Please consider signing this Call to Action from educators who want to express their solidarity with the UN Climate Action Summit and the Global Climate Strikes. To find more information and to sign the letter, click here.
Below is the text of the Call to Action:
‘I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.’ (Greta Thunberg at Davos January 2019)
We are educators who declare our solidarity with the students’ uprising for climate justice action. We call on our fellow educators globally to respond to the students’ appeals. We need to act now.
Children and young people across the globe are rising up against a systematic failure to address the climate crisis. By strategically leaving their classrooms and organizing mass protests, they are demanding immediate action to reduce carbon emissions, halt global warming, and combat mass species extinction.
Education is implicated in this climate crisis. Despite efforts stemming from the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, schools and higher education systems continue to prioritize workforce supply for economic growth over environmental sustainability. We know that fossil-fuel dependent profit-driven activities have escalated global warming and are exacerbating the climate crisis. Scientists have warned us that the planet’s systems are dangerously close to irreversible tipping points. Students are well aware that we live in environmentally precarious times and that they face an uncertain future.
In the face of sobering scientific evidence of a climate crisis, the business-as-usual of education is not acceptable. We must radically rethink the purpose of education and make responsible changes in our classrooms and academic fields. We need to learn different ecologically attuned knowledges, educate for environmentally just and secure futures, cultivate an ecological consciousness about the interdependence of all beings, and challenge the unequal global power relations that drive reckless economic growth. We need to foster the types of learning that nurture non-exploitative relations with the natural environment and that will help us recuperate and sustain life on a damaged Earth.
We call on all educators at all levels to join us in:
- Supporting the striking students in their demands for immediate action to reduce carbon emissions and to restore the habitability of our planet.
- Transforming our own pedagogies and curricula to make them ecologically sound and responsive.
- Realigning research agendas and practices to address the climate crisis and other environmental challenges.
- Reformulating educational policy frameworks to prioritize intergenerational and environmental justice over reckless economic growth and development.
- Voicing our concerns by raising these issues with colleagues, parents, students, local communities, unions, professional organizations, and policymakers.
To the striking students we say: ‘We stand with you. We know our house is on fire. It is urgent. Our future is at stake. We will take educational action for climate justice.’