'How do we walk with them through this time?'

Maria Vamvalis helps teachers bring climate into their classrooms

Dear friends,  

When Maria Vamvalis began her teaching career in Toronto in the early 2000s, she gave her fifth-grade students a basic introduction to the science of climate change.

“I wasn't giving them the apocalyptic scenarios, but I was informing them about the role carbon dioxide plays in warming the atmosphere and explaining that we need to transition away from fossil fuels,” she recalls. 

One day, the father of one of her students paid her a visit and brought along a book of fossil fuel industry-produced research. He kindly explained that, in fact, the climate was always changing and weather patterns were a mystery! She shouldn’t teach otherwise, he told her. Vamvalis knew he had the upper hand, and it was a chilling moment, but she didn’t stop inegrating climate science into the classroom. 

A few years later, Vamvalis taught seventh and eighth graders and encouraged them to do their own research on the impact human-caused warming was having on ecosystems, and on other species. When they responded with concern a school administrator scolded her for “upsetting the children.” She reminded them that it was climate change that was upsetting the children—and that they had a right to be upset. Vamvalis pointed out that they had a responsibility to support them in grappling with these realities and engaging them in seeking out active responses to the problem. Still, she faced an uphill battle. Feeling isolated and frustrated with the lack of support, she decided to think beyond her own classroom. “What would it look like to build a network of support for teachers like her, all around Canada,” she asked herself. Then she went back to school in hopes of answering that question.

A decade later, Vamvalis has just earned a PhD from the University of Toronto, where she has spent the last seven years researching pedagogies for climate justice education, working with teachers, and designing curriculum through an organization called The Critical Thinking Consortium. She also runs a national training program for educators across Canada. 

I reached out to Vamvalis when I learned about her work because it struck me as the kind of approach that more educators here in the U.S. might want to hear about. And I find it heartening whenever people set out—and find the support they need—to work on making systemic change. At this moment, when comprehensive education is key to advancing climate action, I like the idea of looking to our neighbors for a model of what’s possible. I’ll add that we spoke before Justin Trudeau stepped down. Now it’s looking likely that Canada will elect a Conservative Prime Minister who will ‘axe the nation’s climate tax’ and ramp up fossil fuel production. It’s not yet clear how that change in leadership might affect climate education there.

Below is an excerpt from our conversation. 

You describe your work as “holistic climate justice pedagogies for relational wellbeing.” Can you break that down for me?

When I started seven years ago, there was no existing theoretical framework that enabled me to approach this work. There's some climate change education, but most of it was rooted in the scientific paradigm. And that can only go so far; it’s not necessarily going to enable young people to find a path forward. There is citizenship education [in Canada] but it is still rooted in nature-human dualism. And there’s a great deal of evidence that young people are in a mental health crisis, so the big question is: How are we going to teach and nurture their well-being? I had to develop a framework to help answer that question. 

Can you say more about the course you’re teaching for educators? 

Yes. We’re in our third run of the Accelerating Climate Change Education course. A number of educational leaders participated in its design and it is about moving from teaching about climate change and injustice to teaching for action and relational wellbeing, and moving together towards systemic justice. I co-facilitate the course with a Mohawk educator, and it is complex decolonizing work. To me, colonization is all of the historical [events] that have entrenched supremacy and separation between people and land and other species, and it's a scar on our own inner knowing that we are all deeply interconnected. If we truly valued that knowing [as a society], we would not have slavery. We would not have what is currently happening in Gaza. Those things would not be possible, because that inner knowing would be recognized and entrenched in the way that we organize our society. 

My co-facilitator, Kahsenniyohstha Lauren Williams, and I are also trying to model the restoration of relationships and learning. She brings very different ways of knowing to the climate crisis and frames it very differently than, say, Bill McKibben might. We're modeling walking together to find our way through this time.  

Does every teacher in Canada have to take the course?  

For now, it's voluntary for the teachers who are ready and need support, because one of the findings from my research was that many teachers find themselves in situations where they are the only person focused on climate, and the school says, “She's the ‘eco person.’ So, check, we've got that covered.” What we're trying to do is build communities of practice so that these teachers who really want to lead on climate don't feel alone. And that's part of thinking systemically. But I would absolutely love for this learning to be mandatory and we're seeing shifts in our education programs. In 2022, the [deans, directors, and chairs of education from all regions of Canada] signed an accord about the need to really bring climate education to the forefront of teacher education here. That said, the political landscape here is shifting. We're one election away from having a leader who [has had dozens of meetings] with fossil fuel industry lobbyists.  

What are you hearing from teachers about how their students are responding to what they learn about climate change? How are they coping—or not? 

There’s a wide range of responses. I hear from teachers that some of their students can be influenced negatively by what's online, and they can get into climate denial. But most students who are aware are scared, nervous, worried, and I'm actually very concerned right now because many students know what the election [of Donald Trump] means for the climate. It's going to take tremendous courage from everyone to walk together through this [next phase] and really uphold our responsibilities to present and future generations. 

How does teaching critical thinking help students navigate the world of climate change disinformation? 

What happened with that parent 20 years ago was a manipulation of critical thinking. He was presenting “two sides” to a scientific scenario and manipulating the story.  I have worked for the last 10 years with the Critical Thinking Consortium, which—in collaboration with scholars, educators, systems leaders, learners—has developed a framework for how we explicitly teach critical thinking. That's work I do in person with teachers. We teach questioning and investigating; show students how to be inquiry-minded, how not to take things at face value; and how to engage credible sources. But we also teach about the importance of thinking systemically and relationally. We ask: How do we support folks in developing the mental muscles that allow them to stay with discomfort as they're unlearning things. Because we're steeped in coloniality and challenging deeply held assumptions requires an acceptance of discomfort. There are ways to nurture critical thinking that can bring out the very best of our human capabilities, and I think we have to be far more intentional about that in education. 

Given the growing acceptance of AI technology in the classroom, the odds seem stacked against critical thinking. 

I’m always thinking about how we can problematize the curriculum to make it meaningful for students. When we look at studies on engagement, it’s clear that we become engaged when we're caught up in something, and when we're being asked to think critically and creatively. For example, here in Canada we're engaged in a process of truth and reconciliation [as mandated by the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement]. And I could just get up and lecture the students about what happened and why it matters. Or I could invite them to answer the question: How would our community look different in 5,10, or 20 years if we actually began to honor treaty relationships [with First Nations people]?

When we're testing students constantly, and we're taking the meaning out of the learning experience, they can be disengaged from what they're learning. So we have to think very much about the pedagogies that we're using in schools. I just did an online workshop for 1,200 students from grades six to 12 about AI and climate change through an organization called IThink. And I pointed out that AI can do a lot of incredible things that support climate resilience. The technology is being used to detect wildfires before they start, and it's being used to help potato growers in Prince Edward Island to adapt to changing conditions. But it’s still benefiting very few people while using a tremendous amount of resources—not just energy, but water, land, and human resources. What if we put some criteria around our use of AI? Is it promoting justice? Is it ecologically sound? Is it going to contribute to a regenerative future? Is it building relationships, or is it being used for divisive purposes?  

We’re on the precipice of a frightening time for climate education in the U.S. The incoming administration has often denied the existence of climate change and has pledged to ramp up oil and gas drilling while doing away with the U.S. Department of Education. Do you have any words of wisdom to offer? 

It’s a scary moment. When I think about climate justice, it is about centering those who are most impacted by climate change—and they are often the same people who have been least involved in the decision making. But more holistically, I think it’s about identifying those aspects of our own humanity that have been most marginalized and bringing them back to the center. And by that, I mean our interconnectedness and relationality. We have much to learn from Indigenous knowledge, and from the knowledge formed within Black movements for civil rights. This moment can be about healing and repair, and I'm not being Pollyannaish. In the context of this terror—and there's real terror being unleashed as we speak—it’s about being courageous enough to speak these things into existence. If more of us speak from the vulnerability we feel about our planet and our communities being in peril and a sense of wanting to protect both—it matters. And it has a powerful role in leading us through this time, more than the so-called strong man, authoritarian leader does. I see a lot of women offering a form of leadership that truly wants to honor and protect life, and that’s critically important right now.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Climate news you might have missed 

A tragedy still unfolding in LA

The fires in Los Angeles will likely continue to destroy homes and lives for a few more days and I’ve been unable to think about much else. There is so much to say and feel about this new, horrific disaster but for now I’ll share Hamilton Nolan’s meditation on its implication for the bigger picture of climate mitigation and equity. In it he writes:

First people must get safe. When the fires go out, eventually, they will tally their losses, and decide whether to rebuild, and where. These are the immediate decisions and the medium-term decisions, and they will be made by individuals. Collectively, we have a longer term (though not too much longer) decision to make. That decision is: Are we going to do climate change together, or separately? This is a choice for all of us, philosophically, but in a practical sense this is a choice for the government. The results of the choice will be stark, for all of us. Inaction is, by default, a choice to do this separately.

Greenland is at a mineral crossroads 

Donald Trump announced earlier this week that “the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity." He said he wouldn’t rule out using military force to seize the island and sent Donald Jr. there to take a series of selfies and declare he would make it great again. And it wasn’t merely to sow chaos (although most things he does seem to have that effect). As the ice melts in Greenland, it has become increasingly clear that the island is home to an abundance of the rare earth elements that are seen as essential to the energy transition.  

While some mostly-exploratory mining has begun taking place in Greenland, and more is on the horizon, experts say a number of factors will likely prevent an all-out gold rush in the short and medium term. The autonomous region of Denmark is home to a population that is 80 percent Indigenous Greenlandic Inuit, and the government is currently ruled by the Inuit Ataqatigiit party (IA), a democratic socialist party that has been working toward independence since the 1970s. And although the IA pledged to oppose a large rare-earth mining project when the current president Múte Egede was elected in 2021, Greenland then went on to sign a contract with the EU to “develop sustainable raw materials value chains” there. Just what that will look like, and whether the IA can find a way to bring in revenue that would allow it to gain independence without compromising its core values on the environment are the big questions at hand, regardless of Trump’s blustery pronouncements. Of course these days it’s proving impossible to know where the bluster ends and the actual threats begin. 

A plan to blow up the science behind of the nation’s climate policy 

Although most laypeople haven’t read it, the National Climate Assessment might just be the most important climate document produced in the US. When the last one was released in 2023, it broke up the country into 10 regions and provided details about the climate risks, impacts, and responses in all of them. The assessment, which is published about every four years, is geared toward local governments, Tribal governments, city planners, community organizers, researchers, and everyone else who wants to understand, assess, and plan for the ever-unfolding series of climate-related crises we’re facing.  

The next assessment is scheduled to be released in 2026 or 2027 and Politico reports that Russell Vought—a chief architect of Project 2025 and the man Trump wants to lead the Office of Management and Budget—has plans to upend the process behind the assessment. Vought apparently plans to shape the report directly and pick the researchers who work on it in hopes of seeding doubt, and radically altering the basis for the nation’s climate policy. Ultimately, it could serve as a gift for a range of industries that are hoping to see the incoming administration roll back a range of policies based on climate science. As Politico put it, “The Trump version of the report, for example, could be referenced for years in industry attacks on future regulations—rather than as a defense of them.” As for the nearly 500 scientists whose expertise serves as the basis for the National Climate Assessment? It’s likely at least some of them are considering leaving the U.S. for fear that their research could be censored. 

Oil + toxic masculinity = a death grip on the future

Last month, The 19th ran an interview with Cara Daggett, a professor of political science who coined the term “petro-masculinity” — and who did recently leave the country to teach at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany. In the interview Daggett details the way the mid-20^th Century idea of the American suburbs lies at the heart of the efforts by Trump and his supporters to resist inevitable changes to both fossil fuel culture and to patriarchy. She said:

This led to segregated, privatized, White home spaces where you have a vision of a housewife protected from all the dirt and grime of the working world; and also of the multiracial, diverse world. Everything is only accessed by the car, and the people who are showing up in public spaces and workspaces are the breadwinners, who are coded as masculinized. This particular division of private and public, housewife and breadwinner, White and multi-racial, home and work, was built on a flow of cheap fossil fuels and car culture. 

She added:

A sustainable future will mean more than just substituting out one type of energy for another. It really requires challenging a modern Western culture and a way of life that’s premised on unending growth and expansion of cheap energy, mass consumerism and all of the ways that those things factor in a certain traditional vision of the American way of life. Right-wing climate denial understands that the change required is this significant, and their response is defiance—to refuse that change.

“What sense did you make of it?”

The Conversation ran a useful story this week about the mental health impacts of the climate crisis and how climate activists can better navigate the world for their own stability. The headline alone—Why anger, anxiety and anguish are understandable psychological reactions to the climate crisis—says a lot about the authors’ shared perspective. It also led me down a rabbit hole reading about the power threat meaning framework (PTMF), an approach that “centers the consideration of context when making sense of distress,” as a useful way to engage productively with that anger, anxiety and anguish. An alternative to models based on psychiatric diagnosis, the approach uses a framework that encourages those in distress and the people helping them to replace the question “What is wrong with you?’ with four others:
- ‘What has happened to you?’ (How has power operated in your life?)
- ‘How did it affect you?’ (What kind of threats does this pose?)
- ‘What sense did you make of it?’ (What is the meaning of these situations and experiences to you?)
- ‘What did you have to do to survive?’ (What kinds of threat response are you using?)

The researchers behind the Conversation article used the PTMF framework to interview climate activists and found that it helped them narrow in on approaches that allowed them to feel pride in their own persistence, while achieving detachment in the face of critique. The article reads: 

While some had felt guilty for not doing more or not thinking about the climate crisis at all times, use of the PTMF helped them understand how withdrawal and distraction had been valuable threat responses which helped them regulate their feelings, enabling them to continue their activism.  Recognizing the climate crisis as a collective trauma is also useful in another way. It supports recognition that many who dismiss or ignore activists’ concerns are doing so to protect themselves against facing the often-unbearable reality.  

An opening for climate policy that supports the working class  

I don’t know about you, but I am feeling pretty done with election postmortems. That said, I found Tuesday’s New York Times op-ed from Thea Riofrancos and Daniel Aldana Cohen—Biden Left Us With a ‘Prius Economy.’ It’s Time for Something Different.—utterly worthy of my time. In it they articulate what many on the left, and even some on the right have been trying to say: “If Democrats want to win voters with policies that avert catastrophic climate change, they need to bring immediate, material benefits to the working class. That means folding climate policies into an agenda that tackles the cost-of-living crisis.” Amen to that. And Riofrancos and Aldana Cohen provide a number of concrete examples at the state level to strengthen their case. 

You can also see evidence of the divide the op-ed’s authors want to see addressed in this Heatmap article about the emerging effort to ban renewable energy in Oklahoma. Although the activists who want to put an end to wind and solar farms in that state cite numerous concerns, the potential loss of oil and gas jobs is clearly the most pressing.   

The pushback

1. Climate Rights International called on President Biden to pardon four activists charged with felonies for throwing washable paint powder on the protective case used for the U.S. Constitution at the National Archives.
   This story about the Congolese activists who worked with climate groups in the UK and Germany to raise awareness of the massive land auction taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo—and ultimately to pause the auction in October—is eye opening and worth your time. 

2. The British climate activist group Insure Our Future has warned the insurance industry in the UK that continuing the practice of underwriting fossil fuel expansion will result in protests in 2025. “The insurance industry must embrace its power and have the courage to lead the energy transition away from fossil fuels,” said a spokesperson for the group. 

3. In a recent op-ed about the growing radicalization of U.S. climate activists, Dana R. Fisher and Hajar Yazdiha made a detailed comparison to the Civil Rights Movement. They argue that, despite the sanitized view of the Civil Rights Movement that remains in the popular consciousness 60 years later, it was many of that movement’s most disruptive strategies that allowed it to grow. They write: 

   Any movement that challenges the status quo will be divisive. Civil rights leaders knew that they were not just challenging unjust laws; they were challenging the very basis of America’s identity and its democracy. Like the struggle for civil rights, the climate movement is fighting to get its battle cry for systemic changes to be heard over the entrenched interests that are clinging to the status quo. So too might the climate movement—and its sympathizers—lean into its efforts to ruffle feathers and wake people up.

On the brighter side 

1. President Biden moved to ban new offshore oil and gas drilling in most U.S. coastal waters—including in the waters off California and Florida. The effort applies to 625 million acres of ocean, but won’t impact existing drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s not clear how long the ban will stand in the face of the Trump Administration’s push for “energy dominance,” but Biden used the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to enact the ban, meaning that it will likely require an act of Congress to be undone. 

2. After much back and forth over the last few years, New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Climate Change Superfund Act, which will require fossil fuel companies to pay $3 billion annually for 25 years to cover climate-related damages in the state. About three dozen companies will have to pay. Experts say lawsuits will follow, but they face an uphill battle. 

3. Congestion pricing finally went into effect in Manhattan on Sunday. Since then, several photos of nearly-empty Manhattan streets have made the rounds but it’s still a little too soon to know whether it will get people out of their cars in the long term. 

4. After years of operating without a permanent space, the Climate Museum announced that it will be moving into New York City’s Hudson Yard, and is set to open in 2027.

5. Portugal could soon join Denmark and South Korea in subsidizing and investing in the proliferation of plant-based foods as a climate solution. 

6. Some urban planners are taking a long, hard look at the negative impacts of noise pollution and finding ways to create quieter cities.

   

   Photo by Jenn Caselle, via Flickr.

7. Kelp beds along the California coast have been decimated by an explosion of purple sea urchins in recent years, causing an ongoing ecological crisis. According to the Monterey Fisheries Trust: “After they’ve consumed all there is to eat, the urchins survive despite braving starvation, in a hibernation-type state, creeping around the ocean floor like the undead, forming spooky and spiky fields of purple called ‘barrens.’” Now, the Trust is working with scuba divers to harvest the urchins and transport them Monterey to fatten them up and sell their roe to restaurants. Let’s hope their initial pilot project has staying power and the kelp begins to come back.
   
   Take care out there,

   Twilight