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Students worry their communities are becoming unlivable as deadly wildfires, heat waves, hurricanes and floods delay learning, devastate school buildings and exact a toll on mental health.
Two Saturdays ago, I was participating in the Ocean Conservancy’s 2021 International Coastal Cleanup. Since its beginning, more than 16 million volunteers have collected more than 340 million pounds of trash. And if that’s the amount just on the shore, you can only imagine what’s in the seas.
IT’S OUR FAULT
Students think it’s weak that as the generation who screwed up the planet, we have nothing better to say than “it’s up to your generation to save the world.” That’s an understandable response considering we cannot seem to stop destroying habitats, acidifying the oceans and making large parts of the planet’s land uninhabitable for people.
The wildfires that ripped through California towns torched school buildings and postponed the start of school as students and teachers were left homeless. A deadly deluge in Tennessee flooded schools and delayed classes as rescue teams searched for dozens of people who’d gone missing. Students around the country were dismissed early due to heat waves and Hurricane Ida, while smoke settled over towns and cities as far east as Philadelphia, sending kids inside for recess.
Besides the summer bringing on a resurgence of COVID, the starkest evidence yet of the devastating toll that climate change will take on the planet is the disruption of student learning. Sans COVID, students at least know they can always have their trustworthy schools to count on – or will they?
STUDENTS WILL SOON AGAIN FEEL UNSAFE IN SCHOOL
School officials are finding that their infrastructures are unprepared for climate change and aren’t up to the task of weathering climate disasters, and the experience of living through these calamities is adding to the mental health strains on students already burdened by the coronavirus pandemic.
Laura Schifter, senior fellow at the Aspen Institute where she leads K12 Climate Action—an initiative to foster climate-friendly practices and policies within the education sector—says extreme weather is going to increasingly impact and disrupt learning. And if she’s sayin’ it, you better believe it. This is not to be confused with the Al Gore who told us the same thing 15 years ago about all of this with his award-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
THE STORM’S NOT APPROACHING, IT’S HERE
With climate change, students are always either in or between disasters. If you are not experiencing it yourself you are aware that someone else is experiencing it and you are aware of the chronicity of it.
Yet today’s students are coming of age in a world battered by disasters on a scale unimaginable even a few years ago. The failure of adults to teach students accurately about the science behind and threats from climate change, much less about how to mitigate its harms, could add to the mental health trauma young people experience, according to educators and psychologists.
TO TELL THE TRUTH
We already essentially need a truth and reconciliation process if we’re going to help students accurately perceive the situation and build their resilience. It’s a little like any of our national historical injustices—when we’re not speaking accurately about them, it defers the ability to process them, learn from them and heal from them.
Mental health professionals say we may have entered a new reality in which almost everyone, including children, is touched by climate change – and routinely so.
“This summer has been a wakeup call for what we mean when we say climate change is a threat multiplier, in which many things come together to increase stress on our students,” said Elizabeth Haase, chair of the American Psychiatric Association Committee on Climate Change and Mental Health.
Now is the time for the truth, about this inconvenient truth.
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder of The Student Success Project and Think Factory Consulting. He can be reached at 305-788-4105 or email at ritchie@thinkfactory.com and on Facebook and You Tube as The Student Success Project.
