Carter Latendresse
8 December 2016
NAIS and the Only Responsible Stance on Anthropogenic Climate Change
In our commitment to inclusivity, bipartisanship, and debate regarding climate change, the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) has paradoxically abdicated its leadership responsibility and already betrayed two generations of students. We have known since the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report in 1990 that anthropogenic climate change is a real and pressing danger. We have today in NAIS a third generation of students who have lived with the known effects of anthropogenic climate change since 1990, and we can no longer remain neutral under the guise of inclusivity, bipartisanship, and debate without permanently forfeiting our respectability as educators. We have witnessed during our most recent U.S. presidential election process what happens when we entertain false equivalencies about candidates and stances on issues: we mislead the electorate and students by misnaming bigotry vs. inclusivity and denial of science vs. acceptance of science as differences of opinion. NAIS has a moral and professional responsibility to denounce climate change deniers and anti-scientific rhetoric. The existential threat of human-induced climate change far outweighs the threat of alienating a few families and potential donors who might still cling to the inaccuracies and disinformation masquerading as climate change “skepticism.” We owe it to our students to have challenging, respectful conversations that acknowledge that we are rooted in and dependent upon nature and that we are responsible for protecting nature for future generations. Further, we in NAIS should loudly proclaim that we recognize that human-induced climate change is an urgent threat that requires immediate and extensive action on the part of our schools. NAIS needs to do four things: one, begin measuring its carbon dioxide emissions at each school and setting reduction goals; two, begin divesting from fossil fuel stock in its endowments; three, create Preschool - Twelfth grade climate literacy curricula; and four, modeled after the NAIS People of Color national conference, NAIS should also convene a national NAIS Climate Change conference as soon as possible that hosts both teacher and student teams working together to end anthropogenic climate change. We at Catlin Gabel School have begun these processes, and we have reached out to other NWAIS schools to join us in these three efforts, to share knowledge, strategy, and inspiration.
Part of the reluctance of NAIS to take a stand and do the right thing is due to the misguided fear that admitting and acting upon human-caused climate change will alienate conservative families within NAIS. In his book The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt analyzes the key differences between people who self-identify as liberal and conservative. He does this by honoring both sides, assuming good intent on both sides, and by digging into what each side holds sacred. One of the revelations in his book is that “liberals might have even more difficulty understanding conservatives than the other way around” (365). This is especially true on NAIS and university campuses, where the vast majority of teachers self-identify as liberal. It is therefore especially important that we begin to understand how conservatives think.
Liberals “emphasize care for the vulnerable, opposition to hierarchy and oppression, and an interest in changing laws, traditions, and institutions to solve social problems.” Liberals’ “most sacred value is caring for victims of oppression” (Haidt 345). This care for the underdog helps to explain why liberals are quick to confront both personal and institutional sexism, racism, and environmental degradation. As for oppression of vulnerable environment, liberals view endangered species, acidified water, desertified soil, and polluted air as victims of a rapacious extractive corporate globalism.
Conservatives, on the other hand, “do not oppose change of all kinds (such as the Internet), but they fight back ferociously when they believe that change will damage the institutions and traditions that provide our moral exoskeletons (such as the family). Preserving those institutions and traditions is their most sacred value” (Haidt 357). This instinct for honoring ancestors and hierarchies of the past also helps to explain why conservatives are usually system-justifying by nature—so that while they usually oppose personal sexism, personal racism, and littering, they usually ignore whatever institutional sexism, institutional racism, and global pollution that underlie the social order that privileges them.
The good news here as far as human-caused climate change is concerned is twofold: one, denial of science is not a sacred value of conservatives; and two, “The number of conservative voters who believe in climate change has almost doubled in the past two years” (Lehmann). That said, because NAIS teachers are overwhelmingly liberal, and because the vast majority of our NAIS schools have not taken explicit, proactive institutional climate change stances on protecting Earth and humans, many NAIS teachers feel abandoned by their professional association. There are notable exceptions, of course: George School in Pennsylvania has recently announced divestment from coal, while Putney School in Vermont has been integrating farming and systems thinking into their curriculum for years (“George School to Divest from Coal” and “Farm Program Featured”). These schools are the bright lights, the outliers, though, so most environmentalist NAIS teachers remain ashamed of NAIS for not speaking up. It’s just plain wrong when teachers feel like isolated voices crying in the wilderness when they are simply accepting science. In the vacuum created by a lack of NAIS leadership on this issue, NAIS teachers have unfortunately created a kind of echo chamber on campuses where we repeat scientific facts with greater urgency, frustration, and feelings of futility. We are in danger, after doing this for decades, of becoming the very stereotype of shrill liberals berating conservatives that we have been trained to avoid and which personally offend us. Some NAIS teachers, due to their feelings of isolation brought on by a lack of institutional support from NAIS, have begun attributing malice and willful ignorance to conservatives—all the while wondering, due to their decades-long silence on the issue, if NAIS leadership is also secretly in the conservative anti-science camp while posing as authorities on liberal arts education.
In a grim irony, NAIS teachers understand that our frustrated deliveries of science content also doubles down on the unfortunate precedent set years ago by climate science denying conservatives—as today it is we liberals who, ironically, appear to be politicizing science, in our heated, sometimes disgruntled sharing of content. The vacuum of NAIS leadership has baited the teachers, and we have stepped into it, looking for a fight with conservatives, who have denied the reality of human-caused climate change for years. Unfortunately, teacher impatience on the issue of human-caused climate change serves to further entrench the faulty notion that climate science is a matter of emotion and opinion rather than of fact. Students, whether liberal or conservative, moderates or apolitical, dig in when they feel judged, unappreciated, and demeaned—or when they feel debatable content is not being fully explored but is rather being shoved down their throats. As teachers, of course, we know all this, and we grip the rose stem even tighter, silently resenting the disinformation of conservatives and the inaction of NAIS leadership. The byproduct conclusion, though, for some teachers—that conservatives are anti-reality—is not only uncharitable, it misunderstands conservatives as well as our own liberal NAIS echo chamber.
Conservatives hold a strong set of sacred beliefs, according to Haidt, and climate science rejection is not on that list. At the same time, because NAIS teachers and college professors often are preaching to the choir in our faculty rooms, we misunderstand conservative sacred beliefs due to social distance between ourselves and actual pro-science conservatives. The simple fact is that there are far more liberals on our NAIS campuses than conservatives. The same imbalance can be found on college campuses. Today, college professors are 30% more likely to self-describe as liberal than the freshman students who arrive on their campuses (Ingraham). This disconnect and the social distance between liberals and conservatives on NAIS and college campuses leads to assumptions that are not true, such as attributions of lower intelligence to conservatives. Part of our problem at NAIS schools, then, is that we employ too many liberal talking points and liberal stereotypes of others without understanding conservative’s values and conservative sacred beliefs.
It is also true that conservatives also employ too many conservative talking points and conservative stereotypes of liberal teachers without understanding liberal values or liberal sacred beliefs, but Haidt is right when he says that conservative parents and students understand liberal teachers and schools better than we understand them. Students on our campuses have no choice but to hear liberal viewpoints and sacred beliefs, but many NAIS teachers are unfamiliar with conservative viewpoints and sacred beliefs. At the same time, it’s also abundantly clear that some religious conservative beliefs don’t allow religious conservatives to accept the science around evolution and human-caused climate change.
Still, climate change denial is not a sacred value to most conservatives, though some liberals might think so. Science has become politicized because both sides have been balkanized into separate camps by Facebook algorithms and news sources that provide separate news feeds and separate lenses on the world. Fox News and MSNBC are mirror images of one another that provide similar functions to their audiences. Liberals and conservatives both attach themselves sometimes unthinkingly to talking points that their separate media outlets are feeding them. The politicization of science is beneath both sides, though. Liberals at one time attached to the notion that immunizations cause autism; conservatives today still embrace the idea that climate change science is a hoax to impede American business competitiveness. At NAIS, we need to rise above this balkanization of news feeds and talking points and resist the urge to stoop to this billion-person game of telephone and instead tend to the science. We need to believe what the science is telling us without waffling. It’s not a betrayal of liberal values or what liberals hold sacred if we embrace the science that shows that immunizations do not cause autism. Likewise, it’s not a betrayal of conservative values or what conservatives hold sacred if we embrace the science that shows that anthropogenic climate change is a real and existential threat.
It’s not that congressional conservatives can’t understand science, and it misses the point to ask them to tend to the science without first understanding them as people. Understanding of human-caused climate change is not about facts for them so much as about identity and shared community values. Gayathri Vaidyanathan notes that
There is good and bad news for climate scientists. The good news: Most Americans (79 percent) say that science and scientists are invaluable. The bad news: On controversial topics, such as climate change, a significant number of Americans do not use science to inform their views. Instead, they use political orientation and ideology.
It’s political orientation and ideology that people use to structure their identities as they conceive of themselves in their families, in schools, in temples, on teams, in neighborhoods, and in political parties. This identity formation and the web of relationships that informs one’s identity determines in large part the conservative understanding of human-caused climate change. This self-identification relies more upon love and longing to belong, needing to be accepted into a clan, a tribe. It’s less about facts and figures, which is a realization that liberals—for all our talk about liberal values like inclusivity, diversity, and justice—don’t seem to understand in people who self-identify conservative. One of the problems is that liberal non-religious NAIS campuses have too much social distance between themselves and conservative communities, so we sometimes stereotype and demean rather than embrace and assume intelligence and dignity.
The politicization of climate science and the resulting balkanization of camps has occurred for several interrelated reasons, some causal: one, each side of the liberal-conservative divide misunderstands the sacred values of the other due to the prefabricated news streams and search engine algorithms designed to corroborate the viewer’s preexisting notions (Fox News presents events from a conservative viewpoint in order to help form conservative views, and then they inform those conservative views, which strengthens conservative views. NAIS conservatives who digest Fox News version of reality therefore don’t accept a liberal point of view, for they do not see or hear it, except at school); two, as a result of the silence from NAIS leadership on human-caused climate change, NAIS teachers arrive on campus with heightened urgency and emotionality around issue, which sometimes leads to teachers employing hyperbole; three, the overwhelming majority of liberal teachers on NAIS campuses and our resulting social distances from conservatives creates an echo chamber in which we begin to suspect conservatives as motivated by malice and nihilism; four, the propensity of NAIS schools to pretend they can deliver all things to all people and the unwillingness of most NAIS schools to take a stand and say what they don’t do in their missions, what topics are not up for debate (such as human-caused climate change).
There is a way around this misunderstanding, though, and it requires clarity of purpose from NAIS leadership. As Rob Evans stated on October 14, 2016, in his NWAIS lecture “The Changing Independent School Parent,” we as NAIS schools should clearly and fearlessly define what it is we believe and what we don’t believe, what it is we can do as a school, and what it is we can’t do. “We are this kind of school,” Evans advised us to say to prospective parents in another video. “We do school this way. If that’s right for your child and for you, we’d be delighted to have you, and if not, there are other good schools to think about.” If an NAIS school promises all things to all people—including that the school entertains the unprincipled capitulation that human-caused climate change is a debate at their school—the school locks everyone in that community in a dead-end track that ends in humiliation and resentment for some, and inevitably ends in some feeling betrayed and excluded from the community. Instead, NAIS schools should be more forthright and explicitly articulate in our promotional material that we accept human-caused climate change as an obvious fact and that we are actively studying and working to minimize its effects.
One obvious way to take an active stand is to host a national, annual NAIS climate change conference. It might be modeled after the annual NAIS People of Color Conference where teachers, students, trained adult and peer facilitators, speakers, affinity group members, and workshop presenters come together for three days to equip “educators at every level, from teachers to trustees, with knowledge, skills, and experiences to improve and enhance the interracial, interethnic, and intercultural climate in their schools.” Just as NAIS was once too silent and inactive on the issue of inclusivity and equity with regard to interracial, interethnic, and intercultural climate at our schools, NAIS is too silent and inactive on the issue of human-caused climate change today. Further, just as NAIS took the first steps to addressing our silence and inactivity on interracial, interethnic, and intercultural climate at our schools by convening a national conference on those topics, NAIS should also convene another national conference on human-caused climate change starting next year.
Even after NAIS takes a courageous stand, however, our work will be cut out for us—especially as we note the recent political events in this country. While anti-intellectualism and hostility toward science are not in themselves sacred values for conservatives, the conservative leadership in Congress has unfortunately embraced these two pillars. On December 18, 2015, during his end-of-year press conference, President Obama pointed out that “The American Republican Party is the only major party that I can think of in the advanced world that effectively denies climate change.” While celebrating President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the Democratic party also asked Americans to “Call out the climate change deniers,” while simultaneously highlighting the fact that “97% of Climate Scientists agree that climate change is real and man-made, and affecting communities in every part of the country. Yet too many of our elected officials deny the science of climate change.” President Obama, of course, was talking about Republicans in Congress. “All of the deniers are Republicans, including party leadership, which makes the party very lonely on the world stage when it comes to the scientific reality of climate change” (Ellingboe and Koronowski).
Now that Donald Trump has been elected president, the U.S. finds itself with the shameful distinction of having “the only world leader today to deny the science of climate change. . . . [He may be] the only world leader not calling for urgent climate action” (“On the Climate Crisis”). Trump was able to be elected in part because our nation is unique in its refusal to accept science as fact and to instead treat it like opinion or propaganda. As a 2014 online survey makes clear, “The United States [has] more climate change deniers among their respondents than any other country” (“Where in the World Is Climate Change Denial Most Prevalent?”). NAIS teachers, by in large, experience this development as a crushing condemnation of their own profession—for how could an educated populace elect someone so seemingly uneducated to handle the most urgent scientific and environmental crisis of the 21st century?
Despite the visceral revulsion of many to the election this month, this ascension of career conservative politicians and climate change deniers must be met with nuanced analysis and incisive statements. Their minds will not be changed, and they must be opposed in the ballot box and by the teaching and practices of NAIS schools. As teachers in this process, we might also teach how rank and file Republicans have been misled by a powerful economic minority in their own party for the financial gain of the economic minority at the expense of rank and file Republicans. The concepts of the Southern strategy and dog whistle politics are well known, as both Rev. Dr. William Barber (in the Democracy Now news clip entitled “Protests over Tulsa & Charlotte. . .”) and Ian López Haney make clear. What is also clear is that Republican climate science-denying politicians do not represent their Republican constituents, but rather their peers in the economic minority whose campaigns and stock portfolios are funded by fossil fuel interests. We as NAIS educators would do well, therefore, to mentally separate the Republican families in our NAIS schools from career Republican politicians, as most NAIS families that vote Republican most likely do so out of adherence to old fashioned values of personal responsibility, hard work, family stability, and a religion-centered life.
Even while we separate NAIS Republican families from Republican climate change denying politicians, let’s not delude ourselves. Let’s remember that there are real differences between liberals and conservatives, even in our schools, that need to be appreciated. As Jonathan Haidt points out, the values and sacred beliefs of each are very different from one another. Liberals want to care for victims of oppressions, including Earth. Conservatives want to preserve institutions and traditions that provide moral exoskeletons, like family, military, and church. Liberals are not on the whole willing to accept unequal social opportunities and environmental degradation in the price of doing business, while conservatives are.
While there are real differences in values between liberals and conservatives, there are also deeper psychological motivations at work that usually go undetected and to which NAIS teachers should also be attuned. In their article “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” John Jost and his co-authors studied the relationships between people’s stated political ideology and people’s personalities in the psychological literature covering 22,000 cases in twelve countries. They found that "A specific set of social-cognitive motives are significantly related to political conservatism. . . : uncertainty avoidance . . . needs for order, structure, and closure; and fear of threat in general . . . dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity" (366). Political conservatism, with its deep reservoirs of system justification, tends to also rationalize inequality, especially when the system privileges those same political conservatives. Scientific discovery about human-caused climate change that uncovers ecological crisis and economic inequality is therefore discarded by political conservatives, since the science brings up fear of threat to the fossil-fuel driven globalized economy, which disproportionately privileges them as political conservatives even as it creates ecological crisis.
It’s not just short sighted greed motivating political conservatives in Congress, though. There are psychological processes inherent to us as human beings that motivate us to engage in the same types of behaviors that pushed the population on Easter Island to cut down the last of their trees. Rick Mooney states that “Evidence and argument [about human-caused climate change] don’t work to change people’s minds,” even when the evidence reveals catastrophic danger (13). In short, “we cannot defeat misinformation or achieve public enlightenment through rational argument”—a haunting fact for many liberal NAIS teachers whose minds naturally tend to avail themselves to the latest and best information, which then drives us to want to make the requisite changes in behavior due to human-caused climate change (Mooney 24).
We should acknowledge that all people—liberals, moderates, conservatives, and progressives—use motivated reasoning, selective exposure, and confirmation bias, all of which keep us more as lawyers than scientists. That said, conservatives use these rationalizations to avoid the fact of human-caused climate change with greater frequency than the rest of us.
When studying motivated reasoning, psychological and neuroscientific tests reveal that “Our prior emotional commitments—operating in a way we’re not even aware of—often cause us to misread all kinds of evidence, or selectively interpret it to favor what we already believe. This kind of response has been found repeatedly in psychology studies. People read and respond even to scientific or technical evidence to justify their pre-existing beliefs” (Mooney 29).
Selective exposure refers to our practice of self-sorting ourselves “into different information streams [like Fox News and MSNBC] that reaffirm our core convictions” (Mooney 15). It should also be noted that social media sites like Facebook and search engines like Google also sort us in a kind of self-referential feedback loop, as these use predictive algorithms that assume what we want to see based upon previous clicks and searches. We are led as with bread crumbs where the algorithm “thinks” we want to go. Where we end up then reinforces the conclusions we had drawn or the predictions we had made before seeking out the information. It feels good to all human brains to have predictions confirmed—we get a little dopamine shot—and we experience this confirmation as pleasure.
Confirmation bias is when “we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and [we] seek out information to reinforce our prior commitments” (Mooney 32). Motivated reasoning, selective exposure, and confirmation bias are “fundamentally rooted in our brains”—since cognitive dissonance is extremely unpleasant to most people—and these emerge “when we’re very young . . . . Children will decide upon the ‘trustworthiness’ of the source—and they may well, in a contested case, decide that Mommy or Daddy are trustworthy, and the teacher talking about [human-caused climate change] isn’t. This will likely occur for emotional, motivated, or self-service reasons” (Mooney 33).
As NAIS teachers, we’ve all had the exasperating student who won’t accept the simple science on climate change or the historical facts on US economic inequality, or the Department of Justice findings on the institutional racism rampant in the Ferguson criminal justice and police systems. This student will argue into absurdity, never giving an inch, and his classmates will wonder if his grip on reality has slipped, if he is sociopathically angry, if he lacking all empathy. Some students will fear this one classmate, or they will find him interesting as he is so inflammatory in an otherwise mundane school day, or they will want to attribute these uncomfortable moments to a simple difference of opinion. The numbers on climate change, earning income, and incarcerations have nothing to do with opinion, however. They are simply numbers, but you can’t convince the student to accept the numbers and data, as he is emotionally invested in supporting the opposite conclusion that has been drawn at home before he came to school. He has conservative parents who watch Fox News, and the message from his loving home is to not to get brainwashed by our well-intentioned but liberal NAIS school. When he sees the evidence we present at school, it’s actually evidence of his parents’ foresight and wisdom, ironically, as they told him we as NAIS teachers would try to brainwash him. Paradoxically, the more true our statements of fact, the more clear the body of evidence, the more he will dig in his heels for several reasons: one, motivated reasoning, selective exposure, and confirmation bias are hardwired into his brain; two, the cognitive dissonance he is experiencing is extremely unpleasant to him and he wants to resolve it quickly; and three, he loves his parents and feels emotional nurtured by being part of a family unit and home culture that affirms his one and only unique life. This student—like conservative members of Congress—will reject evidence, fact, and reasoning in favor of belonging to some nurturing community larger than himself.
We as teachers know, though, that not all hope is lost. While it’s true that conservatives will be less likely to accept scientific discovery on human-caused climate change than liberals, it is also true that certain discoveries can be so jarring that they rattle loose all political affiliation. Liberals and conservatives are both surprised to learn, for example, that progressive evangelicals like Jim Wallis exist. Wallis is someone who breaks apart stereotypes and caricatures. For many of us in NAIS who find no conflict between science and religion, and for whom religion is the tethering pole of our lives, we are sometimes profoundly insulted by insinuations from our liberals NAIS colleagues that religious people are superstitious, deluded, and unscientific. At these times, though, we must remember that such insinuations are simply regurgitations of caricatures produced by the algorithms rather than the product of complex analysis. We know that Pope Francis, for example, has recently written the following in Laudato Si:
A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. . . . Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it. . . . Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. (11 - 13)
If the leader of one of the most historically conservative institutions in the world can come to such conclusions, shame on the 182 conservative members of Congress and the student digging in his conservative heels who do not (Ellingboe and Koronowski).
At the same time, let us also be honest and admit that the caricature of the anti-science conservative religious zealots is based in truth, like the Pope who jailed Galileo, William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes Monkey Trial, and our President-elect, who tweeted, incredibly, on November 6, 2012, that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Because the caricatures of conservative zealots are obviously based in truth, we on NAIS campuses, sometimes understandably I’m afraid, resort to using such stereotyping when describe all conservatives.
Still, Jim Wallis and Pope Francis, offer us exemplars of those who escaped the echo chambers of their conservative constituencies and who straddle the liberal-conservative divide, reaching out to both sides.
And truth be told, we all inhabit such contradictions in much the same way that progressive Chris Hedges found himself inhabiting as he interviewed hundreds of working class white Trump voters for his article “We Are All Deplorables.” While Hedges does not excuse white nationalism, he does argue that liberals need greater empathy for the economic deprivation and insecurity of working class whites in order to do two things: one, understand the sway that white nationalism has in their lives as a desperate kind of survival strategy; and two, identify with them as members of an SES that are not the 1% economic minority such as conservatives and liberals in Congress. We need not hold out the same olive branches to career politicians of the economic minority that we hold out to working class whites, since the former group has abused its institutional power with lies and coercion, while the latter, in their victimization by members of the former group, has resorted to conclusions beneath their own dignity. Just as Hedges exhorts us to see past the superficial differences between liberal middle class white Clinton voters and conservative white working class Trump voters in order to empathize with the desperate, if misguided choices of the white working class, NAIS schools can align themselves with those victimized by the lies and coercion of climate change deniers—which is to say everyone on our campuses, including those across political divides and in different socio-economic strata.
In our empathy for our children, NAIS leadership should draft an explicit statement to NAIS making very clear that while NAIS understands that climate-change denial is not accepted by most conservatives, NAIS does not accept the congressional conservative platform of climate change denial. Further, NAIS should embrace a leadership position in American education to not only reduce carbon emissions and to develop PS-12 climate literacy curriculum, but to also become a leader in the divestment/reinvestment movement. Such a stance would be one that our students and parents could respect and support. As it is, NAIS is tiptoeing around the elephant in the room by trying to remain apolitical by remaining silent—an impossibility, in any case. Further, by refusing to be explicit about the only responsible stance we can take on this issue, we block ourselves from being a major player for positive change as well.
Let’s remind ourselves that Every single one of the climate deniers in Congress is a Republican. Not one Democrat in Congress denies climate change. To not point this out in NAIS schools for fear of alienating Republican parents is absurd, for we would simply be pointing out a fact, like the fact that the Chicago Cubs won the World Series this year. There’s nothing to be gained from neglecting to point out either fact because we are embarrassed for Cub fans or Republicans in Congress. We as NAIS schools are the ones who should be embarrassed for our twenty-six years of inaction on human-caused climate change.
The Union of Concerned Scientists combed through the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report nearly ten years ago, in 2007, and they found that “it is a greater than a 90 percent certainty that emissions of heat-trapping gases from human activities have caused ‘most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century’” (“How do we know that humans”). Fast forward nine years, countless hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and thousands of peer reviewed climate science papers, and we arrive at the website “Call Out the Climate Change Deniers.” Today we know that the number 97% is more accurate to describe scientific consensus on human-caused climate change than the number 90%. NASA, IPCC, Harvard, and Politifact have all stood by the 97% number despite a well-funded disinformation campaign from conservatives to try to convince Americans that human-caused climate change is still a debate. The 97% statistic is “based on 11,944 abstracts of research papers, of which 4,014 took a position on the cause of recent global warming” (Cook et al).
NAIS should follow the Union of Concerned Scientists and Harvard Researchers, in fact, and go beyond arguing for the veracity of even the 97% number. We should also take aim at the right wing disinformation sources themselves: the Koch brothers, the Heartland Institute, Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and other conservative non-scientific organizations that are motivated, one assumes, by power, wealth, pleasure, and influence more than by honesty, scientific accuracy, environmentalism, and the wellbeing of the future generations in our care on our NAIS campuses (“Exposing the Disinformation Playbook”).
NAIS should expose sources of climate change science disinformation without fear of being accused of political prejudice. If we remain mute and refuse to condemn the disinformation, doubt proliferates along with ecological crises. Researchers at Harvard point out that while 97% of climate scientists have come to the consensus on human-caused climate change, most Americans don’t know about this consensus—which has huge impacts in the way we vote, in what we expect of our elected officials, and in what we teach in NAIS.
The pervasiveness of this misperception [on consensus] is not an accident. Rather, it is the result of a disinformation campaign by individuals and organizations in the United States. The claim that climate scientists are still arguing over the reality of human-caused climate change was designed to resonate with the sensibilities of political conservatives who are inherently suspicious of government intervention in markets and societies. This targeted disinformation campaign has been highly effective in the United States: far more political conservatives (49%) than liberals (18%) currently believe that there is ‘a lot of disagreement among the experts about global warming’ (Maibach et al).
This disinformation campaign has stalled congressional action on human-caused climate change, which is an attack of our children’s future.
It’s tempting to try to make excuses for congressional conservatives as I have done by blaming the media, the echo chambers in their communities, and the natural human psychological bent to steer toward confirmation bias rather than uncomfortable truth. Given the stated aims of our President-elect, however, NAIS needs to proceed with empathy and understanding while also taking a side.
On September 15, 2016, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times called on his community of journalists to take a side in this historical anomaly of an election: “Here’s the question,” he wrote. “Is it journalistic malpractice to quote each side and leave it to readers to reach their own conclusions, even if one side seems to fabricate facts or make ludicrous comments?” We on NAIS campuses should ask ourselves the same question, as teachers and journalists share some of the same ideals: balance, debate, objectivity, and letting the readers and students make up their own minds on contentious issues. However, Kristof came to see the harm done by giving equal time to Trump and Clinton, which gave the implicit suggestion that both candidates were equally qualified. He wondered “if journalistic efforts at fairness [didn’t] risk normalizing Trump, without fully acknowledging what an abnormal candidate he is.” In a similar fashion, many of us have come to see the harm done by NAIS schools remaining quiet on the issue of climate change deniers vs. climate scientists. In our inaction over the last twenty-six years that presented a false equivalency on NAIS campuses, we have normalized the outright rejection of science as a perfectly logical choice to make while at school. “I think we can do better at signaling that one side is a clown,” Kristof wrote. “We owe it to our readers to signal when we’re writing about a crackpot. Even if he’s a presidential candidate. No, especially when he’s a presidential candidate.” Just as Kristof accuses his journalists of falling into “traps of glib narratives or false equivalencies,” many NAIS teachers and administrator are realizing, with each passing year being the hottest on record, that we too have fallen into this trap. Kristoff is right: when a clown and crackpot climate change denier—and a racist, and a misogynist, and an Islamophobe—harnesses the anger of white nationalists and other angry men to becomes president, saying “he wants to ‘cancel’ the Paris climate agreement and repeal the Clean Power Plan—the twin pillars of President Barack Obama's efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions,” we as journalists and teachers must take a stand. Our silence in NAIS, to reframe Audre Lorde, will not protect us, any more than our neutrality on climate change will bring back the homes of the environmental refugees from the Marshall Islands and Kiribati (41). NAIS schools across this nation need to risk alienating conservative families to save Earth as our home for future generations of students. Conservative families, by the way, will appreciate the honesty and clarity, for they too disagree in majority numbers with the Republican climate change deniers in Congress and in the White House (Davenport). At the end of the day, like Kristof’s journalists, NAIS should not pretend climate change is a debate, nor should we recoil from explicitly repudiating the sources of disinformation. We owe honesty and advocacy for truth to our NAIS families, teachers, and students.
The main reason NAIS delays, one assumes, is that NAIS administrators are waiting for a bipartisan support and mutual agreement on the severity of the problem of human-caused climate change. During our wait, we implicitly posit a false equivalence of the kind that NBC Late Night host Seth Meyers detailed between presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on November 2, 2016. In that comedy sketch, he listed twenty-six alleged and actual Trump misdeeds versus Clinton’s one email server mistake (“The Polls Tighten with Six Days Left”). Millions laughed watching the show that night on TV and YouTube—many, I’m sure, comfortable with their erroneous prediction that Clinton would soundly defeat Trump within the week during the U.S. presidential election. The reason the sketch was funny was because Trump was exposed as a deceitful, narcissistic bigot, and there can be no equivalence between him and Clinton, whose main offense seemed to be that she was a strong, sometimes socially awkward woman who refused to be obsequious to other strong men. In the same way, NAIS cannot wait for climate-science deniers to meet us halfway, as they don’t operate in the universe of fact and reason.
These, then, are not equivalencies: Trump stating he will cancel the U.S. commitment to the COP 21 agreement as well as the Clean Power Plan on the one hand, and Obama signing the COP 21 agreement and passing the Clean Power Plan on the other; the 182 Republican climate deniers in Congress on the one hand, and the zero Democratic climate deniers in Congress on the other; the 3% of climate scientists who deny human-caused climate change on the one hand, and the 97% of climate scientists who have reached consensus on human-caused climate change on the other. The Democrats are not right about everything, of course, but they are obviously right in their commitment to lowering U.S. carbon emissions in order to slow human-caused climate change, and NAIS schools should state these facts without embarrassment or reservation. This is not the issue around which we should seek bipartisan support, and we certainly do not have another 26 years to debate a scientific fact. This is not a political issue, either, but a common sense, a scientific, and a moral one. Were NAIS to waste another year in polite obfuscation, in fact, history would put us on the wrong side of this issue and hold us responsible for the world we handed to our children.
Like Harvard, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Nicholas Kristof, and President Obama, NAIS should stop seeking agreement on the science or bipartisan support for climate change curriculum, divestment, and carbon dioxide emission reductions before issuing a statement and convening a national, annual conference on human-caused climate change. Agreement and bipartisan support is not forthcoming. Instead, NAIS should explicitly reject any mention that anthropogenic climate change is debatable. NAIS should also provide professional development for teachers to develop preschool through 12th grade climate literacy curriculum. In addition, NAIS campuses should agree on a carbon calculator (we use the University of New Hampshire Campus Carbon Calculator at Catlin Gabel School) that schools across our country can use to not only compare carbon emissions year to year, but also to compare carbon emissions school to school. By providing professional development to create curriculum and encouraging our schools to use the same carbon calculator, teachers across the country can begin supporting one another to meet the challenges of the greatest threat of the 21st century. We can finally begin to provide hope to our students in a planned, strategic way. Finally, with over 1,600 NAIS schools with an average endowment of at least 18 million dollars, we should also seek to divest our collective $20 billion-dollar endowment from fossil fuel stock, and we should work together to raise the next generation of climate change problem-solvers (Bassett). Such a financial portfolio shift, of course, would not cripple Exxon Mobil and the other fossil fuel corporations, but it would send a clear message to NAIS communities that we are pro-science, pro-child, pro-Earth, and pro-future. If we do not undertake these measures immediately, we risk losing the trust and respect of a third generation of NAIS students and families.
Make no mistake, if NAIS continues to delay immediate and extensive action, we will almost certainly lose the trust of a third generation of NAIS students, not to mention the thousands of teachers whose frustrations grow daily as they wait for NAIS leadership to respond to Earth careening toward two degrees centigrade over preindustrial levels—like watching a satellite in slow motion race toward the sun. When teachers, parents, students, and administrators met this past summer at my school to discuss our next institutional steps regarding human-caused climate change, Lewis Fitzgerald, a 2014 graduate of Catlin Gabel School, explained to us all that he and fellow alumni were disappointed with the hypocrisy and lack of leadership at our school. He had just completed his sophomore year at Swarthmore, and he was part of the divestment movement there, Swarthmore Mountain Justice. He wondered why Catlin Gabel School—which is by most measures quite committed to experiential, environmental education—could be so blithely dismissive of the existential threat of anthropogenic climate change that threatens his generation. Lewis pointed out that NAIS students who learn about anthropogenic climate change in our classrooms, but then watch as we don’t respond with curriculum at each grade level, as we don’t discuss our school’s energy consumption, and as we ignore divestment/reinvestment movements around the country, feel, as Lewis did, “betrayed by their teachers and schools.”
President Obama, NASA, IPCC, and Harvard—the smartest people in the world—have all called for bipartisan support of COP 21 binding agreements, but Republicans in the U.S. Congress have refused support even though “76 percent of Americans said they believed [that] global climate change is occurring” (Ellingboe and Koronowski). Incredibly, at the GOP debates last summer, we saw not one Republican candidate willing to admit the reality of anthropogenic climate change (Jamail). Still, Republicans won the White House and both houses of Congress. Our children’s futures were imperiled by the election this month and by the Supreme Court justices that Trump will name. We at NAIS schools have not a moment to lose.
NAIS should push ahead, therefore, without bipartisan support and without conservative congressional agreement on science. It will never come from right wing think tanks and congressional members who have been bought by the fossil fuel industry. The good news is that there are many who have forged ahead already, people and organizations who provide strategy examples and inspiration. Earlier this spring, Portland Public School teachers and students presented during a PPS school board meeting, and they exhorted the board to drop business dealings with textbook companies representing the science regarding human-caused climate change as being under debate. The board agreed, and in Resolution 5272, dated April 19, 2016, they moved that “PPS will abandon the use of any adopted text material that is found to express doubt about the severity of the climate crisis or its root in human activities.” Our PPS colleagues inspired many of us at Catlin Gabel School, and we hastily put together three days of meetings during August, 2016, with parents, teachers, students, alumni, and administrators to capitalize on the city-wide buzz around climate change activism in Portland schools.
Several teachers, administrators, and parents at the beginning of last summer who are involved in our middle school Catlin Gabel Garden and Beekeeping Club worked with students in our upper school Environmental Action Team (EAT) to draw up the agenda for three days of meetings last summer. We identified preschool-12th grade curriculum, divestment / reinvestment, and an October 14, 2016, presentation at the NWAIS fall educators conference as topics. We then sent that agenda to Tim Bazemore, our Head of School, and asked him to join us.
In a remarkable show of support, Tim not only agreed to present at the conference in a triad with upper school history teacher Patrick Walsh and me, he also asked us as a group to identify our school’s carbon dioxide emissions and to set reduction goals. Finally, he also emailed us the “MIT and the Climate Challenge: June 2015” document and asked us to read it in preparation for our meetings, which he would also attend. The twenty-three alumni, students, parents, teachers, and administrators were inspired by Tim’s participation and leadership, just as we were by the three themes from the MIT report: one, a commitment to science and truth, including explicitly combating disinformation with divestment / reinvestment; two, school as a living lab for climate change solutions; and three, accelerating solutions, including a capital campaign to create a well-endowed Climate Institute. Without the participation of NAIS Heads of School, the NAIS president, and NAIS board of trustees in these initiatives, our association will continue to flounder with half measures in its response to human-caused climate change, and the hopelessness which has already taken root will begin to flower anew now that we have a climate change science denier in the White House. A statement from the MIT report, though, provides an antidote to that hopelessness: “By including the climate challenge among [MIT’s] highest priorities, with unwavering commitment to a strong response, MIT will positively harness the passion of young generations, remain true to its mission, contribute to solving humanity’s greatest current challenge, and ultimately ensure it is on the right side of history” (5).
Media pundits and those in charge of large institutions such as NAIS like "to boil every problem down to . . . 'hyperpartisanship,' or ideological polarization" (McElwee 56). For example, we have been asked by the media, Congress, and even our American school systems to entertain the absurd notion that human-caused climate change is an "issue" that can and should be debated. However, it's not an "issue" for debate; human-caused climate change is science, like ocean acidification or terrestrial desertification is science. What's more, "nearly every prominent Republican politician denies its existence. By contrast, Democrats occupy the center, pushing for an all-of-the-above energy strategy, which includes expanded drilling for oil, extensive fracking, market-based mechanisms to reduce emissions, and heavy subsidies to businesses" (McElwee 56). Climate change exemplifies the problem of staying neutral on the problem or entertaining the delusion that bipartisanship is ideal.
Two hard truths must be spoken with sensitivity and thoroughgoing analysis to NAIS families. We are teachers, though, and we should not shrink from the task. We have taught persuasive essay writing, and now it is our job to articulate a difficult message to which some will respond negatively but to which most will respond with relief, pride, and excitement.
The first hard truth is that politics are not gentile debates like conversations in a classroom. Politics affect the material living conditions of people rather than simply being a difference of opinion. When politicians make health care too expensive, people opt not to see a doctor, they get sick, and they die. When politicians block SNAP, little kids go to bed hungry. When politicians pretend human-caused climate change is a debate, the Marshall Islands and Kiribati disappear under rising tides, and people lose their homes, becoming climate refugees. Rather than treating politics as gentile debate, can we see it for what it is: systemic power that confers money, prestige, power, and influence on one set of people, while taking it away from another. When power is taken away from people, they experience it in their bodies as pain, hunger, shock, and death. It’s not abstract talk.
Recent calls for bipartisanship distract from the reality that politics has a massive impact on the lived experiences of millions of Americans. The idea that the solution is to simply 'get everyone in a room and work it out' . . . presumes that politics isn’t fundamentally about power and who wields it, to whose benefit and whose detriment. This method of political analysis, popular among privileged pundits largely insulated from the negative consequences of the policies they advocate, is demeaning to the millions for whom questions of power mean access to food and health care, the difference between freedom and a cage (McElwee 57).
Not only should NAIS be careful not to pose our impending conversations as theoretical, we should also note that changes in curriculum, school behavior, school policy, and school financial planning will have some negative effects on our campuses. Perhaps we must offer fewer international and field trips; perhaps our schools must employ fewer people. The point is that we in NAIS have for at least twenty-six years been the “privileged pundits largely insulated from the negative consequences of the policies [we] advocate” around environmentalism, and if we now want to enact real change, we now must be prepared to accept compromise and loss as we embrace the hard truths of human-caused climate change on our NAIS campuses.
The second hard truth is that on nearly every issue that affects the material living conditions of people—poverty, climate change, healthcare, mass incarceration—media pundits and those in charge of large institutions like NAIS like to blame a lack of political bipartisanship rather than conservative politicians for our nation's inability to craft legislation that offers equal opportunity and that is environmentally sustainable. "Climate change is one example, but it shows a problem endemic to [the media and other large institutions like NAIS]: "pretending that what is really a problem of intransigence on the right is one of hyperpartisanship on both sides" (McElwee 56). The fact of the matter is that the twenty-six year NAIS paralysis on human-caused climate change is due to the fact that we do not want to offend our conservative NAIS families and donors who have been misled by conservative congressional and conservative think tank disinformation on the topic.
The problem is not hyperpartisanship; it is a rabid right wing that has abandoned even the semblance of governing, believing that a functioning government is inherently a liberal victory. The solution is to stop rewarding Republican intransigence by treating it as standard partisan fare. It is time to condemn, rather than coddle, the vicious pathologies [of the far right in Congress] (McElwee 57).
When conservative politicians disassemble and misinform on human-caused climate change, they give license to fossil fuel companies to dig up Earth’s remaining coal and to drill and burn the remaining fossil fuels on Earth. Again, climate scientists tell us that such a path would take us over two degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, which would make it incredibly difficult for some humans to survive: “We will likely see longer droughts and more intense heat waves, which could cause big disruptions to the world’s food supply. At two degrees, sea levels could rise several feet, which would flood many coastal communities in the U.S. and potentially cause large migrations of people from countries like Bangladesh and India and Vietnam” (“Why 2 Degrees Celsius”). Unlike congressional conservatives and on behalf of all our NAIS community—which is a mixture of liberal, conservative, moderate, and apolitical—we in NAIS must be boldly pro-science, pro-child, pro-Earth, and pro-future as we respond to the most pressing issue of our time. We must clearly repudiate conservative congressional intransigence, the cruelty that results from their legislation, and their refusal to act on behalf of Earth and the future of human survival. Doing nothing is not an option if we expect our NAIS students to ever listen to us again.
This past summer, as I have said, we hosted a diverse group of people on our campus that was seeking climate literacy curriculum for our school, carbon emission reductions for our school, and divestment / reinvestment for our school’s endowment. We are currently hard at work crunching data for our chosen carbon calculator, and Head of School Tim Bazemore is meeting with our board and financial planners to explore the feasibility of divestment / reinvestment. Next spring, Catlin Gabel School will also be hosting a professional development day in mid-April, 2017, where NAIS teachers, administrators, CFOs, and board members can come together to support one another as we work toward our three goals as a larger network of schools.
These developments are two generations too late, of course, but it is an exciting start, and we don’t have any more time to waste. A recent op-ed in The New York Times reveals, in any case, that young people today are insisting upon leaders who embrace the facts of climate change science, who agree that carbon emission limits are necessary, who supported COP 21 binding agreements, who are pushing for green energy production and jobs, and who are spreading 350.org’s leave-it-in-the-ground message that will allow Earth to stay beneath the two-degree Celsius threshold:
Only 37 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds voted for [Trump], according to exit polls, compared with 55 percent for Hillary Clinton. Millennials know that Mr. Trump’s policies threaten their survival. Climate groups like 350.org, with large followings among young people, are now vowing to ‘put everything on the line to protect the progress we’ve made and continue to push for bold action.’ This includes an acceleration of fossil fuel divestment, a campaign that began in 2012 on several dozen college campuses in the United States and has continued to gain steam since (Dembicki).
Despite the small liberal echo chamber in NAIS schools, despite the large conservative echo chamber in Congress that reverberates out to fifty million Republican voters, despite the betrayal and occasional hopelessness referenced earlier, I am still proud to be part of my NAIS school that is finally embracing the challenge detailed in the first IPCC Assessment Report twenty six years ago, when it was “conclude[d] that temperatures have risen by 0.3 - 0.6 C over the last century, that humanity's emissions are adding to the atmosphere's natural complement of greenhouse gases, and that the addition would be expected to result in warming” (“A Brief History of Climate Change”). We are drawing strategy, curriculum, and leadership from not only NAIS but from the Our Children’s Trust, the Standing Rock Sioux, MIT, PPS, Swarthmore, Rethinking Schools, 350.org, books like A People's Curriculum for the Earth, and the hundreds of teachers who attend the annual Northwest Conference on Teaching for Social Justice. NAIS has begun to take a stand in this arena for the children who enter our classrooms every day.
The culture wars of the last twenty years have politicized values, which is to say simplified ethics, so as to make people who hold those values into caricatures that the polarization of Fox and MSNBC can target and replicate. Because of this oversimplification, liberals sometimes assume conservatives are uneducated, rural, misogynistic white supremacists; conservatives sometimes assume liberals are lazy, urban, sycophantic, academic snobs. Despite this significant breach in understanding caused by this fracturing of culture-war-America, we in schools can unpack the development of these caricatures throughout history and show, as both Naomi Klein and Jeremy Rifkin have both argued, that global climate change represents not only the single greatest threat to human survival, but also our shared single best opportunity to come together across nations and political divides to work together for a common goal. The paradox here is that our shared crisis is so dire that it unifies us to work for a shared solution.
Education needs to step into this seemingly unbridgeable gap. A major goal of liberal arts education and the teaching of humanities in particular is to help ourselves to widen our lenses to appreciate someone else’s life as our own, to see their concerns as related to ours, and to overcome what Chimamanda Adichie calls “the danger of the single story.”
We might start by acknowledging that NAIS schools need both conservative and liberal families to flourish. Conservative values such as follow-through, punctuality, reliability, and earning your keep during group work are just as important as liberal values such as creativity, empathizing with an underdog, and risk taking. Certainly, our students, like most people, share values from along the political spectrum. Self-identified liberal teachers must make schools safe and intellectually challenging for conservative students, otherwise the students may never begin identifying themselves with the climate change activists we all need to become. If conservative students do not feel like they belong in our movement, they will alienate themselves on our campuses and retreat into negative feedback loops of motivated reasoning, selective exposure, and confirmation bias that are tailor made for conservative climate change science deniers’ minds.
Before making our conservative students safe with balanced classes, though, our schools need to explicitly reject climate change denial as orchestrated disinformation that serves the interests of an economic minority in Congress and the fossil fuel industries. Conservative families deserve to know where NAIS schools stand on this issue before they send their kids to us. We have tricked ourselves into believing that our conservative families will feel alienated by such honesty and clarity, as though they are children who cannot handle the truth. We have also tricked ourselves into believing that if a few conservative families pull their funding from our schools over our stance on addressing climate change, that our schools and association will crumble. We must understand that “a majority of Republicans — including 54 percent of self-described conservative Republicans — believe the world’s climate is changing and that mankind plays some role in the change” (Davenport). In another twenty-six years, this number will be near 100%, of course, as the science is true and irrefutable. As Neil Degrasse Tyson says, “The good thing about science is that it is true whether or not you believe in it.” Our silence around the science is condescending, disingenuous, irresponsible, and misleading. NAIS schools need to let go of caricatures that conservative members of Congress help to create and instead deal with the sacred values of the living, breathing conservative voters who also respect the findings of science.
We know that the single best stimulus to change public opinion around climate change is simple, clear statements regarding human-caused climate change from authorities such as NAIS President Donna Orem, NAIS Board Chair Katherine Dinh, and our 1,600 NAIS Heads of School.
Clear messages that simply state the extent of the scientific consensus can help correct [the] widespread misperception [of scientific debate around human-caused climate change]. In controlled experiments, a single exposure to a message describing the extent of scientific consensus on human-caused climate change (i.e., 97%) significantly increased participants’ subsequent estimates of the consensus—by as much as 10 to 20 percentage points. Importantly, these simple messages were most effective with the very people who are currently the least likely to understand the scientific consensus: political conservatives (Maibach et al).
We as NAIS teachers should push our NAIS leaders, including Orem, Dinh, and our Heads of School to make unequivocal statements in our 1,600 NAIS schools across the nation regarding the crisis of human-caused climate change. We as NAIS teachers should also insist that NAIS convene an annual climate change conference for adults and students modeled after the NAIS People of Color Conference. Were these done, even conservatives, whose news streams are preplanned according to their climate change-denying algorithmic preferences, will come around to the reality of the situation, as none of us will be able to ignore the problem any longer. Most conservatives (54%) already have accepted the reality of the situation, of course, but with the recent elections of a climate science-denying-president and members of Congress, that number will deescalate (Davenport). Now is the time for NAIS teachers to come together and demand statements from our leadership announcing scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, as “knowledge of the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change can be considered a ‘gateway’ cognition; as members of the general public come to understand the consensus, they more likely come to the conclusion that human-caused climate change is happening and harmful” (Maibach et al). The public, especially the students in our NAIS schools, once they acknowledge the problem, will be that much more likely to act. At present, too many of our students and families are simply being misled by a reactionary conservative economic minority in the White House, in Congress, and on Fox News. That number will surely grow because of the recent elections if we in NAIS do nothing. If we do nothing, many regions of our planet, especially coastal areas where most people on Earth live, will become inhospitable this century.
It must be acknowledged, in any case, that we are not able to shield our NAIS students from climate change even if we wanted to: In "Poll: British Children Concerned by Effects of Climate Change,” a recent UNICEF-UK survey found that “three-quarters of 11 to 16-year-olds were worried about how global warming will change the world and wanted the government to do more to tackle the threat.” Nationally, young people here in the U.S. are taking matters into their own hands, bypassing the lethargy of certain adult authority figures in order to demand climate leadership from responsible adults today: SustainUS sent a group of teen delegates to the COP22 conference in Morocco in November, 2016, where Delegate Becky Chung explained that young people would hold international leaders accountable for human-caused climate change with direct civil disobedience; as a teenager, Alec Loorz founded iMatter, which has since morphed into iMatter Now, an organization that supports high school students in demanding that school boards and city councils across America adopt climate action plans; and here in my home state of Oregon, Julia Olson, the Executive Director and Chief Legal Counsel of Our Children’s Trust, has started an international movement that helps “Young plaintiffs . . . [to] pursue legal actions against government agencies in all fifty states, and [presently] twenty-one young people, aged nine to twenty, are part of a new suit against the federal government” (Nijhuis). NAIS should obviously capitalize on these student-led movements to empower our young people to continue seeking solutions to human-caused climate change. Our students are already organizing and demanding that their schools, cities, and other adults in their lives be on the right side of this fight, and NAIS should embrace this opportunity to stand with our students. It’s not only good, progressive, experiential education to empower our students to be climate activist leaders at our individual NAIS schools, at national, annual NAIS climate change conferences, and at international COP conferences; it’s also scientifically sound, strategically smart, and morally just. Our students are doing all this in any case, and if adults in NAIS get left behind, we will be relegated to the mounds of the shameless, the apathetic, and the timid that litter the ditches of history.
Looking away from the urgent problem of human-caused climate change may feel like a relief in the short term, as we allow ourselves a brief reprieve, but were we to continue ignoring this pressing crisis as NAIS institutions, we would be doing our students an unthinkable, unconscionable disservice as a school association. The time has come, as caring adults, to seek solutions with all our NAIS teachers, parents, and students across the nation. Catherine Rampell, in an editorial in The Washington Post last summer, described visiting a high school in Berlin, Germany, where “Educators there consider climate change so pressing that they integrate it into just about every class.” The German school, Emmy-Noether-Schule, is just one of many in countries around the world that have been teaching climate change problems and solutions for decades. Rampell mentions the Dominican Republic, South Africa, Vietnam, Kenya, and Mauritius as such countries, though the number of countries that teach climate change will no doubt rise because of COP 21 and COP 22. Here in the U.S., “In 2000, Vermont became the first state to include sustainability and understanding of place in its public school standards. . . [and] organizations such as the Center for Ecoliteracy, Cloud Institute, and Sustainable Schools Project are helping districts and schools align their entire curriculum with sustainability principles” (Adams). What is missing, of course, is leadership from NAIS, and I would be so proud to work in a system of schools that took up the banner for our students’ future and began in earnest exploring not just the problems but solutions to human-caused climate change. Thousands of NAIS teachers and students are clamoring for NAIS leadership on the existential threat of human-caused climate change, and we thirst for an annual, national NAIS conference on climate change.
The fact is that global human-caused climate change affects everyone negatively. It is a problem, like the prospect of nuclear Armageddon from yesteryear, that unites us all in shared opposition. Paradoxically, human-induced climate change is our best chance to stop pretending that NAIS schools can either remain silent on the topic or be all things to all people; instead, human-induced climate change offers us the opportunity to come together in our opposition to climate change denial and disinformation. NAIS must meet the needs of the third generation passing through its halls since we have learned about human-caused climate change. We have already failed the previous two generations on this issue, but rather than resorting to self-flagellation and further inaction, let us resolve today to serve our communities for the benefit of all tomorrow.
In a way that Klein, Rifkin, Wallis, Pope Francis, and Chris Hedges all encourage, the way forward begins with understanding our population at NAIS, understanding the psychological bedrock motivating social cognition that all humans share, and understanding that conservative and liberal mind sets are different—but human-caused climate change unites us all and must be met with a unified response. The time is now for NAIS to draft brave policy, to convene climate change committees at our schools, to measure our carbon emissions and set reduction goals, to draft preschool - 12th grade climate literacy curriculum, to divestment NAIS endowment holdings from fossil fuels and to reinvest in green energy alternative stocks, and to organize an annual, national NAIS climate change conference modeled after the successful NAIS People of Color Conference.
We can make these changes starting today, noting that conservative families are not the conservative politicians who deny climate change. We can also note that the tide is shifting: twice as many conservatives as two years ago admit the science behind climate change (Lehmann). After understanding, we must break through the binary of false equivalencies, algorithmic news feeds, stereotype caricatures of liberal and conservative, and become humans who all call Earth home. At the same time, we must hold conservative politicians accountable for the lies and disinformation they spread. We must condemn climate change denial in the strongest possible language while embracing the conservative families on our campuses, knowing that we all arrive with different mindsets that our school needs to flourish. Last, we need to move today—at least—on the three goals set out by the Catlin Gabel School Environmental Advisory Council: carbon emission reduction goals, preschool-12th grade climate literacy curriculum, and divestment / reinvestment. We also need to begin coming together in regional NAIS partnerships—like the event in April, 2017, at Catlin Gabel—to share emission information, green energy strategies, climate literacy curriculum, and endowment financial planning. Last, the NAIS national conference on human-caused climate change must be organized immediately to meet the needs of the generations who will be most affected by climate change: the generations currently attending and the generations entering our NAIS schools in the upcoming years.
False equivalencies support not only stereotypes and binary thinking; they also legitimize the lies that climate change is a debate and that scientists have not come to consensus. Let us be bold now in our convictions and inclusivity. Let us move toward what unites us in terms of sacred values as we confront the horrors that our institutional indifference and inaction have allowed to fester and proliferate over the last twenty-six years. Our current third generation of climate-conscious NAIS students will judge us harshly if we do not act today.
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