Worth a Listen, Look or Read #16 — Redefining the Impact of Global Warming

Jeff Ikler here for Kirsten Richert with our weekly “Getting Unstuck” mini feature: Here in about five minutes, we extend the idea of this week’s podcast with some related content that we feel is definitely “Worth a Listen, Look or Read.”

The idea

This week I talked with Sunny Summers, the Founding School Leader of New Harmony High School in New Orleans. https://bit.ly/2Vq6tv2 New Harmony has written the book on place-based education, as all curriculum, instruction and learning focuses on the New Orleans’ ecosystem in which the school sits. So, it would have been easy to expand here on the relationship of earth, water and culture. But as I was talking with Sunny, an underlying component of that relationship kept waving at me. “Look here,” it whispered. And the “here” are the people — the kids, the faculty, and members of the community — making up this very unique school and its relationship to the local geography. If you listened to the episode, Sunny’s focus on hiring only teachers who have that special “thing” for working with kids is evidence of this very people-centered place.

I know what you’re thinking. Education is always about the people. Next to health care, heart-centered doesn’t get much bigger than education. But often when we talk about education, it’s all the elements that float around the people that seem to get the oxygen. We talk about things such as academic progress or the lack of it, standards and curricula, high-stakes testing, and project-based learning to name but a few. These are all important components, but they can push the people doing the impacting and being impacted into the shadows. Education can sound like a technical endeavor versus a human one.

Taking the idea deeper

That focus on people reminded me of a special book that came up during our conversation: Rising - Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush. Rush takes the concept of global warming and climate change and rotates it 180°. Or maybe she flips it on its head. Instead of just focusing on increases in temperature, more intense weather, drought, forest fires, and a host of other indicators of climate change, Rush focuses on those affected by it: the people standing off to the side, increasingly shouting “Look here.” If it’s evidence the climate-change deniers want, we need to stop talking about calving glaciers and start talking more about the displacement of people and economies.

As Rush explains in video I’m including:

“This book is really about going to different places in the United States and spending a lot of time on the ground in different coastal communities where sea level rise is already an issue. And it's about drawing close to those whose lives are already being fundamentally reshaped and giving them space in this book to share their experience with others because another thing that I found pretty early on was that a lot of these people felt really alone and their experiences like ‘Oh, no one understands what it's like to have the farmland that you've depended on disappear by degrees over decades because of saline intrusion.’ And the thing I started to realize was, yeah, there actually are a lot of people who understand that. There's a lot of people in this situation.”

The video I’ve included in this post is of a book talk about Rising that Rush gave in 2018. The idea that it is people who are affected by climate change is brought into glaring clarity in the first few minutes when the bookstore owner introduces her. He fights back tears when he notes that his long-standing bookstore will become a casualty of climate change if nothing is done to avert the rising sea-levels a few blocks from his store.

Putting the idea to work

> If you can’t commit to reading Rush’s full book, here is an article that she wrote back in 2015, “Down on the Disappearing Bayou.”

> As part of a project-based exercise, have students choose a local situation on which to focus. In my neighborhood in Queens, NYC, that could mean (1) the lack of a traffic light on a nearby corner, and the lack of speed bumps to slow racing traffic; or (2) the loss of parking spaces to a new bike lane and outdoor-dining structures; OR (3) the construction of a six-story jail in the middle of an intensely residential area. Have students focus solely on how people are or will be affected by these situations.