INSIGHT: What Is There To Say?

Empowering The Climate Generation
I'm sorry. It always seems like the first thing I should say. Next Monday, I'll walk into a classroom filled with 18 teenagers from across the country looking to learn about sustainability. They are the unwitting climate generation, likely to experience the impacts of global warming more intensely than any cohort before them. Rather than pity them, I feel compelled to share everything that I know. The knowledge I can impart over the two weeks we're together is just the start, of course. They'll need to acquire a lot more. Unraveling complex, open-ended challenges requires a much more rigorous education system than what is currently in place. If I were them, I would be angry. Lack of timely and significant action is affecting their future. Looking back, they should blame us. We knew better and did little, unable to figure out how to change without sacrificing our relative prosperity; borrowing from theirs to maintain ours. My memory of specific students and their personalities tends to fade quickly come fall. But my compulsion doesn't evaporate, rather, just the opposite. Come spring, I'm thinking ahead again, wondering how I might perhaps assuage the guilt of knowing we're not doing enough by empowering the next generation to do more.