A teacher at Headlands High talked about getting kids quiet around sunset at Marin Headlands. “All of a sudden, they hear frogs for the first time. It’s irreplaceable. We teach inquiry as well. You can’t get those things inside four walls.” A student called saying he watched Bill Gate’s presentation in Copenhagen. That we need to get emissions to zero by 2050. “Do you think affluence might go down to reach that goal?” asked the caller.

McKibben: “It’s the right question, he said. Women are beginning to have fewer children. Now it’s that rising affluence curve. One thing we need to do is make people pay for emissions. We very much need to do this.” What is challenging to teachers, he said, is they must take into account economics, sociology and more (to discuss climate change). “If economics was the organizing principle for the 20th C, environmentalism is that for this century, and it is much more complex because there are more moving parts. ”

Caller, Sandy, who runs a program in San Jose, said students are learning leadership skills to teach younger children to study creeks. Get students commitment to place. “It’s been great.”

From the Exploratorium audience, a Senior at Terra Linda HS, said college students are limited for jobs after college. What’s available?

McKibben said “I teach in Vermont, one of oldest environmental colleges in country. You can almost name where you want to work. We need environmental economics, green engineering, where we might put people to work, this transition to renewable energy is where it is all about and then make sure it is happening here in the USA instead of all in China so you can go to work.”

Amarina Trap of Nature Campuses said we should get 1st graders outside to enjoy the world and basic concepts about the earth and physical sciences; from there, hopefully they come to a place where they feel a connection, at an age where it won’t turn them off, maybe introduce in 5th-6rh, 7th grades – the 350 parts per million.

A Sebastopol guy responded to the age appropriate question that every student should go to a landfill and discover where the refuse goes and who feeds off it.

McKibben says “You don’t want 6 year olds freaking out; people don’t fall in love with terminally ill people for the most part. You got to give them things to do that give them some sense of mastery.” The 350.org people showed 10,000 photos in its flickr account – and because young people “grew up on facebook, this easy communion could help them feel much more empowered than an earlier generation.”

Krasny: “At what age do you feel it is appropriate – the kinds of things that give you real pause?”

McKibben “It depends on what community you are in and whether or not people have had a chance to fall in love with their environment,” he says. “If I can get any kid out here before the age of 16, that process of falling in love with the natural world should happen as early as possible. And sometimes this is a city garden or park.”

A question about the effectiveness of the Copenhagen environmental conference was countered with this:
“We got 117 nations to sign on to 350 pact, but the wrong 117 nations. Not the major polluters. But we are only 1 year old – and young people understand debate on environment it is between physics and chemistry and…it’s possible to turn this around (from where we are) and young people are flexible enough to figure out how to do it.”

A woman from UN Association, Northern CA asked if we can we get climate change in the curriculum in Northern CA.