Essay by Eric Worrall
Earth Day Director of Education and former Montgomery County Public Schools Education Head Bryce Coon wants to build even more climate awareness into the education system.
Earth Day 2024: ‘Green muscle memory’ and climate education promote behaviour change
Published: April 19, 2024 6.52am AEST
Preety Sharma Fellow, Dalla Lana Journalism and Health Impact, University of Toronto
Ayeshah Haque Fellow, Dalla Lana Journalism and Health Impact, University of TorontoThis year, organizers of Earth Day are calling for widespread climate education as a critical step in the fight against climate change.
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Despite people’s deep connection to their local environment — whether it’s blackouts in Toronto caused by raccoons, communities gearing up for a total solar eclipse lasting only minutes, chasing northern lights or hundreds of Manitoba kids excited about ice fishing — there remains inertia in climate action.
Sparking global momentum and energy in young people can go a long way to addressing climate change now and in the near future, says Bryce Coon, author of the report and Earth Day’s director of education.
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In his report, Coon outlines the benefits of climate education, starting with supporting educators to impart “green muscle memory” — habits, routines and attitudes young people develop to perform eco-friendly actions repetitively and consistently. This, he notes, contributes to alleviating climate-related despair and anxiety.
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Young people have come to flex their green muscle memory when they load reusable water bottles each day. That small action has become a part of the daily routine for millions of families, and when added together reduces plastic litter.
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Many believe governments should do more, including making climate education a priority. The survey received responses from 4,035 people including educators, students and parents. More than half of the survey respondents were from Ontario (25 per cent) and Québec (29 per cent).
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/earth-day-2024-green-muscle-memory-and-climate-education-promote-behaviour-change-227211
The Earth Day Report cited in The Conversation article claims climate education has the following benefits;
Climate Education vs. The Climate Crisis
Authors:
Bryce Coon Master of Education EARTHDAY.ORG
Dennis Nolasco Master of Education EARTHDAY.ORG
Emily Walker Master of Education EARTHDAY.ORGEditors:
Jacob Wunsh Master of Arts, English EARTHDAY.ORG
Sarah Davies EARTHDAY.ORG…
THE SOCIAL, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND ECONOMIC BENEFITS
At EARTHDAY.ORG we believe there are three core reasons why all students should be provided with quality climate education in school. We outline these reasons here, in summary, and then detail them in the remainder of this chapter:
1. CLIMATE ANXIETY:
Students are increasingly anxious about the state of the planet and many are suffering from climate anxiety. By engaging with the topic and using social emotional learning techniques, teachers can play an important role in alleviating this anxiety to support their students’ well-being.
2. GREEN MUSCLE MEMORY:
Once we provide students with the information they need to modify their behaviors and to reduce carbon emissions, it will become second nature to them. That is why, to develop green muscle memory, climate education needs to be taught consistently to children across all subjects, from Kinder- garten to graduation.
3. GROWING THE GREEN ECONOMY:
If we are to find ways of mitigating and coping with the problems that the climate crisis is causing and will cause us in the future, we will need to motivate future generations to find solutions and develop new types of industry. This will create massive economic opportunities. The U.S. has already invested $738 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act in the US1, the EU Green Deal2 is a trillion dollars, and China’s investments3 in renewables and battery technology potentially reaches as much as $3 trillion. This public investment is a means of competing for more private investment and conse- quently green jobs. Climate education is how we can prepare young people for this future and teach them the skills they will need to join this growing green workforce to help drive the global green economy.
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Read more: https://www.earthday.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Climate-Education-vs-The-Climate-Crisis.pdf
The lack of self awareness of such promoters of “climate education” is breathtaking.
Students would be a lot less anxious about climate change if they didn’t have their heads needlessly filled with apocalyptic pseudoscience.
The reality is there is no sign of the alleged climate crisis in agricultural production, or other important metrics. There is no sign storms are getting worse, despite dubious claims by some government weather agencies.
But the poor kids who are being subject to “green muscle memory” training are not being taught these facts, they are being taught that recycling can help save the planet.
As for preparing kids for our green future, there just won’t be that many green jobs. The students would be better off learning to be nuclear engineers. WUWT recently reported how tech giants have quietly surrendered to the necessity for reliable nuclear power when it comes to powering their data centers, despite years of promoting green energy “solutions”. It won’t take long for the rest of the economy to follow, once they experience just how useless renewable energy without the support of fossil fuel actually is.
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Earth Day is also Lenin’s Birthday. Which is quite appropriate.
Hey, kids!
Let’s all help Lenin blow out our candles!
PS I’m glad “edit” works again! I went back that comment 3 times.
Thanks, WUWT guys for fixing it.
Q: What did the Soviets use for light prior to candles?
A: Hydrocarbon-fueled reliable grid-based AC electricity.
Green muscle memory for green mushy brains.
How do you kill a civilisation off? By putting idiots in charge.
I don’t think that they are idiots, but something much more dangerous.
Alarmist followers are idiots, Al Gore being exhibit 1.
Alarmists are paid to be evil, Mann being exhibit 1. He had to know long before now that his hockey stick was bogus both in data (stripbark bristlecones) and methodology (centered PCA produces hockey sticks from red noise), yet has never disavowed it since the sole basis for his fame and fortune.
Mann knew the hockey-stick was bogus before he published it, because he truncated Keith Briffa’s data to get the hockey-stick shape.
And his CENSORED folder…
Briffa’s tree data from 1900 onwards….
1940s peak… check
1979 coldest point… check
1990 well below 1940s… check.
‘green muscle memory and climate education’—aka climate propaganda.
Anyone with climate anxiety believes the propaganda, because in truth there is nothing to be anxious about:
Or, to correct Guterres at COP28, the oceans are NOT boiling.
Anyone with climate anxiety believes the propaganda, because in truth there is nothing to be anxious about:
Its kind of hard to stratify “climate anxiety” high on the HairOnFire totem pole when creditors are calling about missed payments, maxed out credit cards, your leaders draining your bank accounts to fund endless foreign wars, watching your job eliminated while illegal aliens are launching third world crime waves in your city. And senile sociopathic kleptocrats are engineering global thermal nuclear war while other sinister elements are destroying your food, energy and other vital supply chains.
The fastest way to rid oneself of “climate anxiety” is unplug from the damned social media and stop the consumption of corporate propaganda from BBC, CNN and other Fifth Column entities.
Get a hobby.
Go to church.
Make real friends.
Get a dog.
Get two dogs to relieve even more anxiety.
They’re also good for keeping alarmists at bay.
More like they are incessantly bombarded with the propaganda.
Unplug from social media will put a rush on addiction clinics.
I worry, when AI does what I used to do, what do I do?
They’re calling for widespread climate education because they’re realizing that Earth Day has become every bit as irrelevant as the annual COP climate conferences. Both of these either generate snorts of derision or are ignored altogether largely because their predictions and non-stop doomsday scenarios have rarely materialized, while the global population and life expectancies have continued to increase, agricultural production has tripled worldwide, and infant mortality and poverty levels have been showing steady declines. So these demands for increased climate propaganda and action (read higher taxes and green mandates) are nothing more than acts of desperation by a group that realizes it’s fighting a losing battle.
Earth day is fun.. I drag out all my old stage lights and celebrate electricity and human progress.
If enough of us do something similar.. we should be able to get a nice little surge in demand 🙂
COP conferences are not irrelevant, they’ve just changed their nature a little.
A preview of the upcoming COP29 conference in Azerbaijan?
Desperate acts, perhaps, but for power and greed more than acknowledgement of a losing battle.
Control the language, control the ideas. K. Marx
Reason #697 to remove your children from government schools.
I wonder how many “cheese” jokes Coon has to put up with.
Seems he should be forced to change his name to “Cheer”… or whatever the woke/broke name is now.
ps.. I liked “Coon” cheese, but I can’t see it on the shelf anymore.. so I don’t buy it. 😉
Yes Dr. Coon who invented the “Coon” cheese variety which was named after him would be turning over in his grave at the rank disrespect shown to his iconic legacy.
Small-minded morons were behind the push to change the name of the cheese variety / brand.
It’s the same way these small-minded morons removed the Aunt Jemima pancake syrup in the US.
That was that good woman’s legacy.
And she and her descendants were extremely and rightfully proud of her work and success.
Who knows the name of even one of those losers who ‘canceled’ her legacy.
Never heard of it.
“ there remains inertia in climate action. “
There’s that absolutely moronic “climate action” term again.
It has absolutely zero rational meaning. !
It is a nonsense virtue-seeking idiocy.
The Ad campaign isn’t working.
So let’s target the kids!
(It seems there weren’t enough useful idiots in the last generation.)
Sadly it’s working. An entire generation programmed that socialism is good and capitalism is evil white supremacy. Sex can be changed on a whim. Advocacy journalism is much better than objective journalism.
I disagree, but that is how they have been programming kids for too long.
Several years ago Penn and Teller did a video of them getting a bunch of people at an Earth Day event to sign a petition to ban Di-Hydrogen Monoxide!
Will that be part of his “Earth Day” curriculum?
Hey, don’t mock! I read somewhere that Di-Hydrogen Monoxide is very dangerous stuff – it has a higher pH than every known acid.
And it causes global warming and floods. VERY dangerous.
I think https://www.dhmo.org/facts.html predates the CAGW warnings.
The site was ahead of it’s time!
It is used in nuclear reactors and kills thousands of people every year across the globe.
Maybe you read it here?
https://www.dhmo.org/facts.html I don’s know who is paying to this site up, but, thanks!
The world may depend on it !!!!!!!
LOL I remember that. Sadly, today, kids will buy into it not knowing any better.
PS Here’s some of it.
https://youtu.be/RF1nwuRFD3w?t=28
And the first thing up:
There are issues Earth Day could address land fills, building on flood plains, old tires. There’s a list, but no, promote behavior change. Maybe they should start with the promotion of spelling, there’s no “u” in it.
One of McKibben’s Book titles is “Eaarth”. (yes, spelled that way) Subtitled “Making A Life on a Tough New Planet”. Worthless like the rest of his books.
Salute!
So watched Carlin’s infamous tribute to Earth Day, and still laugh a lot.
Other than too many f-bombs, it has a lot of geology and biology facts/theories that are well-established.
I subscribe to just about his whole philosophy and hope one day many would accept that humans just might be as he said – a bad case of fleas that Mother Earth will shake off and move on.
So being warned about language:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Miv4NHsDo
Gums sends…
I saw him twice in his last years. Fantastic show. A genius.
Generational. He sounds a lot better to people born before 1980 than after. Only someone born after 1980 would be qualified to judge he “holds up”. We all think we’re still relevant.
They should name it ‘Church of Climate’, and say prayers to the climate God.
Yes, the wonderful green God.
Good report Eric. What these monsters are doing isn’t educating rather it is arm twisting through propaganda. No one should be allowed to put out trash like this without agreeing to debate their views in public. Heartland, WUWT, CO2 Coalition, CFACT and others need to band together and confront light weights like these guys. They need to put up or shut up and stop scaring the crap out of children.
If you believe the world is run by a small number of over-60 y/os, then energy technology, generation and use, might improve enough to hide their mistakes by the time they run the world.
Total eclipses, northern lights and ice fishing are considerably more fun and interesting than having to listen to tiresome old fools drone on about how the world is going to burn up “real soon now” unless we all stop enjoying life.
I just noticed that every author of the post’s cited ‘Climate education v. Climate crisis’ paper was from earthday.org. So I went there thinking they were mainly focused on the CO2 induced ‘climate crisis’ and I would find some stuff to ridicule. Nope. Not at all. But what follows still does.
The main earthday.org initiative is “End Plastics”. Their currently promoted agenda slogan is ‘60×40’—60% reduction in global plastics production by 2040. Utterly impossible in the real world. Yet not also utterly impossible ‘Net Zero by 2040’—that was already taken by EU nutters. So it turns out climate anxiety and green muscle memory isn’t their thing even on Earth Day. Just given some ‘good to be in the cool nutter incrowd’ acknowledgement.
To invertedly quote the memorable movie line in The Graduate, “I have just one word for you. Plastics.” Sadly for earthday.org, the graduate moved on to Mrs. Robinson. Plastics did its own wondrous thing all by itself.
The only problem with plastics is from “developing” countries, who don’t give a damn and just dump everything in their rivers.
and much on their streets
I can’t find good plastic use by country charts online.
I wonder how USA and India compare? I don’t have a guess, but both must landfill a lot of plastic waste.
By forcing people to perseverate on living like mendicants and cave dwellers, it doesn’t alleviate, it exasperates climate-related despair and anxiety. Take a group of urban dwellers out on a week long adventure in the woods using only the things they are carrying in a ruck and you will see grown, fit, allegedly self-sufficient men stressing out. We don’t as individuals spend gobs of money on luxuries just because we want to give the finger to Gaia, we do it because it improves our lives.
Disposable stuff frees us from the burden of cleaning, maintaining, storage, and dealing with the deprecated value. Even that nice S Class Mercedes eventually is crushed and melted. You can chew on a Bic pen because it is disposable. You don’t have to run your grocery bags through an autoclave just so you don’t poison yourself on next week’s purchase. All kinds of hygiene problems are alleviated by using disposable drink containers rather than chaining a community cup to a soft drink vending machine.
Some supermarkets banned bag re-use during the Covid lockdowns, a few more outbreaks will kill it completely.
Outside of the Tropics, everyone has to have protection from the cold most of the year.
I’ve seen one day over 70F since last October, here in Wokeachusetts, where the state government screams “climate emergency” every day- by every one of its agencies and in every piece of paper they produce.
You can damn well bet he isn’t doing that job on a purely volunteer basis. He is paying off a mortgage and living well based on taking a parasite job of figuring how to cheat and swindle people out of a modern lifestyle. This is 100% grift, that he has a very strong economic interest in never solving, but to grow from “director” to “Senior Vice President” by basic empire building, adding more useless parasitic staff and all of the head count costs of maintaining an army of narcissists and activists.
I’m all for educating children about the reality of climate on earth, what I’m implacably opposed to is brainwashing them with unsubstantiated guff which is designed to make them poorer and a few grifting billionaires much richer.
Or as Aristotle put it:
Many people, brainwashed as children, into religion- grow out of it on their own. Hopefully the same will happen with these new victims of brainwashing.
Sounds like pure propaganda to me. No science allowed.
Since the sensible remedies for a more efficient and cleaner planet like nuclear and gas and not the choices made by politicians and their advisers (e.g. wind, solar, and other make believe like big, powerful and safe batteries) we should all know by now that the bunch of lunatics in charge have absolutely no idea what they are doing but feel better thinking they are doing anything rather than nothing.
Like most idiots they simply make things worse by the moment and this time there doesn’t appear to be a fairy godmother on a rescue mission. There remedies haven’t started well and can only get worse.
I was listening to the BBC. It was about growing climate anxiety of young people. They had a psychologist in the program telling them how they could become a climate activist which would give them a positive experience. Nothing about dealing w fear or seeing things in perspective, self preservation, resillience, art, philosophy etc.
Nope. Climate activism as the solution. And the presenter found this all very normal.
So you see how this works: climate alarmism from all sides, constantly, every day, Greta Thunberg style. More climate alarm ‘reporting’, institutionalised. More jobs for ‘educators’ and psychologists, the msm, state bodies.All encompassing.
The proper word for it is GREEN FASCISM.
It is related to religious bigotry.
We had a weekend of splendid spring weather…followed by a new ‘report’ about the dangers of heat stress. This happens everytime the weather turns positive. They cannot let that go by unpunished. It makes me think: do they have that report sitting on the shelf in order to use it when there is a positive weather event or positive news about polar bears, corals etc? It seems so..Climate Warriors is an apt name, constantly on the battlefield..
“Despite people’s deep connection to their local environment — whether it’s blackouts in Toronto caused by raccoons, communities gearing up for a total solar eclipse lasting only minutes, chasing northern lights or hundreds of Manitoba kids excited about ice fishing — there remains inertia in climate action. ”
Someone’s going to have to explain to me how Racoons chewing up power lines, solar eclipses and the Northern Lights have anything to do with anthropogenic effects on the climate. I could see maybe the ice fishing thing (man’s effects on climate killing off the fish or making the ice so thin you can’t get on it…both BS, but at least the argument could be made), but the others I’m not getting.
They could have just as well listed birthdays, Saturday cartoons and Cocoa Puffs.
They are also gunning for plastics:For Earth Day 2024 on April 22nd, EARTHDAY.ORG is unwavering in our commitment to end plastics for the sake of human and planetary health, demanding a 60% reduction in the production of ALL plastics by 2040.