The interview:

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

How did you come up with the idea for this book? 

I had a summer job between tutoring and teaching, installing solar panels. I was the grunt worker for a small solar company in midcoast Maine, and my job was mostly bringing solar panels up the ladder. I really loved it. This was around the time that [U.S. Rep.] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had won her upset primary. I began to hear about the Green New Deal. I was feeling pretty despondent about climate change, and this was the first time I’d heard of a hopeful plan, something that could actually save us. I started thinking about what if this somehow passed and they established something like a solar corps. I would fantasize about that, driving home from work, and then that spark turned into one of the prompts we use in fourth grade writing: “What is the story you wish existed in the world?” For me it was regular working people mobilizing together to transform the world. 

People succeed in the book in coming together and taking collective action to keep the climate crisis from worsening. It seems to me that collective action isn’t a regular part of our schooling, but could it be? What role do you think education should play in encouraging people to take collective action and give them the skills to do it? 

I find myself constantly repeating to my students that we are one of very few social species on the planet. There are very few social species that literally can’t live alone. We will die on our own or we’ll go mentally crazy. I am telling them we only work, we only survive and thrive, when working together, we are meant to be in groups. I don’t know what effect it will have but it’s something I try to weave into all disciplines.

The other thing I try to do is a lot of role plays for social studies and history. We have a unit on the Industrial Revolution. I make sure to teach about the economics of it, which includes the labor movement and why we don’t have little kids working in factories anymore and why we have weekends. We role play a model factory. I am the factory owner and someone always has the idea to go on strike. With climate specifically I try to balance it out always with stories and images of big groups of people working together, whether it is protesting or confronting a senator, to remind them that they are not alone.

How do you teach your students about climate change? 

The really heavy lifting is done exactly this time of year. The kids have all been researching extreme weather and the end of the unit asks them to do further research, called “research with an agenda.” I ask them to look into where we have sinkholes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and tsunamis, and the question they ask is how is the climate crisis impacting or not impacting this extreme weather. All the kids know climate change and global warming, they all are familiar with those terms, which is both sad and interesting. 

I let Greta Thunberg kick things off. I play some classic Greta speeches she gave when she was closer to their age. They are enthralled with the idea that a girl close to their age skipped school to protest something and has become a hero for it. Then we’ll get into the carbon cycle. For our science units, I’ve really been focusing on the cycles of the Earth and trying to impart this idea that our planet, as far as we know, is the only place where there’s life, and we’re so lucky to live on this beautiful planet. They learn that our planet works like this amazing machine with these perfectly harmonized cycles. And now they’re going to learn that one of the cycles is really off and it’s broken.

They’ve also just finished a unit on persuasive writing. For the last couple years, I have let them choose a member of the Maine congressional delegation to write to. As a class we write a persuasive letter asking them to do more, and it includes facts on their research about how hurricanes are getting worse. And then throughout the year I’ll give little updates, like I think Greta was arrested last year for civil disobedience, so when we learn about Martin Luther King Jr. in January and how many times he was arrested for civil disobedience, I’ll probably weave it in. 

In the book you include Emi’s school assignments on “the great transition” along with written feedback from her teacher. Emi struggles with a more straightforward history essay assignment on the climate crisis and the transition to renewables and turns it into something of an oral history, interviewing her parents. How did you land on that device?   

This was my first time writing what a lot of people call speculative fiction, and one of the challenges is you don’t want a huge overload of what they call “world building” at the beginning of the book. I realized through Emi’s projects I could do two things at once: get a little more from her point of view but also learn more about the world through her. 

I also remember doing a big project on the New Deal in high school, and I just felt completely detached from it. For my students now, 9/11 might as well be the Civil War. They are detached. Emi is way closer to it because her parents lived through it, but even for kids that grow up right after war, there is such a big distance between what their parents had to go through and them. I have seen a lot of this writing that I find very charming where students are trying so hard to write academically and to write seriously but they can’t help it and their voice pops back in in funny ways. 

I also wanted to capture her teacher’s comments. I’m always trying to do my best as a teacher to give students little high fives when deserved even though I’m skeptical that even half of them will be read. Emi’s teacher was a nice and good teacher by being willing to let Emi kind of change her project to bring in her mom and some oral histories. That was fun for me and a little Easter egg for the other teachers out there.  

Obviously you have a very vivid sense of what the future could look like because of climate change. Do you feel a disconnect between others you meet — other classroom teachers or students or parents — who don’t have that same sense, or any sense of it, and how do you bridge that gap or do you try to? 

One thing that I find heartening is that only one time ever has a family reached out saying this is political in a way we don’t find comfortable, this is not science, this is not really happening. I was accommodating: I gave the kid an option of a different project. That’s not the battle I really want to be fighting. 

This issue, climate, is so surreal, it’s almost like death. We know we are going to die, and we don’t think about it. I think people really do know how bad climate change is, for the most part. But it’s just something we feel we can’t spend too much time on because it feels inevitable, like death. 

I try to remind people of how so many times in human history when we thought there was no hope and things were stuck, things always changed. And they can change so quickly. There are times like feudalism and slavery that went on for hundreds of years and people must have surely been mocked and ridiculed for even talking out loud about a different future. One of the people I met through my book talks is this amazing writer Kristen Ghodsee who wrote “Everyday Utopia,” and she did all this research in eastern Germany. She found a suicide letter in which someone wrote, “I’m never going to be free, I’m never going to see Paris, communism is never going to end.” And then a week later the Berlin Wall falls. History can change so quickly. 

When I heard about the UnitedHealthcare assassination, I thought of your book, because of the Furies who are seeking retribution for climate criminals and engaging in targeted assassinations. The tension between retribution, which the mother believes in, and the embrace of some peace or normalcy, which the dad wants, is a big theme in your book. Why did that emerge for you as an important tension? 

Writing the book made me think a lot about justice. I learned that [psychologist] Abraham Maslow, who made the hierarchy of needs, later in life wanted to include justice. He nominated it as item No. 4, I think, of 12 items necessary for being. Just this idea that justice is not a feeling but an actual human need and that without we cannot be fully ourselves and it will fester. I’ve seen this in my classroom. We use restorative practices, which I love. When it works, it’s so beautiful, and everyone feels heard. But it obviously doesn’t always work. Sometimes kids feel like justice has not been had. And that injustice will fester and pop up in different ways where a kid will shut down. 

I was wondering what restorative justice would look like for the climate. That conversation would need to be driven by the people most harmed. They might want to see at the very least an admittance or apology by the fossil fuel executives, maybe financial restitution, or to see those industries nationalized and put to use as renewable energies instead. 

Any last thoughts you want to share for teachers on instructing about climate change?  

I always balance out anything I’m teaching them about how scary it is. Greta’s group is called Fridays for Future, and they are usually happy, jubilant protests. I talk about how this is a real thing that’s happening and there are some really serious consequences, but there are millions of people fighting to change things, and you can do it, too. I’ve been to events with adults where a climate scientist will talk and it’s so scary. I’ve seen audiences leave completely defeated. That’s not super helpful. So I try to balance it out with a little hope and lean into how magical our planet is. I tried this new thing this year I learned from a veteran teacher called “my spot.” All the kids choose a spot outside and once a month we go out and read poems and write about it. I don’t think you need to instill a love of nature because kids already have a natural love, but you have to keep fostering it. 

What I’m reading: 

Climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe visits Dickinson College and explores the campus’s commitment to sustainability. 

More than 60 percent of parents of young kids, and 57 percent of child care providers, have experienced at least one extreme weather event in the past two years, according to a survey by the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. 

Massachusetts is the one state that succeeded in cutting food waste, The Boston Globe reports. The state, which two years ago banned businesses that generate major food waste from tossing scraps into the garbage, has more inspectors and waste processing facilities per square mile than other states. Sweden also holds lessons on reducing food waste, says the Globe. 

Youth climate activists are contemplating their strategy in a second Trump term, and may “ease off on mass marches” and focus more on state politics, writes The New York Times.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation requiring school districts to develop plans to mitigate extreme heat and setting 88 degrees as the maximum temperature allowable for classrooms, reports WRGB in Albany.

A new study links the loss of tree cover in Chicago because of a beetle infestation to learning loss for students, according to a study in the journal Global Environmental Change.

This story about “The Great Transition“ was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter on climate and education.

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