The IPCC has just released yet another report warning of the consequences of inaction on climate change. In clear detail, the report lays out viable options to mitigate the effects of climate change and suggests a political path that will lead the population of the planet away from the precipice we are heading toward.

But we should expect that politicians will find excuses not to act. They will say it’s too expensive. That the economy will be devastated. That now is not the time.

They will make the same excuses that politicians did when they resisted attempts to end slavery in the nineteenth century. Politicians then were quite willing to sacrifice human lives at the alter of profit just as politicians today are dismissing the projected death toll that will arise from the ongoing burning of fossil fuels.

I wonder what they’ll tell their grandchildren when they ask, decades from now, why they chose not to act, not to do anything when there was still a chance to do something.

Fauna have long been responding to climate change. As though in a demonstration of the scientific evidence, fish are moving to colder waters, birds are showing up in areas that they have never lived, and insects are moving away from the tropics toward the poles. We humans are the only animals not yet responding in large enough numbers to mitigate a very clear and present danger.

We continue to listen to the band playing cheerful music while our ship is sinking beneath the waves.

But what will we tell our children?

What will we say when they ask us why we continue to insist that they memorize facts and figures that they have instantaneous access to on a device they carry in their pockets? What will we say when they ask why we insist that they use their minds in mathematical calculations instead of teaching them how to use calculations to solve real, intractable problems in the world? Why do we insist on boring them into numbness in schools just when they are reaching the peak of their intellectual capacity and creativity? 

What justification will we have for doing all this while the world that we knew as children is disappearing as the oceans rise and acidify, while extreme droughts and historic floods render any economic predictions precarious at best?

How will we answer?

The ancients prepared their children for adulthood by teaching them how to read the land. The children of the tribe were taught all they needed to know to sustain themselves: where to hunt, where to fish, where to gather food, how to live in harmony with the land. But they lived at a time when the world changed slowly over many millennia and so they could be sure that what they taught their children would still be true for their great-grandchildren. 

We, on the other hand,  are preparing our children to live an age when, not only is the sum total of knowledge doubling every 13 months, but when climate change is dramatically altering entire ecosystems. We need to prepare our children to live in a world we can only imagine and yet we continue to shut down their imagination in our schools, forcing them to regurgitate information we already know.

It does not have to be this way.

There is a plethora of alternatives available to us, the most recent being the Climate Justice teaching resource recently released by CCPA . Subtitled Lessons in Transformation, it’s a comprehensive teaching resource of eight modules that cover a wide range of learning outcomes, and guides students through a consideration of alternatives to the current paradigms prevalent in our society.

But as comprehensive as this resource is, there still is much more our children need to learn to prepare them for the age of climate change. 

Just as traditional literacy was needed when the scientific revolution began to change the shape of reality in the seventeenth century, our children will need to learn to “read” the world in different ways in order to make sense of new realities.  Ecological literacy will be as critical to our twenty-first century children as traditional literacy was key to access the new sciences of the seventeenth century. In the ultimate historical irony, it may be precisely the kind of knowledge that Aboriginal people had about the land, the knowledge that the Canadian government tried to destroy, that will be critical to the future survival of our children.

The scientific revolution introduced new lenses with which to see the world, new realities to see where once was superstition and fear. In our age, we too will need new lenses to see the reality of our changing environment and the impact our actions have on it.

The traditional Liberal Arts curriculum in schools needs to make way for a new curriculum, one that  allows our children to see that we are not in the environment, that instead the environment is in us; that what we do to our environment, we do to ourselves and to all life on the planet. 

We need a new curriculum for the age of climate change, one that is based on the reality of what we are facing.