An article today in Conservation Minnesota details some ways that Minnesota schools can make their school a more environmentally friendly place WHILE freeing up money for education.  The article brought to mind two things that have surprised me as the parent of a kindergartner just starting public school this year.

1.  Paper!

Before our daughter started kindergarten we attended several meetings at the school, met with her teacher and received at least 3 mailings.  The result of these various meetings and mailings was close to a quarter of a ream of paper, much of which contained replications.  I realize that often it takes this many times for a parent to respond, but an alternate delivery method, or a prioritizing of what truly needs to be printed seems in order.  Put it all up on a website, but have some copies available for those who don't have access to the internet or ask parents on their kindergarten registartion forms if they would prefer to use email or post mail.

2.  Bus vs. Ride 

We are lucky in our city to have free busing available to all public school children within the district that are more than a mile from school.  Because we live outside of a mile our daughter will be taking the bus.  There is a long list of reasons I could go into why we made this decision, but I will stick to the one most relevant this blog.  Carbon emissions.  A bus could be described as the largest carpool option that exists and regardless of if I choose to use it or not, it will be running.  Therefore if I choose to drive to school I double the emissions.  On top of this, our school district has been involved with a great program called Project Green Fleet.  "Project Green Fleet is a collaborative effort among business, government agencies and non-profit organizations to improve air quality and protect health by reducing emissions from Minnesota’s school buses and other diesel vehicles. Project Green Fleet helps school districts, privately owned school bus fleets, heavy-duty fleets and other diesel fleet owners reduce emissions through retrofits, repowers, and idle-reduction technologies."

When we toured the school my daughter will be attending last year we were able to go on a school bus ride.  During the ride the driver explained how his bus was retrofited under this program to all of the kids and parents on the bus.  His explanation turned the district's involvement in Project Green Fleet into not only a good environmental decision, but a teachable moment for children and parents alike.  By using the bus system available to my child, I show my support for our district thinking about the importance of reducing carbon emissions and air pollution and providing a teachable moment for all of us about the changes that can be made system wide.

This opinion piece was posted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune today and we thought it was worth sharing.  It raises another important reason that we as educators should be teaching kids about climate change in the classroom; Parent Education and Awareness.  It often takes the concerns of ones own child to bring the importance of an issue to the surface.  Mr. Commers provides us with the perspective of a parent, educated by his children, willing to take some part of the blame, but also willing to be part of the solution.

When Kids Call for Better Behavior

What makes the parent of young children more anxious – the responsibility of teaching the important lessons, or the knowledge that we’re still learning those lessons ourselves?

Recently, as my elementary-age children have drawn an interest in news, we have had more conversation about climate change. This winter's dumping of thirty-two inches of snow on Washington, D.C. caught their attention due to jealousy, but also concern. Recent reporting that Lake Superior’s temperature is substantially warmer this year than normal also prompted talk.

Based on my sample size of two, kids aren’t just aware of climate change and some of its potential impact. And they aren’t afraid of it, so to speak. But they are absolutely serious about responding to global trends with immediate, concrete behavior change. They gave me multiple suggestions for how. Here are a few:

* Compete against your own driving. Set a limit for how many miles you will drive this week. Reduce the limit regularly. Call it car limbo.

* Grow food in the backyard if you have one, and create greenhouses together for winter growing. Why eat food from far away?

* Use a compost. You can put all of your corn husks and apple cores in it, and then it turns into dirt without having to drive it anywhere.

* If you sell things in plastic containers, you should take them back to recycle them (hear that, grocery stores?)

These are mostly relatively simple measures to implement for many of us, and they're increments toward a solution. But the kids don’t stop here. The immediacy and concreteness of their recommendations become more clear with ideas like:

* Add trees all over. Replace some of the streets with trees. Shrink the city.

* Change the city so that people don’t need to drive across town to go from their home to their work.

At times, these conversations have shifted into early forms of generational charges: Dad, your generation and all the others have blown it big time. We’re not going to face the music with baby steps, so get moving. And they’re right. Attempting to explain why some of these recommendations aren’t a matter of course is dicey territory. Don’t even try suggesting to them that politics present a legitimate reason for inaction. There are plenty of ways I continue to develop and guide my children’s behavior, and in doing so hopefully convey larger lessons about life. At the same time, in cases like these exchanges about “going green,” they serve to develop and guide my behavior, too. We’re all better for it.

By Jon Commers, founder and principal of Donjek, Incorporated. His projects focus on navigating placemakers - planners, developers, engineers - through financial feasibility and analysis, with an emphasis on facilitating public-private sector negotiations.

This week we have been busy working with a group of college students from Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, Portugal and France. They are here through the University of Minnesota's Office of International Studies and are studying Climate Change and Sustainability for five weeks. We have been lucky to host them for a few days up at Will's homestead outside Ely teaching them about the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, as well as discussing issues of climate change policy at an international level. It is always exciting for us as at the Foundation to meet with youth from other countries and to have time to have a dialogue on climate change from a global perspective. For one activity, we pulled from our Citizen Climate curriculum a lesson on equity in climate negotiations, and discussed different definitions of equity.  Our discussion was all the more rich because of the diversity of nations represented in our group.  Here are a few photos of the group in action both using their brains and using their hands!

Today was Bike/Walk to Work Day and seeing all the fun events to celebrate it around the Twin Cities Metropolitan area reminded me of the project seen in the video below.  It was done with the thought that:

...something simple and fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better. (fun theory)

Events like Bike/Walk to Work Day intentionally build a community of people committed to doing something good for the environment, by limiting the amount they drive to work.  Others can become inspired by these actions in part because of how much FUN the people that participate seem to be having.

Think about the community you live or work in.  What are some things that could be done to improve the energy efficiency or limit your carbon footprint?  How could they be made fun?

Our newest Citizen Climate curriculum emphasizes civic engagement and helps teachers and students understand the critical and complex climate solutions being discussed on the national and international stage. In the curriculum we recommend playing the Stabilization Wedge Game, a game produced by Princeton University's Carbon Mitigation Initiative . The goal of the game is to demonstrate that climate change is a problem which can be solved by implementing today's technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. The game creators, Stephen Pacala and Robert H. Socolow, show that the difference between maintaining our increasing levels of CO2 and leveling out our emissions of CO2 in the next 50 years is approximately 200 billion tons of CO2, and if illustrated graphically is a triangle (see below from Carbon Mitigation Initiative, Princeton University ).

Click the above images for a larger view

The object of the game is to keep the next fifty years of CO2 emissions flat, using eight 25 billion ton wedges from a variety of different strategies which fit into the stabilization triangle. Students have the opportunity to select from a variety of different strategies categorized as efficiency and conservation, nuclear energy, fossil-fuel based strategies, and renewables and bio storage to fill their triangle with wedges. The game is a good exercise for thinking about all the factors that go into the decision making process, such as money, political will, public opinion etc. I have enjoyed using it with students, but have found it difficult sometime to engage them because the solutions are generally disconnected from daily life.

This week the Garrison Institutes's Climate, Mind and Behavior Project , in cooperation with the Natural Resources Defense Council , came out with what they are calling informally the "Behavioral Wedge." They show how the United States alone could reduce its CO2 emissions by 1 billion tons through easy and inexpensive actions. Actions include, carpooling twice a week or telecommuting once a week; washing clothes in cold water; and unplugging or shutting off electronics more often. The actions outlined in the report, are more relevant to the average student and citizen than those in the Stabilization Wedge Game, and could possibly be integrated into the game when playing with students as a follow up, or as an introduction to solutions they can implement themselves. Let us know how you used it in your classroom, and if we adapt it for our own use we will be sure to post it!

Fore more on the Stabilization Wedge Game

Fore more on the "Behavioral Wedge"