The students had all walked out of class to protest climate change. So this is part of a global climate strike with over a thousand marches happening in one hundred countries all around the world, and Portland students are right there in the thick of it, stain here.
Today to show our one leaders, we're real live.
This is a school walkout that kids in Portland, Oregon organized back in twenty nineteen. And you might remember that around that time a lot of students were holding these kinds of protests. It was a year after Greta Tunberg held her first school strike for the climate, and millions were showing up for these similar strikes around the world to basically demand that governments give us some real action on climate change. But the Portland march was a little different.
It wasn't solely focused on getting local and federal governments to enact policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It was also about this fight with the school board happening right there in Portland.
In the past four episodes of this series, we've gotten into the fossil fuel industry's insidious infiltration of school curricula. It's something they've been doing for the past century. We've shown how these companies pushed this false idea that we could never live without them, that free markets are what make us free. The nature is there for humans to
extract from. It's been pretty dark, but today we're going to talk about people who are trying to fix the education system and get that influence out.
That's right, the fossil fuel industry has pretty clearly tried to limit how we all think about climate solutions at all. But today we'll hear from people who are at the very least trying to solve the problem of disinformation and education. Welcome to a special bonus episode of the ABC's of Big Oil, From Earth and Drilled. I'm Darna Nor.
And I'm Amy Westervelt. We'll start in Portland, Oregon, where we just heard kids walking out of school to demand better climate education. Stay with us. This episode is supported by Degrees Real Talk about Planet Saving Careers, an original podcast from the Environmental Defense Fund. People ask me all the time what they can do about climate change, and I feel a little bit like a climate change guidance counselor sometimes the short answer is what do you get at?
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Portland Public Schools sent out an email saying that while they support kids rallying and demonstrating and lobbying and protesting, they think that it shouldn't happen during school time. The students, on the other hand, say that it's more visible if they strike during school and by doing that, they're showing that this is something that matters to them right now.
So the story kind of starts in twenty fifteen when a group of student activists in Portland approach the local school board basically hoping that the officials would agree to bring in environmental justice curricula for every school in the district. That's right, environmental justice, not just climate science, and the board actually passed the resolution in twenty sixteen.
I think the primary place where students have gotten environmental
education in K twelve has been through sciences. And you know, as a social studies teacher, while I certainly want students to come to me with a solid understanding of the sort of scientific foundations of the environmental crisis, I think that if we stop in science classes, I think we really risk overwhelming students with a lot of facts about how terrible the crisis is without maybe always studying the social movements and groups and people and communities working on solutions.
So that's Tim Swineheart. He currently teaches environmental justice at Lincoln High School in Portland, and he worked with a lot of those kids to get the resolution passed. Some of them were actually his students. But he said that even though the board passed the measure unanimously, since then, not much has actually changed, and that's why they held that big walkout in twenty nineteen.
We've talked a lot in this series about the oil industry's efforts to infiltrate education, but the industry has had ample help. The federal government has made funds available to them, for one and schools have adopted their materials for decades. But Darta, it sounds like these activists had a much harder time getting into just one school district than fossil fuel companies have ever had getting into all the schools.
Yeah, that's it's really true, and it's a really good point, and it's sad. These kids got like thousands of students to walk out of class that day, so many that a lot of the schools actually counted it as an excused absence, and they held sit ins at city Hall and they worked with educators and parents to collect thousands of signatures and support of this measure. And it's not
like the school board hasn't done anything right. They did this review of all textbooks used in schools and they voted to eliminate anything that promotes climate doubt.
We did a review of many of the adopted curricula and science and social studies and found wishy washi language. You know, the climate change might be caused by right, not all scientists agree with the theory of the greenhouse effect, things like this, So part of it was calling out what was determined to be climate denial language in some of those textbooks.
And the school board has done other stuff too. It created an advisory committee for the school district with student
and teacher activists on it. Back in twenty twenty, they hired this manager to oversee climate justice programming, and all of that is really good, and they even started to work to secure some funding to support the new climate justice programming, but that actually ushered in some problems because, to the organizer's surprise, Portland General Electric, the area's largest utility company had actually contributed a quarter million dollars over
three years to support the development of climate education programming. Not for nothing, either, administrators agreed to let the utility help create the classroom materials. In a letter to their supporters, the committee said that they learned of this partnership through TV news reports, as in the school board didn't even consult them beforehand before taking this funding.
And you know, PGE is a publicly traded for profit corporation. But I think community like Portland does a good job of greenwashing itself, you know, but also has a history of having to really be pushed to get off of fossil fuels, to move away from coal burning power plants.
I think of how even you know, even here, like when we have one of the strongest climate justice education policies in the country, there is a lot of movement, you know, in a positive direction, and still we see the ways in which corporations can sort of co opt that process, you know, to potentially kind of make themselves
look better. Seemed like a pretty blatant conflict of interest again for a publicly traded for profit corporation that had been climate reticent in the past and had had been called out many times by community activists for their lack of vision when it came to climate policies and climate action.
The organizers who fought so hard for this resolution are nervous that the PG and E funding could compromise really important pieces of the measure, Like there's this part of this measure that says that the curricula that the school district brings in won't encourage students to see themselves as like impartial to climate justice, but instead to actually get involved.
One piece of language that I think is so important, especially right now, is that students come to see themselves as leaders and activists for social and environmental justice. So this policy specifically says that the school district will support student activism on climate and environmental justice.
And so far, you know, the school board has sort of signaled that it's going to stick to this sort of commitment to activism. For instance, you know, they allowed kids to get an excused absence for the school strike that they held in twenty nineteen. But still, the idea of a utility that gets most of its power from gas and coal having its fingers in this project could
obviously be a real problem down the line. Especially because the activists are hoping for the school district to do a lot more to meet the spirit of the resolution.
What a lot of people have noticed or talked about is that the resolution says that there will be curricular opportunities for all PPS students to study climate literacy and climate justice. So there have been ways in which that curriculum has been created more democratically by small groups of teachers that come together as experts to kind of share
their craft and their practice. If the school district supports professional development for teachers, which we have not yet, you know, in those areas, and then there are other ways in which what we call curriculum is actually sort of a series of spreadsheets and links and documents that you know, are stored on district servers, and you know, as long as there's sort of a digital representation of a lesson plan that may have been written by a teacher or
may have been written by a district administrator, you know, and that it's linked to state standards, then we're able to say, oh, yeah, we have a climate justice curriculum, you know. And I think we have a mix of both right now on Portland, and maybe given the age that we live in and everything else that's going on. Maybe that's the best we can expect, but that's kind of a whole other can of worms that has been frustrating.
Swineheart and his comrades in this fight for climate justice. Education aren't giving up the fight. They're still pushing the school board to discontinue its relationship with PGE. But they know that even bigger changes are needed, like transformative changes for the whole education system.
We need new curriculum because this moment calls in some ways for the entire educational project to be rethought. You know, we're facing a planetary emergency, and I think that the status quo of education is just not going to cut it at this point.
And this entirely new way of looking at education isn't just theoretical for Swinehart, because he's actually tried to envision what it would look like with this project that he worked on and called the People's Curriculum for the Earth. Co edited it with Bill Bigelow, who's this former social studies teacher, and they released it through Rethinking Schools and that's education project inspired by Howard Zinn back in twenty fourteen.
Now they're working on another edition, and it's basically this just gorgeous book of articles and role playing games and stories and poems and graphics, all designed to help teachers educate their students about climate change.
We're specifically teaching against fossil fuels. We're not teaching about fossil fuels. We're teaching against fossil fuels. That's because life on Earth depends on us moving off of fossil fuels. And that's not a political opinion of mind, that's a scientific fact.
Right.
So the way in which we have developed this curriculum have been to engage students with ways in which they can see the struggles in various communities, i mean social movements, so that necessarily are going to be part of the fight to move our society away from fossil fuels.
So, whereas the fossil fuel industry has sort of, you know, promoted this idea with schools that freedom comes from capitalism, that nature is this resource to be extracted, this curricula that Tim worked on is full of ways to teach kids about the importance of actually protecting the commons. And you know, while oil and gas companies have pushed this idea that individuals are all part of the problem, and we all need to do our part to solve climate change.
This curricula actually names polluting companies as the real enemies. There's even a piece in it called forget shorter showers.
Fossil Fuel companies want us to believe that we can't live without them, right, And you know, so I think we have to recognize as communities, as educators, that it's going to take a fight to loosen their stranglehold on our democracy, our collective consciousness, and our communities. And I think that part of that work has to begin in school.
But you know, my favorite part of this whole curricula is actually some that Bill Tim's co editor came up with. It's a response to the chocolate chip cookie experiment that Kurt Davies told us about in the second episode of this podcast.
You remember, my.
Daughter came home from school in probably third or fourth grade.
And she said, we did this really cool lesson today where the teacher gave us a chocolate chip cookie and a toothpick and we had to.
Carefully extract the chocolate chips without breaking the cookie.
And the lesson was you can do mining safely. And I flipped out I was like, oh my god, you're getting mining propaganda.
Well, the People's Curricula has a version of the chocolate chip cookie experiment in it too, but it's a pretty different version.
My co editor, Bill Bigelow ran across that activity and designed this just brilliant simulation. He took that activity and he ran students through it in the way that the you know, American Coal Foundation sort of suggests that you would. But he asked them to do it really with two minds. You know, one was to just kind of participate in the activity. The other one was to think about, well,
what is this activity teaching students and what's missing? Right, it becomes this incredible opportunity for students to say, well, gosh, I can't put this cookie back together. You know, what is this idea of reclamation, Like what is that supposed to I have a bunch of crumbles here. I can't just put it back together. You know, if this is the earth, what are the implications for what this means
when mining companies talk about quote reclamation. I think there's a way in which, you know, we can use some of this industry propaganda actually critically in our classrooms. Right to have students examine the ways that they've been used in the past, the way they're still deployed today, you know, basically as sort of what's not even greenwashing because they're not pretending to be green.
I love that they re envision this chocolate chip cookie experiment, and I also love that that they're trying to sort of, you know, create something that can be used beyond Portland. I was really shocked to read that they found out in the process of this that sort of like we won, but also the utility is going to fund this whole thing. It's just like it shows you how hard it is to actually get these companies out.
Right one hundred percent. And it's not surprising, right, We've talked so much in this series about how oil and gas interests will make it seem like they're doing something altruistic by providing funding. And obviously it's not like there's a whole lot of public funding going around for education right now, particularly not for climate justice education.
Yeah, exactly, the problem isn't that they give funding to this stuff. The problem is that it never comes without strings attached.
Right, But why would they fund it if it weren't for the strings attached? There wasn't something in it for them.
Honestly, I feel like one of the most insidious ideas that that sort of fossil fueld pr has pushed is the idea that corporations are people. I mean, way, way, way way Before the Citizens United case made that like a legal reality in the US, the fossil fuel companies were coming up with ways to get people to think of companies as people. And you just find that, I don't know, invading people's thinking on these things all the time, where it's like, but shouldn't we give them a chance?
And I'm like, it's not a person, it's a corporate entity. They don't have like you're not gonna hurt their feelings, and of course they're acting in their own interests.
The point of a private company like this is to make money for executives for shareholders, Like the purpose of having the company is to grow profits, right.
Which is like how corporate structures work in the US. Like, that's sort of like the way the law works around corporations. What I don't understand is why anybody expects them to behave differently unless required to do so. Anyway. Okay, so we've discussed the fact that one reason that fossil fuel propaganda ends up in schools is because school teachers are often super overworked and underpaid, and then schools in general are under resourced, so they've kind of got way too
much on their plates to worry about. And when they're looking for materials or curricula to bring into the classroom and someone offers them something that looks credible and slickly produced, it makes sense that they don't necessarily take hours and hours to vet it.
I talk to somebody who's working on a project that's trying to help teachers to sort of weed out all of the bullshit lesson plans out there. I spoke with Frank Neopold, and he works on climate education at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.
I fund a project called the Clean Collection, which is the Climate Literacy Energy Awareness Network. And what we're doing there is the Internet is of educational materials, and you know, teachers will always be looking for supplementary materials to whatever curriculums they're working with, and whether it's from kindergarten to undergraduate, whether it's earthscience or non orth science. You know, it could be biology. Could they also be non science disciplines.
So the Clean Collection has this team of people who rigorously review climate and energy education resources to see if they're actually aligned with some basic climate literacy standards, and then they compile all of them on this database. It's searchable, and then if you're a teacher and you're looking for, you know, a lesson plan about heat waves or droughts or coal or other environmental issues, you can just go online and find these pre vetted materials.
So we've looked at over thirty thousand digital assets and we currently have a reviewed collection of something in the order of, you know, seven hundred and fifty, so from thirty thousand to seven hundred and fifty, and we continuously re evaluate the science of materials. Once it's in, it doesn't stay in. It has to continue to stay be current.
And this is a really cool project. But the thing is that, you know, while these materials might be up to snuff based on scientific standards, some oil and gas messaging can crop up in these much subtler ways. So for instance, there's this one vetted lesson plan from a group we've heard about in the series before called the
National Energy Education Development Project or the NEED Project. This lesson plan is called Energy Flows, and it's about all the different forms of electricity, and there's nothing in it that would necessarily raise red flags. But that's also the problem because there's also nothing in it about the dangerous effects of burning fossil fuels. And that's not surprising because need is funded by dozens of companies, including almost all
of the major fossil fuel interest groups. But still there's no outright climate denial in this and so that's better than what might end up in a teacher's hands.
I mean, it does seem better than just a free for all where teachers are kind of, you know, left to sort it out for themselves. But I think that, you know, to tackle this kind of super insidious issue. One way to do that is to create a bunch of groups that vet every single climate related thing that gets into schools. But it seems like surely there must be some more systemic approaches out there.
I'm not sure there's a way to really exercise you know, fossil fuel influencing classrooms unless we like overhaul capitalism.
Okay, so this is Katie Worth again. She's the investigative journalist we heard from the start of this series. Her book Miseducation about the state of climate education in US schools comes out next month.
There's so much public private partnerships and schools. I think it would just be a major shift. We would actually have to fully fund education to like not take donations from Apple, say you know, of computers. I'm not totally sure how you would do it through state or federal legislation.
If say you legislate that schools couldn't use educational materials that are from energy interests, like are we cool with a private solar company coming in and doing a presentation about how solar power works or donating a solar rate to the school. So to me, the more likely and achievable scenario is that we really advocate for improved climate education in every state and in every classroom.
Can you point it out that that education shouldn't just be one lesson in like middle school or high school either. In an ideal scenario.
A good climate education can't just be a single unit in middle school science. And then maybe if you take you know, high school earth science or environmental science, you'll learn a little bit more like you know it should be. The issue is relevant to many educational context because it's like relevant, like basically in every single industry. Let me read to you the classes that climate change shows up
in the academic standards of the state of Hawaii. Third grade social studies, middle school science, high school biology, US History and Government, World History and Culture, Pacific Islands Studies, Earth Science, environmental science, and at least one math class. So you know, there's no kid that's going through the school system in Hawaii that's not hearing some stuff about climate change and getting at least a little bit climate literate.
So, in addition to the clean collection vetting climate education resources, Katie found some examples in her research of training programs for teachers.
So Washington State is spending millions of dollars a year on professional development for teachers that is specific to climate change. They started just a few years ago, and in their first two years they reached one in five teachers in the state. Like that's a big number. So they started with science teachers and now they're doing these professional development
seminars with people and other disciplines. And the truth is like a lot of teachers didn't learn much about climate change themselves in school, right, It's like not you know, one of the classics that we all learn about, like how to do long division or something like, a lot of teachers haven't learned it themselves, and so there's a good reason why they kind of shy away from it when it comes up in the curriculum because they're just not confident and they have all millions of other million
other things to do, like giving teachers time off, giving them resources, helping educate them so that they can be resource for their students, and like give their kids a real good education about it is you know, transformational.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I actually heard from the folks in Portland that they're pushing for this similar kind of professional development for teachers too. But all of this still does kind of seem like it's putting a lot of responsibility on individuals, on the students, on the teachers parents, to sort of sort out the systemic problem for themselves, right.
I know, it's this exhaustingly familiar approach to problems in this country. So we did hear about one really pretty unexpected place where a systemic solution is in.
The works, Si Framulata and Luemila Quindici persa a prind si quira nos Comuni.
So this is coverage of the people in cyclical on Climate Change, La Dato Si, which was released back in twenty fifteen. This caused like quite a stir because you know, a lot of business people and politicians are too so so when the Pope came out and was like, yeah, climate change caused by humans, we should do something about it, it caused kind of a big a big flat.
Catholic schools very broadly have this mandate coming from all the way up from the Pope, really to focus on environmental issues and weave that into the curriculum.
So that's a big thing happening here.
That's William Mendorin, the high school science and math teacher we heard from earlier in the series. He works at a private Catholic high school, and he says Catholic schools all over the world have this mandate now to incorporate the Pope's and cyclical on climate into their curricula.
Amy, does that mean that the most progressive climate education in the US in the next couple of years will actually be at Catholic schools. That's pretty wild, I know, it really is.
I feel like it says a lot about what the heck is going on with our public school system. Van Doren said that that in California at least, that there is a formal, concerted effort to actually like create a blueprint for how this is going to work in Catholic schools in general. And then California is sort of like a leader on this stuff. So usually when a curricula gets adopted here, it ends up going to all the
schools throughout the country. So yeah, there you go, Catholic school Anyway, I feel like we've we've found at least a few silver lightings in this kind of otherwise fairly dark and depressing topic about fossil fuel companies in schools.
It's true. It's heartening to know that you know there's at least people working on this and that there have some success at the moment.
Darna, thank you so much for being here and doing.
This with me. It's been it's been a pleasure.
It's been such a pleasure for me. I'm so glad that I got to be a part of this.
Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast Network. This series is a collaboration with earther Gizmoto's climate and justice site. My co host and co reporter for the series is Darna Noir. Our editors are Julia Richie for Drilled and Brian Kahn for Earther. Our producer is Juliana Bradley. Mixing and mastering by Peter duff. Our fact checker is Trevor Gowan. Music is by Martin Wissenberg. Our artwork was created by Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James
Wheaton of the First Amendment Project. You can find corresponding stories, videos, and documents for this series on earther dot com. For listening and we'll see you next time.