The following books were suggested by educators and discussed at Planet Stewards Book Club Meetings from 2017 - 2019. Included are links to resources and guiding questions. All are welcome to join our discussions! For information about current Book Club selections, meeting dates, and how to attend, see our Upcoming Events page. Sign up to our email list and receive invitations to future events. Have questions? Contact: [email protected].
Animals plainly know where they’re going, but how they know has remained a stubborn mystery—until now. Supernavigators is a globe-trotting voyage of discovery alongside astounding animals of every stripe: dung beetles that steer by the Milky Way, box jellyfish that can see above the water (with a few of their twenty-four eyes), sea turtles that sense Earth’s magnetic field, and many more. David Barrie consults animal behaviorists and Nobel Prize–winning scientists to catch us up on the cutting edge of animal intelligence—revealing these wonders in a whole new light.
This touching and at times laugh-out-loud funny novel introduces us to Cooper Gosling, a painter who’s struggling in the aftermath of family tragedy. She grew up listening to her father tell stories about Antarctica’s greatest explorers, and now that she’s thirty and uncertain what to do with her life, she decides to set out on an adventure of her own. She signs up with an artist colony that piggy-backs on a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research team’s trip to South Pole, and proceeds to spend a dark and freezing year among not only fellow artists, but climate scientists.
Much to everyone’s chagrin, a climate change denier is in the mix, and as Cooper’s story unfolds, so does a rivalry between the believers and the non-believer. The novel is rife with fascinating and piercingly funny dialogue about the meaning of the scientific method, the importance of NSF funding, and how both art and science can lend insight into the workings of the universe.
Additional great resource reads:
South Pole Station takes a cool look at a hot topic.
Science, Art and Redemption in the Land of the Penguins
Transformation and Non-Adventure in Ashley Shelby’s South Pole Station
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the “Big Easy” of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.
With every passing day, and every record-breaking hurricane, it grows clearer that climate change is neither imagined nor distant―and that rising seas are transforming the coastline of the United States in irrevocable ways. In Rising, Elizabeth Rush guides readers through some of the places where this change has been most dramatic, from the Gulf Coast to Miami, and from New York City to the Bay Area. For many of the plants, animals, and humans in these places, the options are stark: retreat or perish in place.
Weaving firsthand testimonials from those facing this choice―a Staten Islander who lost her father during Sandy, the remaining holdouts of a Native American community on a drowning Isle de Jean Charles, a neighborhood in Pensacola settled by escaped slaves hundreds of years ago―with profiles of wildlife biologists, activists, and other members of these vulnerable communities, Rising privileges the voices of those too often kept at the margins.
Sleepy Valley is a town probably similar in many ways to the one where you live. Things are fine on the surface but no one is thinking about the future. Are you ready for what is about to happen to you and to towns all across the country and around the world?
Marley and Brianne, the main characters in our story, were not. Nor were their parents, their neighbors, or anyone in town. When they woke up on the day after their high school graduation they found their lives turned upside down as a series of climate catastrophes descended on their town. They struggle to find their voices and their purpose for living while attempting to save their family and friends, their town, and civilization as we know it.
The Big Melt engages, informs, and challenges readers of all ages to consider a variety of perspectives on what is rapidly becoming the challenge of the century: Now that our climate is changing, what do we do? This work of contemporary fiction, with a touch of fantasy and hope, will inspire you to care a little more about what might occur in your town in the not-too-distant future.
Read an interview with the author
This book takes the reader through Captain Moore’s initial voyage to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, his subsequent research expeditions, and his fierce work to engage the world in recognizing and taking action on the plastic invasiveness crisis in our oceans. The research expeditions presented in the book are part of a world-wide effort prompting a massive global reassessment of plastic's pervasive presence in the Gyre, raising profound questions regarding the implications of this new remote ‘habitat'. His hard-won credibility and dogged, game-changing efforts to get the world to pay attention to a looming ocean crisis have earned him world-wide respect, igniting participation in The Plastic Pollution Conversation.
The Great Lakes—Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Superior—hold 20 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water. They provide sustenance, work, and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan’s compulsively readable portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the lakes with an examination of the perils they face and the ways we can restore and preserve them for generations to come.
There is a growing crisis in our oceans as rates of infectious disease outbreaks are on the rise. Marine epidemics have the potential to cause a mass die-off of wildlife from the bottom to the top of the food chain, impacting the health of ocean ecosystems as well as lives on land. Fueled by sewage dumping, unregulated aquaculture, and drifting plastic in warming seas, ocean outbreaks are sentinels of impending global environmental disaster.
Ocean Outbreak follows renowned scientist Drew Harvell and her colleagues as they investigate how four iconic marine animals—corals, abalone, salmon, and starfish—have been devastated by disease. Based on over twenty years of research, this firsthand account of the sometimes creeping, sometimes exploding impact of disease on our ocean’s biodiversity ends with a hopeful message. Through policy changes and the implementation of innovative solutions from nature, we can reduce major outbreaks, save some ocean ecosystems, and protect our fragile environment.
Prior to discussing Ocean Outbreak you might enjoy watching Dr. Harvell discuss another of her books A Sea of Glass, on Cornell University’s Chats in the Stacks Book Talk
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published in three serialized excerpts in the New Yorker in June of 1962. The book appeared in September of that year and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. Carson’s passionate concern for the future of our planet reverberated powerfully throughout the world, and her eloquent book was instrumental in launching the environmental movement. It is without question one of the landmark books of the twentieth century.
You can read the complete original serialization from the New Yorker Magazine here:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
So far, humanity hasn’t done very well in addressing the ongoing climate catastrophe. Veteran science educator L. S. Gardiner believes we can learn to do better by understanding how we’ve dealt with other types of environmental risks in the past and why we are dragging our feet in addressing this most urgent emergency. Weaving scientific facts and research together with humor and emotion, Gardiner explores human responses to erosion, earthquakes, fires, invasive species, marine degradation, volcanic eruptions, and floods in order to illuminate why we find it so challenging to deal with climate change. Insight emerges from unexpected places - a mermaid exhibit, a Magic 8 Ball, and midcentury cartoons about a future that never came to be.
Instead of focusing on the economics and geopolitics of the debate over climate change, this book brings large-scale disaster to a human scale, emphasizing the role of the individual. We humans do have the capacity to deal with disasters. When we face threatening changes, we don’t just stand there pretending it isn’t so, we do something. But because we’re human, our responses aren’t always the right ones the first time—yet we can learn to do better. This book is essential reading for all who want to know how we can draw on our strengths to survive the climate catastrophe and forge a new relationship with nature.
In Energy: A Human History. Author Richard Rhodes reveals the fascinating history behind energy transitions over time—wood to coal to oil to electricity and beyond.
Through a cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress, through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford.
In Energy, Rhodes highlights the successes and failures that led to each breakthrough in energy production; from animal and waterpower to the steam engine, from internal-combustion to the electric motor. He addresses how we learned from such challenges, mastered their transitions, and capitalized on their opportunities. Rhodes also looks at the current energy landscape, with a focus on how wind energy is competing for dominance with cast supplies of coal and natural gas. He also addresses the specter of global warming, and a population hurtling towards ten billion by 2100.
This is a story about climate change for kids... and their adults. What might happen if we could SEEcarbon dioxide in the atmosphere? What if CO2 were, say, pink? In this engaging, funny, and highly timely book, a young boy whose parents named him Wilbur "in honor of that pig in Charlotte's Web" discovers the power of the human imagination and how he can tap that power to see a shade of pink he has never imagined – a pink so astonishing it just might save the Planet. With help from his geeky "dorkasaurus" Dad and a pair of bright green goggles, young Will learns all about carbon and caring, carpooling and climate change, and how learning to see "this particular pink" will help all of us keep our Planet cool.
In this book Pulitzer Prize winning author and world-renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson states that to stave off the mass extinction of species, including our own, we must move swiftly to preserve the biodiversity of our planet. Half-Earth argues that the situation facing us is too large to be solved piecemeal and proposes a solution commensurate with the magnitude of the problem: dedicate fully half the surface of the Earth to nature. Identifying actual regions of the planet that can still be reclaimed―such as the California redwood forest, the Amazon River basin, and grasslands of the Serengeti, among others.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, “a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation,” uses the indigenous cultures’ sacred plant, sweetgrass, as a poetic metaphor to explain the origins of plant, animal, and human life on Mother Earth. Dr. Kimmerer presents this book as a gift of braided stories “meant to heal our relationship with the world” by weaving together the three strands of “indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most.” She explains the necessity for humankind to be rejoined with its relationships to nature, and to understand the implications of the Earth’s gifts and our responsibility to return these gifts.
Adapted from: https://longwoodgardens.org/sites/default/files/wysiwyg/Discussion_And_Question_Guide_Braiding_Sweetgrass.pdf
Adapted from: https://longwoodgardens.org/sites/default/files/wysiwyg/Discussion_And_Question_Guide_Braiding_Sweetgrass.pdf
The Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change by Ingrid Zabel, Don Duggan-Haas and Robert Ross is a comprehensive tool for educators that “focuses on the scientific aspects of climate change: how climate works and why scientists think it’s changing, and the science and engineering behind the steps that would mitigate climate change and enable humans to adapt to climate changes that do occur.” Although the focus is on high school educators, teachers of all ages can find scientifically accurate information and links to highly regarded resources
“The Indigenous communities and their traditional territories are the islands of biocultural diversity in the ever-rising sea of development and urbanization. The Archipelago of Hope takes readers on a journey to explore the inextricable links between Indigenous cultures and their lands, and how they form the foundation for climate change resilience around the world.
Indigenous peoples have a millennia-long track record of maintaining intimate relationships with the natural world, which has nourished their communities and sustained their cultures. This is the track record that they have maintained despite formidable odds, including multiple “izations”—colonization, Christianization, sedentarization, and globalization.
What makes Indigenous communities indispensible in the search for climate change solutions is that their ancestral territories are the “living laboratories,” where the traditional practices and understanding of nature meet modern technology and scientific insights, generating new knowledge critical for developing relevant climate change responses.” Excerpt from https://orionmagazine.org/2017/11/eight-questions-author-gleb-raygorodetsky-archipelago-hope/
Here's an article by Gleb Raygorodetsky about how Indigenous peoples are disproportionally burdened by climate change and why their traditional knowledge is essential to securing the health of our planet https://www.guernicamag.com/the-archipelago-of-hope/
In Junk Raft: An Ocean Voyage and a Rising Tide of Activities to Fight Plastic Pollution, Marcus Eriksen tells the story of how he, his wife Anna Cummins, and hundreds of volunteers began studying the world’s oceans and found a “plastic smog of microscopic debris that permeates our oceans globally, defying simple clean-up efforts. What’s more, these microplastics and their toxic chemistry have seeped into the food chain, threatening marine life and humans alike.
"Far from being a gloomy treatise on an environmental catastrophe, Junk Raft tells the exciting story of Eriksen and his team’s fight to solve the problem of plastic pollution."
What do you think is the take-away message from this book?
Eriksen discusses gyres and the myth of a giant floating garbage patch and ”smog” of micro-plastics. What do you think can be done as a next step in terms of the science of studying plastics in the world’s oceans? How do ocean gyres affect your local community?
What are some solutions and innovations to address micro-plastics in the oceans problem? What advice can we give our colleagues who want to make a difference?
What are your thoughts and concerns of micro-plastics moving up the food chain?
There is a big discussion of plant-based plastic in the book. In your opinion, are plant-based plastics good or bad for our environment?
Eriksen states that “chemistry, product, process and system are the four intervention points where the utility of plastics needs to be reinvented.’ What are you thoughts on this?
B Corp are corporations with a mission statement that “social or environmental justice is of equal standing with the profit margin.” Eriksen lists a few B Corporations do you know of others?
What is your reaction to his letter to the "Member Corporations of the American Chemical Council?"
Earth Day is but 5-weeks away – how might we use the plastic we collect from our oceans, rivers, streams and land to help educate our community?
In this NOAA Planet Stewards Book Club meeting we'll be discussing Ship Breaker, a 2010 young adult Cli-fi novel by Paolo Bacigalupi set in a post-apocalyptic future. Human civilization is in decline for ecological reasons. The polar ice caps have melted and New Orleans is underwater. In America’s Gulf Coast region, where grounded oil tankers are being broken down for parts, Nailer, a teenage boy, works the light crew, scavenging for copper wiring just to make quota - and hopefully live to see another day. But when, by luck or chance, he discovers an exquisite clipper ship beached during a recent hurricane, Nailer faces the most important decision of his life: Strip the ship for all it’s worth or rescue its lone survivor, a beautiful and wealthy girl who could lead him to a better life.
How do humans define wealth, could this cause a conflict with ecological awareness and activism?
How much is your world worth?
Dystopian literature is frequently portrayed as a stark and depressing genre that occasionally offers some form of hope. How does Ship Breaker fit into that description, and in what ways (if any) does it break the mold?
How does social class play out in Ship Breaker and are there similar disparities in today’s society? Please elaborate on what this means for equitable societies.
The Patrick Ness review and the Paolo Bacigalupi interview offer up different viewpoints on the purpose of dystopian literature. Ness argues that dystopian lit is popular with YA readers because it represents their lives and the challenges they face. Bacigalupi comments on its ability to give readers an opportunity to think about some of the issues our society faces. Does Ship Breakersucceed at either?
What will our world look like when we run out of nonrenewable resources in a post global climate change age? How do we engage YA in this discussion without the readers feeling defeated?
How does this book address green issues? Are some of these issues already occurring today?
Recycling
Drastic change in the environment
Corporate consumption of resources
Harvesting body parts
Genetic engineering
A few key themes included in the story: sea level rise, extreme weather, climate change, segregation of the elite, recycling…How do these concepts play out today as we enter a changing planet ecosystem?
The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where climate change has completely altered the processes of civilization. Discuss the importance of the setting to the events of the story.
For additional thought and discussion:
https://www.climategen.org/blog/book-of-the-month-ship-breaker/
About the Book: In 2011, David Goodrich rides his bike from the coast of Delaware to the coast of Oregon through gas-drilling Pennsylvania, tornado-prone Missouri, drought-ridden Kansas, and wildfire-choked Montana - to tell the story that our planet is in peril. As he pedals from town to town and from state to state, he connects the dots for us on climate change, sharing what he experiences from this ride and a few prior and subsequent treks. He also combines personal reflections with sobering facts, figures, and his own eyewitness account of climate change impacts and other’s perspectives from across much of our nation.
About the Author: Out of college David Goodrich worked briefly on a Gulf Coast drilling rig but then settled down to a scientific career, working for the U.N. Global Climate Observing System in Geneva, Switzerland and at NOAA in Silver Spring, Maryland. There, he served for many years as director of NOAA's Climate Observations and Monitoring Program and from 1998 to 1999 as the head of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Despite his late introduction to cycling, David not only rode the 26 miles round-trip from his home to his work at NOAA for many years, but he set out on a 4,200 mile Trans-america bike trek. On this ride he combined his avocation as a cyclist with his vocation as a scientist to examine climate change.
Seamus McGraw takes us on a trip along America’s culturally fractured back roads and listens to farmers and ranchers and fishermen, many of them people who are not ideologically, politically, or in some cases even religiously inclined to believe in man-made global climate change. He shows us how they are already being affected and the risks they are already taking on a personal level to deal with extreme weather and the very real consequences for their livelihoods. McGraw also speaks to scientists and policymakers who are trying to harness that most renewable of American resources, a sense of hope and self-reliance that remains strong in the face of daunting challenges. By bringing these voices together, Betting the Farm on a Drought ultimately becomes a model for how we all might have a pragmatic, reasoned conversation about our changing climate.
Since 2008, coal emissions have also generally declined. While total coal emissions are below those from petroleum and other liquids, there is more CO2 released per Btu of energy. The decline in coal emissions has contributed to a lower carbon intensity of U.S. energy consumption. Natural gas emissions have generally increased since 2008, primarily reflecting growth in the natural gas share of electricity generation largely through displacement of coal-fired generation. http://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/carbon//
What do you see for the future of coal and the use of methane? What efforts are happening in your community to reduce/sequester carbon dioxide?
In this fiction, water is scarce in the American Southwest. Texas and New Mexico are all but abandoned, and the Texans are struggling to survive along with the other unfortunates of society.
With natural resources dwindling, Arizona, Nevada, and California are locked in a fierce battle for what little relief the shriveling Colorado River can provide. Catherine Case, the Queen of the Colorado—murderous and hard as steel—seems to be coming out on top with enough control to manage luxury arcology developments in Las Vegas while the rest of civilization descends into a scene of anarchic violence and poverty.
Into this volatile environment steps Angel, a Las Vegas water knife. His job is to secure, or cut the water for the Southern Nevada water authority, deal with authorities that won’t play. Rumors abound of a new source of water in Phoenix, a place full of refugees hoping to head to California. Angel heads off to investigate but answers are elusive and meets Lucy Monroe, a journalist who covers the new form of reality reporting, a voyeuristic look at those suffering the most. She is investigating the death of her friend Jamie. As the water levels drop, the stakes are raised much higher than any of them anticipate, and the fragments of knowledge that they have must be pooled to save their lives.
The drought in America has reached epic proportions and law and order has vanished, leaving the population at the mercy of gangs and warlords. There is water available, but this is controlled from the end of the gun, leaving those without looking longingly at the lush gardens and pools of those with power. There is mass migration too, but rather than Mexicans trying to reach America, you have Texans travelling to reach water.
Additional Resources:
In many ways, The Water Knife is an extension of the results of the trends seen in that video series. What do you think the future holds for water regulation and population growth in the southwest?
The Legal Dictionary explains water rights:
Water rights general emerge from a person’s ownership of the land bordering the bank of a watercourse or from a person’s actual use of a watercourse. Water rights are conferred and regulated by judge-made Common Law, state, and federal legislative bodies and other government departments Water rights can also be created by contract, as when one person transfers his water rights to another.
In the eighteenth century, regulation of water was primarily governed by custom and practice. As the U.S. population expanded over the next two centuries, however, and the use of water for agrarian and domestic purposes increased, water became viewed as a finite and frequently scarce resource. As a result, laws were passed to establish guidelines for the fair distribution of this resource. Courts began developing common-law doctrines to accommodate landowners who asserted competing claims over a body of water.
These doctrines govern three areas: riparian rights, surface water rights, and underground water rights. An owner or possessor of land that abuts a natural stream, river, pond, or lake is called a riparian owner and the law gives owners certain rights to water that are incident to possession of the adjacent land. Riparian owners have a right to enjoy the natural condition of the water undiminished in quantity or quality by other riparian owners.
Every riparian owner enjoys this right to the same extent and degree, and each such owner maintains a qualified right to use the water for domestic purposes, such as drinking and bathing. However, this qualified right does not entitle riparian owners to transport water away from the land abutting the watercourse not does it permit owners to use the water for most irrigation projects or commercial enterprises.
What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming - by Per Espen Stoknes
Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, by George Marshall
Huffington Post Article: Why Psychology Should Be A Part Of The Fight Against Climate Change
NPR article:How Psychology Can Save The World From Climate Change
Instead, he suggests that we upend the 5 D's:
What are concrete ways we can use these strategies in our own communities or schools and with people close to us?
How can we use these reframing ideas in our work with students and their families?
Do you agree? What is the role of the teacher as a climate communicator in your community?
This approach would be ideal for helping students envision a different low-carbon world. How would you use this in your work?
Is this a shift that you have already taken or one that you would consider in the future? Are there things the Planet Stewards program can help you and ultimately your students become more connected to the world around them?
This new genre explores the potential, drastic consequences of climate change. "It’s not an entirely new concept—Jules Verne played with the idea in a few of his novels in the 1880s—but the theme of man-made change doesn’t appear in literature until well into the 20th century. The British author J.G. Ballard pioneered the environmental apocalypse narrative in books such as The Wind from Nowhere starting in the 1960s. But as public awareness of climate change increased, so did the popularity of these themes: Searching for the term “climate fiction” on Amazon today returns over 1,300 results. Since the turn of the millennium, cli-fi has evolved from a subgenre of science fiction into a class of its own. Unlike traditional sci-fi, its stories seldom focus on imaginary technologies or faraway planets. Instead the pivotal themes are all about Earth, examining the impact of pollution, rising sea levels, and global warming on human civilization. And the genre’s growing presence in college curriculums, as well as its ability to bridge science with the humanities and activism, is making environmental issues more accessible to young readers—proving literature to be a surprisingly valuable tool in collective efforts to address global warming." (Margaret Atwood in the Atlantic)
The fundamental story of climate change is simple. Human behavior provoked a change in the weather, unleashing, among other effects, dangerous storms. This story should sound familiar. It’s one of the oldest narratives in the human repository. In a February 2015 feature for The Guardian, the cli-fi author Sarah Holding wrote that the genre “reconnects young readers with their environment, helping them to value it more, especially when today, a large amount of their time is spent in the virtual world.” Also check out Sarah Holding's Top 10 cli-fi books"
Are there any books that you have used with students? How did you incorporate it into your curriculum? Are any books particularly attractive for future use?
If you have seen the show, do you agree that climate is enough of a climate theme to call it cli-fi?
“Ecological meltdown makes for a reliable sci-fi setting for the same reason Wall Street tycoons are convenient villains – to the average moviegoer, it’s believable. Serious environmental dislocations (at some scale) are all but inevitable. Many of them are underway. As a movie set up, an eco-dystopia needs no explication." Do you agree? Do you think that these movies increase awareness that there is "no escape" and we need to take care of planet Earth?
Discussion questions for The Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Sea Levels. Don’t have time to read the book? Just read the summary below and watch the intro video.
Summary: The past fifteen thousand years--the entire span of human civilization--have witnessed dramatic sea level changes, which began with rapid global warming at the end of the Ice Age, when sea levels were more than 700 feet below modern levels. Over the next eleven millennia, the oceans climbed in fits and starts. These rapid changes had little effect on those humans who experienced them, partly because there were so few people on earth, and also because they were able to adjust readily to new coastlines.
Global sea levels stabilized about six thousand years ago except for local adjustments that caused often quite significant changes to places like the Nile Delta. So the curve of inexorably rising seas flattened out as urban civilizations developed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and South Asia. The earth's population boomed, quintupling from the time of Christ to the Industrial Revolution. The threat from the oceans increased with our crowding along shores to live, fish, and trade.
Since 1860, the world has warmed significantly and the ocean's climb has speeded. The sea level changes are cumulative and gradual; no one knows when they will end. The Attacking Ocean, from celebrated author Brian Fagan, tells a tale of the rising complexity of the relationship between humans and the sea at their doorsteps, a complexity created not by the oceans, which have changed but little.
"There is a strong realization that we have to do it together," said Chris Zevenbergen, chair of the Flood Resilience Group of the Unesco-IHE Institute for Water Education. “There is a continuous effort to keep our feet dry, to keep our country safe. I think that is a bit at the heart of the Dutch people and in their DNA.” Are there lessons for other countries with the Dutch methods?
Other articles on the same topic:
Resource List:
Consider actions that were taken in some recent healthcare studies.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/we-may-have-found-a-way-to-reach-vaccine-skeptical-parents_55c0e2d0e4b053bc04e90ff2?kvcommref=mostpopular
Climate Stories - The Climate Minnesota project is collecting "climate stories".
This book focuses on the great hurricane of 1938, the early days of weather and hurricane forecasting, and presents first hand accounts of the tracking and impacts of the storm. You can find more information at the following sites:
Robinson also makes an entertaining case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity. Click here to see his TED talk. Also consider reading the following books by Dr. Robinson, The Element and Out of Our Minds, Learning to be Creative.
Lisa Rivero writes about the father of creativity, E. Paul Torrance, who developed the widely used Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, used to identify creative ability in children. He also created the Future Problem Solving Program, “to develop the ability of young people globally to design and promote positive futures using critical, creative thinking.”
E. Paul Torrance's Manifesto:
Here are a couple of great lists of ideas for Teaching for Creativity
In addition to the book (or if you do not have the book), we recommend the documentary film of William's journey at www.movingwindmills.org.
“An alarming report from Alaska and Northwest Canada, ground zero for climate change. Disproportionate temperature increases in the north, relative to the lower latitudes, make the region a perfect laboratory for witnessing the effects of global warming and for designing strategies to mitigate or adapt to altered weather patterns. According to longtime Alaska resident and veteran author Lord (Creative Writing/Univ. of Alaska, Anchorage; Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life, 2009, etc.), climate-related changes are happening now, radically transforming landscapes and lives. Her account’s power stems from her on-site observations, lyrical descriptions of the land and sea and sensitive interviews of local officials and natives whose insight and experience humanize an otherwise vast and arcane subject. They’re already making hard choices about land and water use, fire prevention and species conservation, as well as about combating climate change while still respecting traditional cultures.”
Using one engaging story after another, coupled with accessible scientific facts, world authority Richard B. Alley explores the fascinating history of energy use by humans over the centuries, gives a doubt-destroying proof that already-high levels of carbon dioxide are causing damaging global warming, and surveys the alternative energy options that are available to exploit right now.
All the videos are a bit less than an hour in length. We know "Stuff" is something many of us struggle with in our lives, so it was really interesting to hear what educators think about these issues as individuals and the myriad of ways they present them in their classes.
Related Resources:
This is a remarkable documentary transports the viewer to the arctic to experience shrinking glaciers and ice-sheets. The photographing is breathtaking. You can feel the ice, so grab a warm blanket and check it out!
The official synopsis from Google Play:
Filmmaker Jeff Orlowski profiles National Geographic photographer James Balog as he endeavors to capture undeniable proof of climate change by launching the ambitious Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), a project that entails using time-lapse photography to document shifting ice glaciers. With the aid of his young assistants, Balog travels to three continents, placing 30 cameras in key positions to record vivid images of the majestic ice caps as they slowly melt away. In the process of capturing these incredible shots, Balog finds his skepticism fading, and experiences a brush with mortality that leaves him positively convinced that nature is currently experiencing a profound shift, the likes of which has never been witnessed by modern man.
If you haven't seen the film, here are some places you can get it:
One of the more popular climate scams employed by the EPA, Katherine Hayhoe and many others – is to show photographs of glaciers from the 1940s (or later) next to recent photos. The implication being that these glaciers started to retreat sometime recently, and that it is due to global warming. This is blatant fraud. These glaciers have been retreating for hundreds of years, and it has nothing to do with CO2. http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2012/01/time-lapse-video-shows-how-glacier.html
If a student came to your class with this information, how would you handle it?
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