Teaching the Culprits of Climate Chaos

At least two of my former high school students lost their homes in the recent fires that hit Altadena in Southern California. A Rethinking Schools writer, now a school administrator in Altadena, lost both his home and his school — with the homes of many of his students and faculty members also reduced to ash. The enormity of loss is hard to grasp. 

On Democracy Now!, Leah Stokes, University of California Santa Barbara professor and host of the podcast A Matter of Degrees, offered some context on the wildfires: “We know that climate change is the main driver here. The fact is that LA 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. . . . More than twice the amount of area is burning in California than would have otherwise because of climate change, and . . . climate change is the main driver of all of this dryness.” 

Yes, the author of the misery generated by the Southern California wildfires, and countless other not-so-natural disasters, is climate change. But our urgent curricular responsibility is to help students evaluate the social roots of the crisis. Because it is only from a diagnosis of the causes of climate destabilization that we can figure out what to do about it.

As these fires raged, I joined my friend and colleague Tim Swinehart at Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon, to teach an updated version of my lesson “The Climate Crisis Trial: A Role Play on the Roots of Global Warming.” (Instructions and student materials can be downloaded at the Zinn Education Project.) Too often, students’ default response to environmental degradation is puny and individual: recycle, replace the plastic spoons in the cafeteria, and yes, take shorter showers. As I mentioned in last issue’s “Earth, Justice, and Our Classrooms” column, as personal virtues these are fine; as a response to the climate calamity we face, they are inconsequential. An inability to think systemically and in terms of collective action is not students’ fault; capitalism conditions us to respond individually to social problems.

For students to join in creating meaningful strategy, we need to help them make explanations: Who or what is to blame for our climate predicament? 

The structure of the trial activity is simple. Students are divided into five defendant groups — fossil fuel companies, the U.S. government, governments of so-called developing countries like China and India, U.S. consumers, and the system of global capitalism: “the market.” Each group receives an “indictment” along with lines of possible defense. All are charged with the same crime: 

You are charged with the destruction of cultures, species, and putting at risk the lives of countless millions of people around the world. But your crime is also about the future. You are destroying the lives of people throughout the world who are alive today. And you are destroying the lives of people yet to be born.

The five defendants: Fossil fuel companies are the source of most greenhouse gas emissions, and have been since the dawn of industrialization — coal, oil, and so-called natural gas. The U.S. government subsidizes the fossil fuel industry and has squandered its immense power to redirect our energy system. China is the leading emitter of carbon dioxide, and with India burns far more coal — the most polluting fossil fuel — than the rest of the world combined. At the core of the fossil fuel-burning colossus is U.S. consumer culture — Thinglandia — about 5 percent of the world’s population and consumer of about a quarter of the world’s resources. And global capitalism: the rules of the game — an economic system with a laser focus on private profit; it has put in jeopardy all life on Earth. 

At Lincoln, Tim and I played prosecutors and tag-teamed going after climate-crime defendants, one by one. Each group had prepared written defenses. These were smart and eloquent. There was spirited finger-pointing; the jury and members of other groups challenged one another with astute questions. 

Afterward, in written comments and discussion, students assigned percentages of blame for each group or indicated interconnections among the groups as they located responsibility for our climate catastrophe.

In Tim’s classes, and in others where I have led this activity, students have contradictory responses when it comes to the guilt of the capitalist system. One student found capitalism 40 percent guilty because it is “the overarching arm of controlling how money flows, and how lives are ultimately affected.” Another student who defended capitalism so ably in the trial that she sounded like a free market preacher, found the system 60 percent to blame in her write-up. On the other hand, one student found capitalism only 3 percent at fault because it is “not a thing. It is not responsible because it does not exist.”

Of course, there are no right answers — no single climate culprit. I like how the trial gets students to wrestle with ethical issues of causality, exploring personal vs. systemic vs. governmental responsibility. And it is fun. Students have a good time, even if we are dealing with dire circumstances.

But one — maybe obvious — takeaway reinforced for me this year is that just because students land on groups or forces responsible for the climate emergency does not translate into knowing how to address these root causes. For example, Ally wrote in her trial debrief, “The groups with the most blame in the trial have the most responsibility to make a change. The groups making the largest negative impacts could be the ones to create the most positive.” 

Ally is right that those who make a mess should clean it up — no matter how much it costs. However, regardless of its massive culpability, it is magical thinking to propose that the fossil fuel industry will play any role creating positive change. 

“After having this discussion I think fossil fuel production should come to an end,” wrote Eva. “Fossil fuel production is pointless anymore.” Students found the fossil fuel industry more at fault than any other defendant. Reasonably, many students wanted some kind of government intervention or crackdown. “The government needs to act,” Eli wrote with understatement.

Abolishing Fossil Fuels

Just after the trial role play, I began reading Kevin A. Young’s Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won. Young opens his book: “Strategizing begins with an assessment of the enemy, namely how it exercises power and where it is vulnerable.” For Young, today’s “enemy” is the fossil fuel industry and the capitalist system. 

It may be counterintuitive, but to develop strategies for climate justice, Young proposes that we look to social movements that had nothing to do with the climate: the movement to abolish slavery; auto workers organizing in the 1930s; the Civil Rights struggle in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963; and the activism leading to the 1970 Clean Air Act. Young argues that “the fundamental source of those movements’ power was the direct threat they posed to capitalists through strikes, boycotts, and other mass disruption.” 

A climate justice curriculum needn’t settle on the movements that Young examines, but I love the idea that a way to help students imagine responses to the environmental crisis is by looking at when movements succeed, and asking students to tease out the factors that made these movements powerful — and then to bring these lessons forward to the movement to abolish fossil fuels. 

Whether or not we approach “abolishing fossil fuels” by doing the kind of analysis of elite vulnerability that Kevin Young suggests, by centering social movements in a climate curriculum, we alert students that the response to injustice is collective action. That activist sensibility is the “habit of mind” we need to nurture. 

At the Zinn Education Project, there is abundant curriculum for this — on the abolition movement, Reconstruction, feminist struggles, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and more. But ZEP also features lessons that tie directly to environmental justice: “Food, Farming, and Justice: A Role Play on La Vía Campesina”; “Blockadia: Teaching How the Movement Against Fossil Fuels Is Changing the World”; “From the New Deal to the Green New Deal: Stories of Crisis and Possibility”; and in Rethinking Schools: “‘We Cannot Create What We Cannot Imagine’: Helping Students Picture Climate Justice.”

Yes, let’s teach the culprits of climate chaos. That’s how students learn who has created and maintains our predicament — and what needs to be abolished. But we can also alert students to the fact that in every era, people have organized to challenge injustice. And, although no victory is clean and permanent, sometimes they win.