Tag Archives: climate crisis

Planting the Seeds of Change in Education: Why Climate Crisis Activism through the Lens of Racial Justice is Critical to Creating and Sustaining a More Equitable Society

Transform Don’t Trash – NYC Environmental Justice Alliance: “On the ground and at the table” Photo credit Matt Davis

Abstract:  The climate crisis must now be addressed in an urgent, radical way, before the harm we do to our environment is irreversible; in 2020 we are presented with an opportunity of unprecedented scope to reset society on multiple, interlocking levels.  The pandemic and resulting societal disruption reveal in stark contrast inequities in economic opportunity, as well as access to healthcare and education, due to the continuing governmental legacy of racist policy that targets Black Americans.  In the de facto segregated New York City public school system, activism that links environmental and racial justice with the climate crisis, building on the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement, is growing.  It is a necessary connection that will unify and strengthen our collective efforts–and unite Americans–to make critical progress on both critical fronts.  Racial justice and environmental justice are inextricably linked with the worsening climate crisis. On the local level, in New York City, we can empower current and future generations of learners through education. the racism that produced segregated housing in toxic environments and neighborhoods, and subsequently in largely segregated school districts, cannot be perpetuated as we emerge from quarantine.  As we unite to address police brutality against Black Americans, the urgent call to address underlying issues of climate justice that affect health and healthcare–and the climate crisis that enables pandemics to roar across the planet–must be the focus of our individual and governmental efforts.

Key Terms:  Racism, Environmental Justice, Climate Justice, Black Lives Matter, Climate Crisis

Learning where our food comes from and where our waste goes is all part of understanding the climate crisis and environmental justice.

Harvesting healthy food at Red Hook Farms

A sampling of curriculum content, particularly in the high school curriculum, though adaptable to younger students, follows.  They are envisioned to foster interdisciplinary engagement.  In schools, curriculum surrounding waste generation and processing—where does our garbage go?—recycling, composting, community gardens, greenspaces, and green market economies should be studied, inspiring future engineers, scientists, writers, artists, and architects. 

Civics/Government

  • Discussion of the question at the heart of the civil suit Juliana vs. The United States:  do the People have a constitutional right to a healthy environment?  https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/juliana-v-us
  • What duty of care do we owe one another in a society—on an individual level (such as mask-wearing) and on a national/global level? 
  • Study of the Green New Deal as it relates to NYC realities. 

https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf

https://www.sunrisemovement.org/green-new-deal

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02012020/green-new-deal-future-2020-election-climate-change-sanders-ocasio-cortez

  • Discussion of the recently proposed companion Senate bill Environmental Justice for All Act by Senators Harris, Booker, and Duckworth:

https://www.harris.senate.gov/news/press-releases/harris-booker-duckworth-introduce-comprehensive-legislation-to-help-achieve-environmental-justice-for-all

One segment in the documentary included the slogan, “Green jobs, not jails,” a positive example of government-backed support for low-income homeowners to convert their homes to solar power, with people of color from the community participating in jobs training to install the panels.  Energy savings—and clean energy—allowed POC to purchase the panels, making them part of the clean energy movement.  

Environmental Science

  • The Harbor School

A field trip to Governors Island to explore the oyster project at the Harbor School and is an excellent example of positive, cool environmental science.  The oyster middens that used to line the Manhattan shores are testament to the once-teeming food source.  Oysters filter roughly thirty-five gallons of water a day and are quietly cleaning our harbor.  The shell recycling project (you can see it on Governors Island) exists because oyster larvae, called spats, need old oyster shells on which to attach to grow.  It is an inspired way to teach about ecosystems and water health, and a 10-minute ferry ride is a welcome breath of fresh air—when we can emerge.  https://untappedcities.com/2017/08/30/the-harbor-school-nycs-only-maritime-high-school-partners-with-billion-oyster-project-on-governors-island/

Red Hook Farms educational and volunteer programs inspire the next generation of leaders
  • Red Hook Farms is a truly inspiring effort surrounding farming, gardening, and education, involving public housing and NYC communities, not to be missed.
  • Red Hook Farms Composting Facility is “the largest community composting program in the United States run entirely on renewable resources.”

Composting is an elemental way to empower individuals to assert control over daily consumption and waste disposal.  Over 1/3 of NYC waste is compostable food waste; in landfills, it emits greenhouse gases and increases the trucking of waste.  [source https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/nyregion/nyc-compost-recycling.html]

History

  • Innumerable examples, through Jim Crow and Civil Rights struggles, to present,  beginning with this accessible and vital resource:  Reconstruction:  America After the Civil War, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a 4-part PBS Documentary.  Part I is linked here:  https://www.pbs.org/video/reconstruction-part-1-hour-1-n0g1em/

Environmental Justice and Community engagement

Excellent and engaging curricula can be accessed through We Act, an organization that powerfully links the issues of climate justice to education and activism and provides templates for action.  We Act programming, such as Environmental Health and Justice Leadership Training (EHJLT), online learning mini-modules, and environmental and healthcare careers networking, are all part of this vibrant organization’s initiatives.

  • Climate Justice Agenda 2020

The Climate Justice Agenda 2020:  A Critical Decade for Climate, Equity, and Health published in April by the New York City Climate Alliance offers a fantastic roadmap for environmental issues facing NYC communities.  Its overarching goals are to reduce harmful greenhouse gases and localized emissions; advance a just transition towards an inclusive, regenerative economy; and cultivate healthy & resilient communities.  Educators can cull local topics most relevant to students in the neighborhoods in which their schools are housed.  Issues surrounding waste transfer stations, truck traffic, pollutants, storm water treatment, coastal resilience, and the sustaining of a green jobs economy are a few of the items on this comprehensive and exciting agenda.

Memorializing Loss: The Convergence of Funerary Art and Climate Change

An Art Review by Carol Joo Lee

To talk about Climate Change is to lament what we have lost – land, water, air, and the species that depended on them, human and non-human. The onset of the sixth mass extinction looms large over our collective minds – at least those who don’t deny the indisputable data – and it creates existential conditioning that vacillates from dread to despair. Throughout history artists have been moved to memorialize the losses and traumas that have been inflicted upon humanity: a 14th century illustration depicts Black Death; Poussin’s “The Plague of Ashdod” records the horrors of the plague outbreak of the 17th century; and Picasso’s 1937 “Guernica” captures the inhumanities of Nazi bombing. In the face of tragedies of epic scale, art can universalize the unimaginable and humanize the incomprehensible. Contemporary artists of the Anthropocene, for many decades now, have tried to contextualize, eulogize and memorialize the losses/deaths stemming from ecological and environmental collapses. Essentially, the losses spurred by the Climate Crisis is the loss of home – literal and metaphorical, biological and geological, material and immaterial, multitude and one. 

An early illustrated manuscript depicts the Black Death (Credit: Courtesy of Louise Marshall/ Archivio di Stato, Lucca)
Poussin’s The Plague of Ashdod in 1630-31 (Credit: DEA / G DAGLI ORTI/ De Agostini via Getty Images)
© The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

“I control the pain. That’s really what it is.” – Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres‘s works do not explicitly speak of the climate. Nonetheless, they exemplify governmental negligence and political inertia during the AIDS epidemic, which began in the 1980s, thus in the wake of the woeful bungling of the Covid-19 pandemic on the part of the federal government and the continuing denialism of Climate Crisis, it seems apt to re-examine his most famous piece “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” from 1991 in our current context. Commonly referred to as “candy spill,” this participatory work, a mound of wrapped candies weighing approximately 175 pounds, the healthy weight of his lover before succumbing to AIDS, spill out from one corner of the room. As visitors take candy from the pile, the artwork shrinks then eventually disappears altogether. The candy has a twin function – representing the body and the placebo. In taking the candy, the audience becomes complicit in the erasure and masking. The site of the installation becomes an in-situ memorial to his lover and all who perished during the AIDS epidemic. It is sweet and heartbreaking. It is also a foretelling of Gonzalez-Torres’s own life, who died 5 years later of the same disease. We can very well imagine the mound of candies as our home, Earth, and the work, already powerful, begins to take on a whole new meaning.

How, when, and why do we invest culturally, emotionally, and economically in the fate of threatened species? What stories do we tell, and which ones do we not tell, about them?
– Ursula Heise

What Is Missing?

“What Is Missing?” is an interactive web project spearheaded by artist and architect Maya Lin, who’s most well-known work is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. No stranger to liminal sites where the dead and the living collapse to create a third space, Lin’s “What Is Missing?” is a portal of remembrance, reacquaintance and resurgence that works on several levels: a digital tribute to the now extinct species; an anthropogenic record of places; and a depository of people’s personal biocentric memories of “what is missing.” Flickering dots of various colors and shapes indicating different categories like disaster, conservation, timeline and stories across the darkened map of the world bring to mind constellations in the night sky. One can click on East Asian Cranes (coming back) or Heath Hens of Martha’s Vineyard (extinct) and get an overview of their survival history dating all the way back to 600 in the cranes’ case and 1620 for the hens. Launched in 2009 and updated up to 2018, the site itself feels like a digital relic given the further exacerbation of the planetary conditions under which all living species struggle to survive, and losses of an untold number of species from our biosphere since the site’s launch. 

© 1982 Agnes Denes

In 1982, Hungarian American land artist Agnes Denes transformed 2 acres of landfill in lower Manhattan into a wheat field. Created at the foot of the World Trade Center and a block from Wall Street, the golden patch of agriculture, titled, “Wheatfield – A Confrontation,” on the land valued at $4.5 billion, which has since become Battery Park City, was “an intrusion of the country into the metropolis, the world’s richest real estate.” Denes and volunteers cleared the piles of trash brought in during the construction of the Twin Towers, then dug furrows and sowed seeds by hand. In four months time, the land yielded 1000 pounds of wheat. The harvest became horse feed for the city’s mounted police and the rest traveled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called “The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger.” The seeds were also given away in packets for people to plant them wherever they may end up in. Denes, in her prescient ways, was calling attention to what she deems as our “misplace priorities”: “Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept; it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns.”

© 1982 Agnes Denes
© 1982 Agnes Denes

The harvest also marked the end of the physical artwork but the idea lives on through the visual documentation which offers a surreal angle and an uncanny audacity imbedded in the work. It is a rather strange coincidence that the work happened 19 years before the destruction of the World Trade Center and we are now 19 years out from the 9/11 attacks. In 1982, the field was a living, breathing counterpoint to the unbounded appetite for capitalism. Today, the work, at least the photographs with the towers in the background, function as a memorial for both. 

Whether imbued with soft activism like Lin’s digital project or offering interventionist criticism like Dene’s wheat field, art under the umbrella of environment and climate challenges may not offer solutions but by showing and making us confront the losses and our lost ways, art does what it has always done throughout history, it reveals the nature of our time. 

Top Image: Plaque Memorializes First Icelandic Glacier Lost to Climate Change
(Dominic Boyer/Cymene Howe)

A “Convenient” Model: Gore’s Behavioral Approach to the Climate Crisis

Perhaps the underscored theme in the film An Inconvenient Truth is hope. But it is a certain kind of hope, a hope that is entrenched in perseverance and commitment. While Al Gore’s lectures all around the world seem heavily pronounced with this hope, despite the “inconvenient truth” of global warming, the tonal aspects of the film ultimately function as an accordion playing out signals for hope and alarm for the audience.

Al Gore, a quintessential underdog who has travelled all around the world, in order to save the world; for decades, doing the same work and improving upon it, even as time reveals more damage around the world from global warming; persisting, even when the naysayers call him a “hoax” or a threat to American society; he preserveres in his commitment and rings tirelessly the alarm bells of a “moral issue,” “not a political one,” all while reminding his audience that they have a choice and humankind can do anything, even the unthinkable, even the impossible.

Al Gore in 2007 discussing the impact humanity has had on the planet's ecosystem. Lluis Gene/AFP/Getty Images

Al Gore in 2007 discussing the impact humanity has had on the planet’s ecosystem. LLUIS GENE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The film’s incessant framing of Gore as a hero can be distracting to the significant messages in the film, such as the damaging effects of 2005’s hurricanes, the loss of polar bears , the increasing heat over the current years , and major potential disasters arising for Beijing and Calcutta. At each circumstance, I am waiting for more information, left with questions. What measures are being drawn up to prevent these issues? What new technologies could help us gain “dramatically altered consequences”?

But, at the same time, despite the film getting nowhere close to any resolve for any of these issues, it is, essentially, this certain hope of Al Gore that is to set the precedent for global warming awareness-raising. It is Gore’s universal commitment that is emphasized in the film. He travels the world, seeks out scientists, has been involved for decades, he thinks about the future. In some way, Gore is the “hero” of the [first wave of] climate crisis attention.

An Inconvenient Truth, despite its shortcomings or its conceits, ultimately presents a model for a behavioral approach to climate crisis: stick to truth, and stay with it, because, no matter what you may lose, nothing compares to losing the planet.

For more, check out: https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/conservation/conservationists/inconvenient-truth-sequel-al-gore.htm