be more difficult than any pandemic teaching — “crisis teaching” as a local principal so accurately put it — ever was. English teachers are well aware of the struggle to encourage students to read Shakespeare just as math teachers struggle to encourage diligent geometry in the age of WolframAlpha. But what student will want to work through Julius Caesar when they feel their elders have betrayed them in polluting the world? What respect will anyone pay Pythagoras when he is just another name from a more optimistic, bygone age?
The best teacher leads by example, and if we fail to act, what will our children do?
We need involvement from all schools of all counties of all states. More than ever, we need unity to fight for progressive, sensible change. This means help from our unions: the National Education Association and all state affiliates — the Alabama Education Association; the American Federation of Teachers; the Arizona Education Association; the Arkansas Education Association; the California Teachers Association; the Chicago Teachers Union; the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers; the Colorado Education Association; the Connecticut Education Association; the Delaware State Education Association; the Education Minnesota; the Federal Education Association; the Florida Education Association; the Georgia Association of Educators; the Hawaii State Teachers Association; the Idaho Education Association; the Indiana State Teachers Association; the Iowa State Education Association; the Kentucky Education Association; the Louisiana Association of Educators; the Maryland State Education Association; the Massachusetts Teachers Association; the Michigan Education Association; Education Minnesota; the Mississippi Association of Educators; the MEA-MFT; the Missouri NEA; the Nebraska State Education Association; the Nevada State Education Association; the New Hampshire NEA; the New Jersey Education Association; the New Mexico NEA; the New York State United Teachers; the North Carolina Association of Educators; the North Dakota Education Association; the Ohio Education Association; the Ohio Federation of Teachers; the Oklahoma Education Association; the Oregon Education Association; the Pennsylvania State Education Association; the Professional Educators of Tennessee; the Rhode Island NEA; the South Carolina Education Association; the South Dakota Education Association; the Teachers Federation of Puerto Rico; the Texas State Teachers Association; the United Federation of Teachers (NYC); the United Teachers of New Orleans; the Utah Education Association; the Virginia Education Association; the Washington Education Association; the Wisconsin Education Association; the West Virginia Education Association; the Wyoming Education Association.
Most importantly though, we need you, the nameless educator who recognizes that their students’ well-being is predicated on climate action. A single school services hundreds of students affecting as many families, and a single department’s protest — a single teacher’s protest — is the germ of something greater.
As a teacher, you are a harbinger of the future, and it is time to decide — what will that future be?
Camera, Lauren. “One Third of Teachers Are at a Higher Risk for Coronavirus.” US News, 1 May 2020, https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2020-05-01/one-third-of-teachers-are-at-higher-risk-for-coronavirus.
Gibbens, Sarah. “Midwest Flooding is Drowning Corn and Soy Crops. Is Climate change to Blame?” National Geographic, 3 June 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/midwest-rain-climate-change-wrecking-corn-soy-crops/.
Harmon, Amy. “Climate Science Meets a Stubborn Obstacle: Students.” The New York Times, 4 June 2017, www.nytimes.com./2017/06/04/us/education-climate-change-science-class-students.html.
Nucitelli, Dana. “Aggressive Action to Address Climate Change Could Save the World $145 Trillion.” Yale Climate Connections, 26 March 2020, https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/03/aggressive-action-to-address-climate-change-could-save-the-world-145-trillion/.
Parsons, Lewis. “Climate March.” Unsplash, September 2019, https://unsplash.com/photos/kzr98J4HUs8.
“Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C Approved by Governments.” IPCC, 8 October 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-1-5c-approved-by-governments/.
Watkins, Katie. “Report: Gulf Coast Coral Likely To Face Widespread Destruction By The End Of The Century.” Houston Public Media, 20 December 2019, https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-environment/2019/12/20/354741/report-gulf-coast-coral-likely-to-face-widespread-destruction-by-the-end-of-the-century/.
