Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement, published by Facing History and Ourselves, is a sourcebook with replications of historical texts, references to popular culture, current laws, and issues in the bio-ethical debate.

CONTENTS:

• Science Fictions & Social Realities
• Race, Democracy & Citizenship
• Evolution, ‘Progress,’ and Eugenics
• In an Age of ‘Progress’
• Eugenics and the Power of Testing
• Toward Civic Biology
• Eugenics, Citizenship, and Immigration
• The Nazi Connection
• Legacies and Possibilities

ISBN: 9780961584191 | Facing History and Ourselves

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The Story of Stuff has been viewed millions of times by people throughout the world. There is a growing series of related films including the Story of Electronics, the Story of Bottled Water, the Story of Cosmetics, the Story of Broke, and more.

Watch

Here is a description of the Story of Stuff film from the website:

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

Produced by Annie Leonard and Free Range Studios.

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Goodell begins with the devastating impact of coal mining in Appalachia. He remembers when he first saw the impact of mountaintop removal mining: “It was like the first time you look into a slaughterhouse after you’ve spent a lifetime of eating hamburgers.”

The film travels to Mesquite, Nev., where residents are fighting a coal-fired plant, and also to China to explore the health impact of coal there — an important piece of the story not included in any of the other films reviewed here. The film’s strength is its exploration of alternatives to coal — wind, solar thermal, increased energy efficiency through recycling “waste heat” — which makes this a valuable resource for science as well as social studies classes.

The treatment of carbon dioxide sequestration may confuse students; the film simultaneously suggests that this is a terrible idea in North America but a good one in China. But, on the whole, Dirty Business is a fine and lively overview of a complicated issue.

By the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Trailer

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La Via Campesina’s concept of food sovereignty proposes a radical social transformation to make food systems more democratic. Source: Ian MacKenzie La Via Compesina/flickr, CC BY

On the Dec. 8, 2009 broadcast of Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman asked her guest, 15-year-old Mohamed Axam Maumoon, youth ambassador from the Maldives Islands to the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen, for a message to young people everywhere about what climate change meant to him.

Without hesitation, Axam turned to the camera and asked, “Would you commit murder . . . even while we are begging for mercy and begging for you to stop what you’re doing, change your ways, and let our children see the future that we want to build for them?”

What does it mean to take Axam’s question seriously? For many of us in the wealthy and so-called “developed” countries of the world, it means learning about the very real and life-threatening ways that climate change is affecting some of the world’s poorest populations.

From the rapidly submerging islands of the Maldives, Kiribati, and Tuvalu, to the melting permafrost in native lands across the Arctic, indigenous peoples around the world are confronting some of the worst effects of the climate crisis, despite having done so little to cause it. Axam’s question prompts us to confront the injustice of a situation in which the wealthiest 20 percent of the world’s population has been responsible for more than 60 percent of global warming emissions.

Download lesson to continue reading.

Indigenous people demonstrate at the 2010 climate change summit in Cancun. Source: Keri Koch.

Classroom Stories

We used materials from the Zinn Education Project, Rethinking Schools, and Teaching for Change with our 7th grade to create an interdisciplinary, experiential project that explored Indigenous Perspectives on Climate Change. It was the perfect way to tie together our humanities unit on Indigenous Perspectives on American History with the STEM unit on deep time and extinction-level events.

Our students prepared for the ‘Don’t Take Our Voices Away’ indigenous people’s climate summit simulation as a final learning demonstration. Taking on the perspectives of various indigenous groups was something our students took seriously as they researched both the cultures and climate challenges faced by the groups. Then, at the summit, they did presentations that explained the priorities and needs of those groups before launching into negotiations about how to best communicate those perspectives with the rest of the world.

Leading up to the summit, we took a climate justice gallery walk using photos shared on the ZEP website, researched indigenous climate activists, and also did the Meet Today’s Climate Justice Activists mixer. Those activities were the perfect scaffold to the summit. Overall, I saw my students develop deep understanding and empathy through the interactive and experiential materials provided by the Zinn Education Project.

I am grateful to have participated in a workshop where I learned how to use them. Now that I am at a school where our model centers experiential project based learning, these materials have become an invaluable resource.

—Lesley Younge

Middle School Humanities and Math Teacher, Washington, District of Columbia

I used ‘Don’t Take Our Voices Away’: A Role Play on the Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change to lead an asynchronous online discussion with my environmental science students about the effects of climate change on marginalized communities. My students are often VERY quiet and discussions are hard. Additionally, many available resources for climate change teaching is not appropriate for a college level course. This one being asynchronous and the content matter really seemed to open them up.

They shared personal stories about how their families would be affected and admitted to not even knowing some of these groups existed. We discussed the specific impacts in our area, and how as a land grant institution, we live and learn on the lands of the Cherokee people everyday. Both the students and I learned a lot about each others’ perspectives and heard voices from many other communities. I could not recommend the assignment more for anyone looking to explore teaching climate change effects on communities with their class.

—Abby Boyd

University Science Graduate Instructor, Clemson, South Carolina

I’m a Participation in Government teacher at Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School, a public 6-12 school in Queens, New York. We have some latitude to design our own curriculum at my school, and given our motto as a “school for a sustainable city,” with a focus on designing learning experiences around environmental and social justice, we work to thread the climate crisis into many of our case studies across the disciplines.

This year, we wanted to kick off the semester in Government class by thinking about ways in which people traditionally, and non-traditionally, “participate in government.” We also wanted to explore on-going fights where communities rise up against the confluence of big business, fossil fuel companies, lobbyists, and dark money to fight to protect the Earth.  The Zinn Education Project’s Teach Climate Justice resources were a boon to spark our curricular thinking.

Using the Don’t Take Our Voices Away role play as inspiration, we decided to teach and learn deeply about the Dakota Access Pipeline Fight as a way to better understand indigenous peoples’ perspectives on climate, and also to analyze the heroic methods and strategies used by #noDAPL protesters to make their voices heard. Teaching the role play over a few days to build background knowledge, we wanted students to be able to empathize with the stakeholders in this fight in order to better understand the stakes, and the resources, both natural and financial, at play in this particular issue. Without much other context, we jumped right into the role play. Once all of the DAPL stakeholders were named and their arguments analyzed, we were then able to dig into the context behind each of these positions.

In order for students to understand the ways in which people power with limited resources (as the Standing Rock Sioux exemplified) can strategize and make their voices heard, students needed to investigate the levers of power.  So, we introduced our students to an old chestnut of community-based organizing strategy: power mapping.

Using the Midwest Academy framework and the resources from Zinn to provide primary and secondary source support, students power-mapped (and backwards power-mapped) the DAPL fight.  They thought about specific targets — or stakeholders they wanted to move — as they designed short-, medium-, and long-term goals to achieve their organizational aims and to move stakeholders.

These frameworks allowed students to explore the roots of grassroots organizing. With with the  examples provided by the Standing Rock Sioux and the curricular supports provided by the Zinn Education Project, the power mapping exercise was not just theoretical for my students, but was a case of real stakes and the struggle for climate justice.

—Evan O'Connell

High School Social Studies Teacher, New York

There are few lessons that I enjoy teaching more than ‘Don’t Take Our Voices Away’: A Role Play on the Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change in my science classroom. In part, because it gives tangible details and a human face to the issue, not just a story of polar bears or talk about temperature. This is missing in a lot of the science curriculum we are provided. Likewise, the voice of indigenous people in the world is something quite absent in our westernized science curriculum, which is maybe not surprising because these voices are also being left out of world decisions.  Those points are what drew me to teaching the lesson. I keep teaching it because of how my students respond. They enjoy the structure of the activity, that they have some agency and control in what happens, as they get to take on the roles and make proposals.

—Holly Hardin

Middle Science Teacher, Durham, North Carolina

My district ends the 7th grade social studies curriculum with a look at the Columbian Exchange and the short-, medium-, and long-term effects of the exchange, including but not limited to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and European murder of Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Because these themes will be repeated in 8th, 9th, and 11th grades, the 7th grade focus is mainly on Columbus and the Spanish conquistadors, as well as the affects of the slave trade on sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, as an attempt to show the long-term effects of this interaction, I have used a few selections from ‘Don’t Take Our Voices Away’: A Role Play on the Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change, specifically the testimonials from the Taíno/Caribs/Arawaks, the peoples of the Amazon, and the Bambara.

Although it is framed around the question, “what are the long-term consequences of European interactions with Africa and the Americas,” I have found students to be extremely receptive to the messages about climate change. They are, after all, going to be the inheritors of the Earth, and many of them, even in middle school, are keenly aware of the dangerous effects of climate change we are beginning to see. We discuss the lack of power these groups have in advocating for their needs in our “post-colonial” system, and the fact that each of these groups is suffering but still needs to ask for help is not lost on many students.

—Joshua Rubin

Middle School Social Studies Teacher, Silver Spring, Maryland

Additional Resources

Paradise Lost. PBS NOW traveled to the nation of Kiribati to see up close how climate change affects residents’ daily lives and how they are dealing with the reality that both their land and culture could disappear from the Earth. NOW also traveled to New Zealand to visit an I-Kiribati community that has already left its home, and to the Pacific Island Forum in Niue to see how the rest of the region is coping with the immediate crisis of climate change. [Producer’s description.] This film can be viewed for free online. It was used in the classroom and is recommended by the teachers who wrote “‘Don’t Take Our Voices Away’: A Role Play on the Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change.”	The Island President tells the story of President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives. After leading a 20-year pro-democracy movement, surviving repeated imprisonments and torture, Nasheed becomes president at 41, only to encounter the crisis of climate change. Considered the lowest lying country in the world, a rise of a mere three meters in sea level would inundate the 1,200 islands of the Maldives, rendering the country practically unlivable. [Producer’s description.]
Democracy Now! interview with Mohamed Axam Maumoon, the 15-year-old environmental ambassador from the Maldives, challenging Western viewers by asking, “Would you commit murder?”	Democracy Now! clip featuring youth activist Kari Fulton speaking at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico: “We want people to know that whether you live in the forest, whether you live in the hood, you will be impacted by false solutions.”
Coup in Maldives: Adviser to Ousted Pres. Mohamed Nasheed Speaks Out from Hiding as Arrest Sought. Democracy Now! broadcast, 2/9/2012.	Lessons, books, films, and websites for teaching about climate change in K-12 classrooms.

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The book features some of the best articles from Rethinking Schools magazine alongside classroom-friendly readings on climate change, energy, water, food, and pollution — as well as on people who are working to make things better.

At a time when it’s becoming increasingly obvious that life on Earth is at risk, here is a resource that helps students see what’s wrong and imagine solutions.

Here is an excerpt from the introduction to the book:

Shorter Showers?

In our “Earth in Crisis” group, teachers kept returning to our students’ responses: They wanted to know what they could do personally. Early in our work, we concluded that we need to help students recognize the inadequacy of responding to the environmental crisis solely as individuals. As we mention in the teaching ideas for Chapter 3, “Facing Climate Chaos” (p. 174), there are entire books that urge students to consider their individual carbon footprints, suggesting that our personal patterns of consumption are a root cause of global warming. Students are urged to think about the frequency of their baths, their electricity use, the stuff they buy. Yes, of course, we want young people — and everyone — to be mindful of the Earth as we go through our daily lives. And we want students to recognize the power they have — collectively or individually — to make the world a better place. But it’s wrong to direct students primarily toward individual solutions to create change.

Reviews

To really confront the climate crisis, we need to think differently, build differently, and teach differently. A People’s Curriculum for the Earth is an educator’s toolkit for our times. — Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

This volume is a marvelous example of justice in ALL facets of our lives—civil, social, educational, economic, and yes, environmental. Bravo to the Rethinking Schools team for pulling this collection together and making us think more holistically about what we mean when we talk about justice. — Gloria Ladson-Billings, Kellner Family Chair in Urban Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Bigelow and Swinehart have created a critical resource for today’s young people about humanity’s responsibility for the Earth. This book can engender the shift in perspective so needed at this point on the clock of the universe. — Gregory Smith, Professor of Education, Lewis & Clark College, co-author with David Sobel of Place- and Community-based Education in Schools

Teacher Testimonials

To introduce our Climate Change unit, we wanted to begin with empathy and a connection to the communities that are most affected by climate change.

My co-teacher and I decided to start with “The Whole Thing is Connected: Plastics and Poverty” from A People’s Curriculum for the Earth. This chapter and series of articles reinforces the idea of environmental racism — the idea that people of color are disproportionately affected by the deleterious affects of climate change, in addition to those who live in poverty (which often intersect, unfortunately). We wanted to ensure that our students understood that, even though recycling plastic seems like a good thing, this seemingly benevolent act could negatively affect those who live in places like “Cancer Alley,” where the toxins of burning plastic bottles (like the one we so carefully and expertly recycled) could cause harm. Empathy is the first step in making change. If your students do not connect to those are affected, there is no motivation to create action steps for change.

This was the first step of our much larger project, the Climate Change Challenge, where we asked students to come up with an innovative and creative solution to reduce the deleterious affects of climate change. One student came up with light switch that turned off if there were no sound waves for more than 30 minutes to save energy, and another group designed an App where you could report environmental “crimes,” similar to the Citizens App. Introducing the topic of climate change with this article on empathy versus straight up textbook content, really connects students to their projects and gives them a more human reason to care and emotionally invest in the future of our earth.

—Stephanie Kadison

High School Science Teacher, New York

When I told my 8th grade social studies students that we would be exploring climate change, I didn’t receive the most receptive, encouraging responses. They made comments to the effect of, “We just studied this in science, why are we learning about this in social studies?”

A revealing question, one that exposes how compartmentalized and disconnected they saw this issue from society. Before this semester, having never delved into climate change as a social studies educator, I would have been at loss.  Then, I turned to A People’s Curriculum for the Earth. The collection of primary-source based lessons and activities embedded in this book proved to be an invaluable and powerful resource.

Lessons like the Climate Change Mixer, Paradise Lost, and the Thingamabob simulation took my students from a place of what appeared to be indifference and complacency,  to a place of inquiry, compassion, and activism.

The culminating activity involved having my students participate in a mock trial based on Bill Bigelow’s role play activity ‘Who’s to Blame for the Climate Crisis’? By this point of our study, my students were emotionally and intellectually ‘invested’ and were genuinely curious as to what or who is responsible for the environmental crisis.

A People’s Curriculum for the Earth prompted me as an educator to teach differently — more holistically, and more critically. It also reminded me of the importance of cultivating the learning conditions for students to make those intimate connections between themselves, other human beings, and the earth.

—Sarah Giddings

Middle Social Studies Teacher, Mesa, Arizona

ISBN: 9780942961577 | Rethinking Schools

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Portrait, available as a poster, by Robert Shetterly of Americans Who Tell The Truth.

Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet. . . . the dirtiest trick that governments play on their citizens is that they are working for ‘clean coal.’ . . .The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death. — James Hansen

On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to the U.S. Senate stating the greenhouse effect had been detected, indicating that the climate was in fact changing.

Hansen was also arrested on this day in 2009 during a protest against mountaintop removal mining at Massey Energy Company.

James Hansen testifying in front of the U.S. Senate in the 1980s.

Hansen has stated,

Several times in Earth’s long history rapid global warming of several degrees occurred. . .  In each case more than half of plant and animal species went extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine. If we drive our fellow species to extinction we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world that we inherited from our elders.

Below are resources for teaching about coal and climate justice.

This event is included on the Zinn Education Project’s Climate Crisis Timeline.

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We’re sitting in the cozy, inviting library of Portland, Oregon’s Madison High School. For her research and presentation on a “climate warrior,” Ana chose the late Stephen Schneider, a leading scientist on the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I ask what impact it had on her to study Schneider. She simply says, “He makes me want to be a better person.”

In an audacious embrace of Portland schools’ 2016 climate justice resolution, teachers in Madison’s Citizen Chemistry for All course — a class enrolling more than 300 sophomores in the school — adopted an essential question for the past two years: “Why are human changes to Earth’s carbon cycles at the heart of climate destabilization?” In a paper on Madison’s approach to studying climate change, “Warrioring Up for Climate Justice,” chemistry teacher Treothe Bullock and Restorative Justice coordinator Nyanga Uuka explained that teachers “wanted to support students in building a bridge between the personal and the planetary.” Students would demonstrate their learning in an annual two-day “Climate Justice Fair,” and would represent “communities which are engaging as ‘climate warriors,’ providing critical analysis of their work and/or proposing additional needed activism.”

An honest, rigorous look at the science of climate change can be terrifying and disheartening. Falling into cynicism is a hazard one confronts simply by living in our society, with its inequality, violence, and lack of democracy. But add to that, knowledge of the inexorable rise of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere — and what this heat-trapping pollution means for the Earth — and despair feels like more than a threat, it feels like common sense. Knowing this, Madison chemistry teachers focus not purely on the science of climate destabilization, but also on individuals and organizations taking action to reverse it, inviting students to research “climate warriors,” those who have not given up, those who “know the truth,” and yet are not defeated by it.

Download article to continue reading.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of Rethinking Schools.

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The

The purpose of this guide is to help teachers find ways to integrate climate and sustainability concepts in their classrooms — in ways that will enrich and enhance the classes and help meet learning goals. Sustainability concepts are inherently complex and well-served by interdisciplinary approaches, so we also include ideas on how that could work. Equally important, it’s essential that these topics be covered in core subjects in which all students participate, not just environmental science or other elective courses.

It’s important for schools to be leaders in raising community awareness of global warming and climate change.

We are not trying to provide a curriculum or even individual units or lesson plans — our goal is simply to provide a variety of entry points that can help teachers integrate climate and sustainability issues in your classroom. Adapt the information you find here to fit your classes, your students. It’s not an addition to what you have to cover — it’s a way to help meet learning goals and to enrich and enhance your classes, a framework that can help you reach goals for student learning and skill development.

This is not just for science teachers! In fact, a pure science perspective may fail to develop the social, ethical, and political contexts that are critical to understanding this issue. This guide provides context and information for teachers in any subject area to feel comfortable with these topics — background information and sources on global warming’s causes, impacts, and social-justice implications. We also include sample ideas for engaging students in every subject area.

It’s also worth mentioning that people tend to use the terms global warming and climate change interchangeably. Global warming is the direct result of more heat being trapped by higher levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, causing slow increases in temperature. The warmer land and oceans causes climate change that we experience directly. So global warming and climate change aren’t exactly the same, but they both refer to the same phenomena.

A project of the Alliance for Sustainable Communities–Lehigh Valley.

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The Paulings marched in advance of a White House dinner they were attending on the evening of April 29 for U.S. Nobel Prize winners.

Pauling had written to President John F. Kennedy twice that same year to make the same plea, on January 26 and on March 1, 1962. Here are excerpts from the January letter:

Dear Mr. President:

I urge that you not order the resumption of atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons by the United States.

So far the United States has carried out about twice as many test explosions of nuclear weapons as the Soviet Union. The megatonnage of the bombs tested by the Soviet Union is about 60 percent greater than that of the bombs tested by the United States, but it is the number of tests, rather than the total megatonnage, that determines the amount of information obtained. There is no doubt that the United States still has a great lead over the Soviet Union in nuclear weapons technology.

March 1, 1962 letter from Linus Pauling to President Kennedy. Source: Oregon State University’s Special Collections

It is not necessary for the protection of the United States and the American people for our government to resume nuclear testing in the atmosphere.

There is general agreement among biological scientists about the biological effects of radioactive fallout. No one can deny that the fission products produced by these tests in the atmosphere cause genetic mutations that will lead to the birth of grossly defective children.

Here are excerpts from the March letter:

President John F. Kennedy, White House:

Are you going to give an order that will cause you to go down in history as one of the most immoral men of all time and one of the greatest enemies of the human race?

Are you going to be guilty of this monstrous immorality, matching that of the Soviet leaders, for the political purpose of increasing the still imposing lead of the United States over the Soviet Union in nuclear weapons technology?

Read about Pauling’s defense of Japanese Americans returning to Los Angeles after leaving the concentration camps in Linus Pauling: Advisor and Advocate by Jonathan van Harmelen in Discover Nikkei.

Below are more people’s history resources on nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

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ACT UP activists sit-in at New York City Hall, 1989. Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections

On June 5, 1981, the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published a study about five patients — all gay men — treated for a rare fungal infection caused by severely weakened immune systems.

Los Angeles immunologist Dr. Michael Gottlieb, CDC’s Dr. Wayne Shandera, and their colleagues report that all the men have other unusual infections as well, indicating that their immune systems are not working. Two have already died by the time the report is published and the others will die soon after. (From A Timeline of HIV and AIDS at HIV.gov)

The study claimed that the infection was spreading among patients who identify as gay. It claimed that the cause of the infection was likely an unknown “cellular-immune dysfunction” that was soon identified as AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome). This study marks the beginning of the recognition of the AIDS epidemic in the United States.

In the decades that followed, people organized to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS, to find a cure, to educate people about treatment and prevention, and to create a culture of compassion instead of fear around it.

Activist organizations like ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) have worked since the 1980s to change healthcare policies and cultural stigma, while supporting individuals. Read about the tactics ACT UP used to pressure the FDA in 1988 and about its organizing success as a model for grassroots activism.

June 5 is also observed as HIV Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day.

Listen to the words of Vito Russo, a founding member of ACT UP, performed by actor Peter Sarsgaard as part of a Voices of People’s History event on March 21, 2017 in the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House.

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