February 16, 2014
By Mickey Friedman
Ever since I took the trolley to the Bronx Zoo, I have felt a deep connection to the penguins.
And I’ve always felt the penguins had much to tell, and much to teach me.
I’ve been thinking more about the proposed $56 million renovation of Monument Mountain Regional High School. The building is “educationally obsolete,” the School Committee believes, and a $56 million renovation will enable us to provide a “21st-century education.”
The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Task Force on 21st Century Skills defines these skills as a mix between core subjects like English, World languages, Arts, Mathematics, Economics, Science, Geography, History, Government and Civics, and critical “21st century interdisciplinary themes.” These are “Global Awareness, Financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy, civic literacy, health literacy, and environmental literacy.”
It’s important to imagine what life will be like for our high school students and to consider how best to prepare them for that life.
But it’s critically important to provide a real, not a rhetorical 21st-century education.
This I believe requires some radical truth-telling. And I believe my penguin friends have much to teach us.
Because they’re confronting the 21st-century head on. No rhetoric. Just Reality. Because thanks to our man-made climate crisis, many of my penguin friends are dying. While we talk about “environmental literacy” they’re trying to survive an environmental catastrophe.
Climate scientist Guy McPherson explains: “We as a species have never experienced 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere … We will hit the average of 400 ppm within the next couple of years … At that time, we’ll also see the loss of Arctic ice in the summers … This planet has not experienced an ice-free Arctic for at least the last three million years.”
Given what’s happening to the oceans, our water, our air – the death of species after species – do you really think improving “environmental literacy” will cut it? We’re facing a planetary emergency never before known to man. And replacing blackboards with whiteboards isn’t nearly enough.
Meanwhile, as we rush headlong to the ecological Armageddon, the politicians prevaricate. The pitchmen pitch. The liars lie. You don’t need a 21st-century education to discover 90 companies are responsible for two-thirds of our man-made global warming emissions. That Chevron, Exxon, and BP head the list.
So what is it we need to teach and learn in these the days without jobs, when salmon isn’t really salmon, and Subway has to remove a chemical used to make yoga mats from its footlongs?
Maybe more than anything an education that teaches our young to reclaim the earth. To name and shame the killers of fish, the murderers of the middle class. Teaching them to peel away the layers of lies. To put down their iPods and Pads and Phones and learn to organize. To empower a million Martin Luther Kings; a multimillion Rosa Parks. A vast nonviolent, civil disobedient army of Pussy Rioters.
Mario Savio said: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious – makes you so sick at heart – that you can’t take part … And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … and you’ve got to make it stop.”
Maybe that’s asking too much of our educators. But, at least, then, have them share stories of the penguins.
The Magellanic penguins, whose chicks have it hard in the best of times, are dying in record numbers because of increased rainfall, and more prolonged periods of hotter and colder weather. A rigorous study of Magellanic chicks at Punta Tomba in Argentina reveals the number of breeding pairs in the colony has declined 24 percent since 1987. “Rainfall is killing a lot of penguins, and so is heat,” said P. Dee Boersma, a University of Washington scientist and lead author of the study. “And those are two new causes.”
These new weather patterns have so stressed my penguin friends, even Humboldt penguins in a British wildlife sanctuary are taking anti-depressants. While the U.K. suffers biblical flooding. And Northern California and Nevada struggle to survive epic droughts.
An earnest educator explained how many Monument Mountain high school students weren’t taking advantage of the greenhouse program because they had to walk down the hill to the current greenhouse. So the proposed renovation would add attached greenhouses.
Will the coming 21st-century world of rising seas and flooded farmland and scarce drinking water be so accommodating? And who is really served by making life so easy?
So very good at denial, ostrich-like we just don’t want to see.
But my penguin friends are fighting back. Forced by warmer temperatures from their traditional breeding grounds on thin sea ice, Emperor penguins are now learning to climb 100 foot high glaciers to breed.
Finding penguin skills we humans never knew they had. Maybe it’s time for penguins, not platitudes. Penguins and people united.
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You can read more at:
http://www.p21.org/about-us/p21-framework/57
http://www.massculturalcouncil.org/creative_minds/21st_century_skills_whitepaper.pdf
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/
http://www.thenation.com/article/177614/coming-instant-planetary-emergency
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/09/penguins-ice-walls-climate-change-antarctica?
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4046067.Mario_Savio
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/09/flooding-crisis-intensifies-met-office?
http://america.aljazeera.com/features/2014/2/drought-thinningtheherdofranchersinnevada0.html