Welcome to the second installment of Rethinking Schools’ climate justice newsletter.
As we described in our inaugural email blast: “We aim to connect climate justice educators across regions, disciplines, and grade levels to deepen their work. We’ll explore what ‘climate justice’ education looks like through a kaleidoscope of teaching environments and invite you to join us in conversation and movement-building.”
As we assembled the newsletter, Hurricane Milton crashed into Florida. It went from tropical depression to massive hurricane in record speed, according to NASA — killing and wrecking as it moved through the state. Across the country, communities in northern California saw early October temperatures of 108 degrees, beating previous records by 9 degrees.
And the genocide in Gaza grows more unspeakable.
As always, we look for hope in the defiance, imagination, and hard work of activists across the world. A few examples are included below. In these harsh and unequal times, we can learn from and inspire each other.
— Bill Bigelow and Mimi Eisen
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“Let’s Be Clear” on Palestine and Climate Justice
In the first installment of this newsletter, we shared Rethinking Schools’ “Teach Palestine” issue and underscored that climate justice educators have a crucial role in teaching about the war on Gaza. In the intervening months, students and educators led sweeping anti-war protests and bore violent crackdowns across the country, and Israel’s assault on Palestine deepened in both Gaza and the West Bank — and now, of course, in Lebanon.
In the new school year, many students have resolved to continue organizing against the U.S.-backed genocide. As Prism reports — with moving quotes from students — this anti-war movement faces a new patchwork of campus policies in response to the spring sit-ins and encampments.
Environmental justice reporter Alleen Brown analyzes how the backlash to Palestinian solidarity camps echoes the crackdown on Standing Rock in 2016 and climate protests around the world. Time and again, Brown writes, we glimpse “how easily laws and police funding designed to protect against terrorism can be repurposed to suppress environmental and land defense movements, with industry support.” All the while, a strong current of solidarity runs between environmental, Indigenous, and Palestinian liberation groups.
Let’s be clear, as the politicians love to say: To be for war is to be against climate justice. To be for military escalation is to be for environmental degradation. We cannot excuse policies that drastically increase emissions, destroy ecosystems, force migration, support fossil fuel companies, squander government funds needed to address global warming, and call the people enacting them good on climate.
“Our liberation struggle is interconnected with global movements advocating for Indigenous rights, land rights, the fight against the fossil fuel industry and climate colonialism,” Palestinian water engineers Rasha Abu Dayyeh and Abeer Butmeh explain in their Friends of the Earth International article. “This is part and parcel of the collective struggle for a world where everyone has the right to live with dignity, free from oppression.”
Environmental Justice Activists Look Like My Students
In July 2023, a fire ripped through an abandoned Kmart across the street from Parkrose High School in Portland, Oregon, expelling plumes of smoke and asbestos over the neighborhood. In September, Parkrose teacher Moé Yonamine’s environmental justice class began studying the intersections of colonization, climate justice movements, and environmental racism near and far — from Portland to Lāhainā. But Moé observed how her students at Parkrose, one of the most diverse schools in the state, did not seem to consider themselves or people who look like them environmental activists.
In the fall “Earth, Justice, and Our Classrooms” column for Rethinking Schools, Moé describes a final project she designed to encourage her students “to see how powerful their ideas and voices are — that they are the community, and have the right to step up and lead for justice.” She posed an action project grounded in environmental harms and remedies, with a series of questions — What are the issues? What are the impacts? What are the actions? — and a visit to the abandoned Kmart site.
Moé outlines how the final project unfolded — from research, to a site visit, to a mixer activity steeped in personal narratives and impacts, to actions students and their neighbors could take to bring environmental and community justice to the Kmart site. Students came up with proposals for the site, including a community center, a playground, and a grocery store with healthy foods. “I think if anything, we need a homeless shelter,” said one student, Makiyah. “Homelessness is everywhere and it’s not going away. There’s so much space there. Why can’t we do that?”
Moé’s class invited the public into the plans they dreamt up, set up a school fair in the library, met with environmental and legal groups, and much else besides. Moé writes, “The environmental justice fair showed students that the reason we learn is to change the world for the better. And that this world needs their voices in it.”
Debunking False Climate Solutions in Our Classrooms
The “Earth, Justice, and Our Classrooms” column in the summer issue of Rethinking Schools was Tim Swinehart’s “Debunking False Climate Solutions in Our Classrooms.” Reflecting on 20 years of teaching about the climate crisis, Tim writes, “It’s been an ongoing discussion to help students parse legitimate attempts to address the crisis, as compared to so many false solutions that are, upon closer examination, greenwashed practices or products designed more to protect polluting industries’ profits than to protect humans and the planet.” Tim’s article went to print as the Environmental Defense Fund announced its new investments in solar geoengineering — in short, blocking sunlight to cool the Earth, and likely creating a host of new existential threats in the process. An incredible deflection, in more ways than one. This playing God with nature is what happens when policymakers fail to do the one thing needed to address the crisis: end our reliance on fossil fuels.
One resource Tim uses in his classroom is Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: Resist False Solutions to Climate Change, a colorful 60-page booklet (free online) that brims with art, photos, cartoons, and infographics. Developed by grassroots climate justice groups, the booklet outlines 12 bogus fixes to the climate crisis and names geoengineering as “perhaps the ultimate false solution” — one that “represents a potentially catastrophic threat to human rights and the environment, yet does nothing to address the root causes of climate change.” Hoodwinked then lists six principles for real solutions. One example: “replace economies of greed with economies serving ecological and human needs.” OK. Easier said than done, but this is what needs to happen.
Tim describes a research-mixer in which students investigate the false solutions and principles for real solutions identified in the pages of Hoodwinked. They meet to share and collect information from one another. He offers a final reflection from one of his students, Addison: “I find it interesting that a lot of false solutions are super technologically advanced or reliant on big corporations. The real solutions are more about creating community and using local practices in order to create new systems.”
“That Contract Means Nothing if Our Earth Is on Fire”
In June, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) opened contract negotiations to the public for the first time. Chief among CTU’s demands is climate action to address ways global warming bears on K–12 education across the city and beyond. For one thing, CPS itself has a huge carbon footprint. According to Lauren Bianchi, a social studies teacher and chair of the CTU’s climate justice committee, “CPS buildings produce yearly emissions equivalent to about 900 railcars’ worth of coal.”
CTU represents teachers across more than 500 schools, many in old buildings with crumbling infrastructure. The union calls for solar panels, heat pumps, composting programs, removal of lead pipes, suspension of gas heaters, establishment of heating and cooling centers, among other demands to meet extreme weather and environmental degradation. Along with measures to ensure that students can actually study, CTU addresses what students study. The union calls for CPS to expand career technical curriculum, to prepare young Chicagoans for clean energy jobs.
These contract demands follow an important trend among unions that recognize the intensifying climate crisis and reach for more than wages and benefits improvements. In 2023, Los Angeles Unified School District teachers went on strike and secured a contract that, alongside other demands, called for greater climate literacy in L.A. schools. Three years earlier, janitors in Minneapolis took to the streets with high school students and environmental justice groups to protest unfair labor practices — including corporate water and energy consumption — and clinched a deal to lower carbon emissions.
Contract negotiations for CTU are ongoing. But it is one of the most powerful teachers unions in the country — and helped elect Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, former teacher and union organizer — so it is poised to advance at least some of its climate demands. In the words of CTU president Stacey Davis Gates, “That contract means nothing if our Earth is on fire.”
Teaching to “Change the System”
And check out the Prism article by Ray Levy Uyeda, “‘They Learn that You Need to Change the Rules, the Incentives, and the System.’” Uyeda interviews Chicago teacher Ann Finkel and Iowa teacher Rachel — pseudonymous because of curricular repression there — about their use of materials from Rethinking Schools and our Zinn Education Project (coordinated with Teaching for Change): “Climate justice isn’t often built into official district lesson plans, but both teachers find ways to discuss everything from Just Transition frameworks and climate reparations to what we all lose when we sacrifice the planet’s health.” The article is part of Prism’s inspirational series, “Teaching Truths: Educators Speak on Justice and Liberation in the Classroom.”
Our Zinn Education Project (coordinated with Teaching for Change) has a Teach Climate Justice Campaign, with classroom-tested lessons.
Many of these materials come from our Rethinking Schools book, A People’s Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis. And check out our booklet, Teaching for Climate Justice, a compilation of “Earth, Justice, and Our Classrooms” columns from Rethinking Schools magazine.