Support NeoGAF

[Piecake]

On Thursday, President Trump’s decision to withdraw from a landmark global climate agreement touched off a new round of combustible debate. But here in Idaho, Esler (The teacher) has managed to nurture a growing cadre of budding environmentalists by eschewing politics and focusing on tangible changes in the natural landscape, changes that affect the crystalline water, the ancient trees, the once-abundant snow.

Esler prods students to investigate and reach their own conclusions about people’s impact on the environment. Instead of lecturing about the perils of warmer winters, he takes his class into the surrounding Bitterroot Mountains to measure declining snowpack. Instead of telling them to use energy-efficient LED lightbulbs, he has them test the efficiency of four varieties and then write about which they prefer and why.

On the trip to Farragut State Park, students take pencil-thin core samples from their trees. They count the rings to get the tree’s age, then do some math to determine how much carbon the tree pulls out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis.

“We could do this in the classroom,” Esler said. “I could just give them the numbers and show them a PowerPoint. But now I have kids smelling the inside of a tree. That’s a tangible connection. . . . I hope it makes them think about what happens to that carbon when it comes out of their tail pipe.”

After learning about the persistence of plastic in the environment, Lenna Reardon talked her boss at the local ice cream parlor into installing a recycling bin. Connor Brooks’s family now composts. Jordan Lo, the vice president of the Environmental Club, is on a crusade to get his classmates to ditch bottled water for reusable containers.

Most of Esler’s students say they rarely thought about climate change before taking his class. Craig Cooper, a state water researcher who leads a local climate action group, admits that outreach is a problem.

“The single biggest failure of the climate movement is that it hasn’t done a good enough job building relationships,” Cooper said. To most people, climate change is “a political argument they don’t want to get into.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...f64b4fe2dfc_story.html?utm_term=.5829d2883af0

 

[Gnomepowered]

I wish more students had the opportunity to do real-world data collection and experiments, so this was a heartening article to read. The college courses I have taught only had the budget for like...one field trip per semester (although it wasn't a field camp class or anything).

Generally, I think most people are aware of climate change, even if they claim to not believe in it. My uncle says he doesn't believe the science, and then laments how little snow they have had the last decade or so and how rarely he gets to take out his snowmobiles.

In America, science has become politicized to an extend I haven't seen in other countries, and anti-science stances and conspiracy theories have become weaponized to such an extent that it is harming the country. People doubt science because they believe all scientists are falsifying data to push an agenda, which unfortunately does happen, but not to the extent they believe. They dismiss climate findings because they believe scientists are biased in researching climate change- and of course they are biased, if they wouldn't do the research in the first place, but that doesn't invalidate the results. People say climate change can't be real because they heard on Fox news or whatever that scientists don't agree on all the facts- which is true, but basically on how fast we are going to be screwed, not whether we are screwed or why.

There is obviously a communications disconnect between the scientist minority and the non-scientist majority they are working to help, and I believe very much that introducing these politicized scientific concepts to kids before they are old enough to be fully politicized themselves is important. When you are too young to have been immersed in the bullshit liberal-conservative-whatever culture wars, maybe it's easier to accept what evidence is saying, without trying to twist it to match your non-scientist beliefs?