“We are the first generation to feel the consequences of a warming planet, and the last generation that can steer a different course.”
Rosanna Xia
As described by environmental writer, Rosanna Xia, this time in human history is temporally perched in a hinge moment: between actions that will directly address the earth’s climate changes or inaction that will lead ineluctably to disaster for the planet and the species. In her book California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline (2024), Xia uses California as an example of both the many threats to the planet and an approach to meeting these threats through collective knowledge and its filial complement, environmental justice. Along similar lines, Pope Francis (2020) uses Friedrich Hoelderlin’s poem ‘Hyperion’ to inspire hope in the pursuit of that knowledge: “Where danger is, also grows the saving power.” He goes on to say, “That’s the genius in the human story. There’s always a way to escape destruction. Where humankind has to act is precisely there, in the threat itself: that’s where the door opens” (para. 17).
In this volume and the Vatican meeting that they organized (2024), leading climatologist, V. Ramanathan and university president Marcelo Suárez-Orozco champion an emphasis on Climate Resilience as the foundation for educating ourselves and our youth to use our knowledge and power to propel us into action. To achieve Climate Resilience, they advocate a multi-pronged, trans-disciplinary approach. One of those prongs involves a commitment to a type of education for the young that transforms the way that they think and we all live. The goal is to equip our society to understand the sources of our climate crisis, the lasting changes needed to address it, and the steps needed along the way to respond to the inevitable disasters accompanying the effects of the ongoing climate crisis.
This paper will use the example of California to illustrate both ongoing and future efforts to give our youth the tools they need in this mission, beginning with climate literacy. Just as literacy is the foundation for educating the individual, we conceptualize climate literacy as one of the principal building blocks for educating our society’s resiliency in the face of the climate-based hazards to survival that have already begun.
Alberto Manguel, in his book Fabulous Monsters: Dracula, Alice, Superman, and Other Literary Friends, writes (2019), “What has become a cornerstone of faith for me, truer than true and more so as time goes by, are the words the Abbot says to the painter of illuminations, in Kipling’s story ‘The Eye of Allah’: ‘But for the pain of the soul there is, outside God’s Grace, but one drug; and that is a (hu)man’s craft, learning, or other helpful motions of mind’” (p. xxii). Building the mindsets of our youth through learning is a “cornerstone of faith” for those who choose collective action over inaction, over indifference, and over outright denial in this hinge moment. It is learning, therefore, that becomes the antidote to disaster. In the words of Pope Francis (2020), education is “one of the most effective ways of making our world and history more human…Education is above all a matter of love and responsibility handed down from one generation to another” (para. 7).
Frank Niepold, Senior Climate Education & Workforce Program Manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has outlined all the ways in which key leaders are already building climate literacy. He identifies that our students are being educated not only in schools, but also in communities and through organizations such as museums, zoos, and parks, and through engagement in youth groups and faith communities. Climate literacy is further maintained through constant communication through entertainment organizations and media outlets, and through our access to important and timely information as provided by federal, state, and international agencies. Finally, a deepening of climate literacy can be sustained by the kinds of coordination that can be delivered by local government and community groups, as well as the kinds of training and workforce development that professional organizations and unions can provide (2024). As emphasized at the climate resiliency meetings at the Vatican and an ensuing meeting in Santa Barbara (2024), there is a great need for far better coordination of the many current efforts on climate change both within groups working on the same conceptual area (e.g., community preparedness or climate literacy) and across all climate-related areas so that silos can be prevented and knowledge can be better accessed and shared across groups.
California provides a unique opportunity to begin to link the various organizations and approaches to climate literacy, beginning with initiatives at the state level. For example, California uses Assembly Bills on Climate Literacy and Resiliency to initiate changes in its schools. Assembly Bill 3051 allows the state’s taxpayers to donate to the California K-12 Climate Change Education Voluntary Tax Contribution Fund, which is used to “award grants to school districts, county offices of education, resource conservation districts, district and county office of education partnerships with higher education institutions, and community-based nongovernmental organizations focused on environmental and climate change education” (2024, §18752, No. 2A). More specific in its intent, Assembly Bill 285 (2024) requires a California course of study for grades 1-6 and grades 7-12 to emphasize the causes and effects of climate change and methods to mitigate and adapt to its effects. Assembly Bill 130 (2024) contains a provision appropriating funds to build free and open education resources on climate change and environmental justice for K–12 students through standards-based curriculum units and the integration of environmental principles and concepts.
Such initiatives directly and indirectly target the three pillars of an overall approach described by climate scientists like Ramanathan: Mitigation, Adaptation, and Societal Transformation (MAST) (2024). That said, the onus is upon how MAST initiatives are implemented in local communities and schools so that our youth become part of the solution. According to a press release from Ten Strands (2021), a non-profit organization aimed at raising environmental literacy in California, “Senator Ben Allen [D-District 26] led the way in championing the proposal to change the way California teachers and students understand climate change and environmental justice issues while developing critical thinking skills around global topics. Ten Strands... worked with Senator Allen to garner support for this budget request” (para. 3), recruiting over 165 nonprofits, county offices of education, school districts, teachers, regional parks, and organizations to endorse the appropriation. Organizations such as Ten Strands are involved in creating such curriculum units dedicated to a developmental approach to Climate Literacy in K to 12. A related group, the Environmental and Climate Change Literacy Projects (ECCLPs, pronounced “eclipse”), aims to “Educate, activate, and empower all California students by the time they graduate to be literate in climate and environmental justice issues, drivers of solutions, and to become environmental stewards of our planet.” (ECCLPs, n.d.). The ECCLPs is a multisystem initiative organized by the UC and CSU systems in partnership with key community partners in PK-12 school districts.
The University of California operates 10 campuses and includes more than 280,000 students and more than 227,000 faculty and staff, with 2 million alumni living and working around the world, while the California State University operates 23 campuses and educates 485,550 students every year. The partnership with Ten Strands and ECCLPs aims to advance PK–12 climate change literacy and environmental justice by focusing on teacher preparation and professional learning, and annually to graduate 400,000+ California high school students to be literate in climate change and environmental justice issues and solutions. This is achieved not only through the aforementioned government initiatives and local communities, but specifically through programs that already promote literacy itself.
Our research team within the UCLA/CSU Collaboration for Neuroscience, Diversity, and Learning hopes to connect our research on literacy development to the work on Climate Literacy by groups like Ten Strands and ECCLPS. Our work underscores that literacy is our species’ change agent: the means to changing our brain, the individual’s life trajectory, and the future of our species. Too little understood in our current milieu, the human brain was never born to read. The act of learning to read has not only added an entirely new circuit to our brains, but also changed the very structure of that circuit’s connections. It is the brain’s plasticity that allows new circuits to be made by connecting older cognitive and linguistic structures (like vision and language) to new knowledge. Just as a young brain becomes literate through time, exposure, teaching, and effort, the same principles for its development are useful to incorporate in curricula that help our young become climate literate. By making climate literacy one of the basic foundations of our entire educational curriculum, we can take advantage of the brain’s ability to go beyond its original capacities and develop whole new pathways, just as it must do to form what we call deep reading.
It is important to provide a description here of what deep reading involves, so that the intersection between cognitive neuroscience research on reading can propel work on climate literacy development. Briefly, deep reading represents the development and integration of some of our most sophisticated cognitive, affective, and linguistic processes with basic reading skills. These processes include the formation and continued growth in background knowledge; empathy and perspective-taking; inference and deduction; critical thinking; and insight-driven reflection. These same deep reading processes are fundamental to both expert reading and to climate literacy. Together they are the foundation for the future growth and development of our citizenry of the 21st century. Neither can be taken for granted in the present.
In the United States, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) frequently discusses as our country’s grade card for its students. NAEP describes the relative performance of our students on areas like reading and math. Progress is depicted as basic, below basic, and proficient for those who are fully comprehending what they read. Very importantly, the most recent NAEP report indicates that only one-third of our fourth and eighth grade students reach the proficiency level, while a staggering majority of children of color never reach basic levels of reading, much less proficiency (NAEP, 2023). This has led to a recognition that the US has a “literacy crisis”, which has led to increased attention to the development of literacy in the K-12 areas. We believe that this attention for greater funding for better methods for the teaching of literacy can be combined with climate literacy initiatives. Our existing work on the reading brain suggests that the same principles for teaching the deep reading processes underlying proficiency are equally important for attaining climate literacy. Just as UCLA Dean Tina Christie (2024) advocates the incorporation of climate literacy efforts within funding for community schools, we advocate that we piggy back efforts to create reading proficiency alongside climate literacy initiatives.
Such a combined set of emphases could undergird a future, developmental curriculum for climate literacy for PK to 12. More specifically, at every age there would be age-appropriate stories, curricular activities, and books with emphases on background knowledge empathy, inference, and critical thinking. There would be an entire strand in the reading and language arts periods in school that would be devoted to climate literacy-based concepts found in stories written especially for this goal. Every new story in this strand could introduce new information about the earth (i.e., Background Knowledge) or about how others think and feel (Perspective-taking), and a chance to try this on for themselves in their lives (Empathy and Reflection).
Very important for issues that too often polarize members of our society, stories allow us show how differences between us and “others” can be the very things that bring us together and allow us to imagine whole new worlds. Thus, the emphases in empathy and background knowledge can be developing the ability to read text ever more deeply, all the while learning new knowledge and developing new ideas about their own potential for “bending the curve” (Ramanathan et al., 2019) of climate warming. In addition to developing new emphases in curricula (e.g., programs like Ten Strands and ECCLPs) based on neuroscience research on deep reading, there can be an effort to add climate literacy emphases within existing reading intervention programs (e.g., our own RAVE-O program). Due to the work by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Science and Pontifical Academy of Social Science, we have begun to build new stories and activities based on climate resiliency for struggling readers. Thus, we are using our interventions for increasing deep reading to teach climate resiliency and a path to action by our youth.
Until this time, we have conceptualized literacy programs as a way to build a kind of a moral laboratory for what Martha Nussbaum called “compassionate imagination.” We now wish to add to our programs stories with emphases on empathy, background knowledge, and reflection that can become a building block for environmental justice and climate literacy. This kind of youth engagement, allowing our youth to pass over into the consciousness of another, is an ability that is, according to Junot Diaz, the “closest we can get to telepathy.” Such a capacity has never been more important for empowering us to understand the needs of others around a troubled planet, and indeed the needs of our entire species.
Another goal within our reading-brain-based curricula is the formation and development of critical analysis processes. These capacities have also never been more important for our society and especially for our more vulnerable young. Critical thinking processes are not only the basis for reaching proficient, deep reading, they are also the basis for protection from the rampant misinformation and disinformation that bombards our society. Armed with metacognitive strategies that teach our students to connect what they read to background knowledge, inferential and analytic thinking habits, we can help our youth learn to discern truth value and disregard misinformation and disinformation, particularly with regard to the maelstrom of misinformation about climate change.
At its best, deep reading goes further than the very important use of critical analytic and empathic processes when young readers encounter text. Although it is never a given, deep reading can help the young and older readers strive to develop their own thoughts about what they have read. In the process of such a goal, the readers can discover not only their own unique insights and associations, but also their own path to acting upon such insights. Such a path can contribute to climate literacy by the realization that, in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, “We must hang on to others the things gained in contemplation.” When work on literacy and climate literacy is combined, this ‘handing on’ can become a catalyst to action and part of the antidote to the hinge moment that we find ourselves facing. As Fr. John S. Dunne (1985) said, “Wisdom… is not contemplation alone, not action alone, but contemplation in action” (p. 77).
There may be no other sector in our population better primed to take action on our climate issues than our youth and young adults, many of whom are already taking action. The example set not only by the fictional characters, but also by the real child actors playing them in the American TV series “Jane,” focuses on our environment and its endangered species. Produced by the Jane Goodall Institute, this program and its young actors serve as a reminder of the untapped power of our young, especially in California. In her review of this television show in the LA Times High School Insider, high school junior Sherman Kim (2024) writes that “the environmental issues are becoming so dire that even the children must now take action” (para. 6). She memorably concludes: “the morality and clear view of the world that children possess could do wonders for the world” (para. 6).
Yet another CA high school student, Anaya Gupta, has designed a high school curriculum called “Bending the Curve” to propel climate literacy and to mobilize youth. Based on her grandfather Ramanathan’s highly influential book of the same title, her curriculum teaches a foundation in climate change knowledge and a universal language about climate literacy that students can apply to their own forms of targeted action. It is extraordinary to see such a young person describe the need for modules that teach our young, her cohort, background knowledge about social justice, mental health, the government, and how to effectively communicate and talk about climate change.
In summary, one of the major prongs in our approach to teach climate literacy and resiliency must be based on education. Although our emphases in this chapter are predominantly directed to learning for our youth, we believe that climate literacy begins well before the child enters school and must continue through the life span if our society is to save itself. That said, an important force in education has to be on the ethical, empathic, thoughtful formation of our young citizens and the utilization of the inimitable energies and idealism of our young. Placing increasing focus on climate literacy in our youth and giving them the tools to take meaningful action is essential for their future and ours. As high school student Sherman Kim wrote, the views of the young can do “wonders for the world”.
References
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