Living By Learning About Blog Action Day

 Today, thousands of bloggers around the world are uniting to talk about the environment. It’s a beautiful thing to hear so many people speaking up for the world we live in.

I have had a chance to look at some of these posts and I’m amazed by the diversity of the entries. Techies are sharing how they conserve energy, while gardeners are describing how they are protecting the land from pollutants.

This ecclectic conversation is particularly interesting to me as it points out how much more there is to this discussion than the overwhelming focus on the dire consequences of global warming that our children have been exposed to recently.

Nuclear Arms Race

When I was growing up, we were afraid that the nuclear arms race would inevitably result in the mass extinction of mankind. However, as a young adult I saw the crumbling of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Cold War. As a result, we no longer live in fear of imminent nuclear destruction.

Global Warming

Our new nemesis is global warming. A recent Washington Post article describes one young boy’s take on global warming:

“That’s the Earth now,” the 9-year-old says, pointing to a dark shape at the bottom. “And then,” he says, tracing the progressively lighter stripes
across the page, “it’s just starting to fade away.”

Alex Hendel of Arlington County is talking about the end of life on our beleaguered planet. Looking up to make sure his mother is following along, he taps the final stripe, which is so sparsely dotted it is almost invisible. ” In 20 years,” he pronounces, “there’s no oxygen.” Then, to dramatize the point, he collapses, “dead,” to the floor.

Fortunately, most educators don’t leave the intruction at this point. The best educators enable students to understand that each one of us can help change the world.

Change The World

Last year I coached an Odyssey of the Mind team whose challenge was to create a skit in which a traveller goes around the world in 8 minutes with at least one stop in a Polar region. This problem was sponsored by NASA, who also provided an interactive earth science guide that included learning modules on topics such as the “Too Many Blankets” that was developed for students in Grades 1-4.

Sure, the focus on dying polar bears could have been depressing, but the lesson was that kids could learn about the challenges facing our environment in order to figure out what they could do to save it.

My team decided to save the world using a nifty Global Warming Accelerator/Reverser. Who knows what informed and passionate young minds might devise in the future?