On Saturday afternoon as the Riverwalk Market Fair was closing up, John Thomas (AKA Mr. JST Technology) alerted me to a Great Blue Heron that was perched on the…
Category: <span>Environment</span>
Longtime City of Northfield Environmental Quality Commission (EQC) member George Kinney stopped by my corner office at GBM last week to alert me to a solar energy workshop coming…
In case you hadn’t noticed, Northfield’s blogosphere is humming (Northfield.org here, Monkey See Monkey Read here, Just Food Co-op here) with the news that Atina Diffley of Organic Farming Works…
Officially, Earth Day 2012 was yesterday, April 22. But in Northfield, it’s being celebrated this coming Saturday, April 28, noon to 5 on Union Street between Third and Fourth…
As I noted in a blog post last month, the City of Northfield compost site is now accepting food scraps and non-recyclable paper. I took the above photos last…
When I was up at St. Olaf’s Buntrock Commons earlier this week, I noticed a very cool display on the impact of student use of disposable coffee cups. The…
I went mountain biking with Bill Nelson along the Minnesota River bottoms this week and he showed me an area just east of Cedar Ave. where beavers have been…
Explorer Will Steger had a commentary in last week’s Strib titled, Make America climate-literate. Here’s an excerpt:
It wasn’t until 2002, when the Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated from western Antarctica — an ice shelf formed more than 12,000 years ago that my expedition team took a full month to ski across — that the facts of global warming prompted me to take action. In 2006, I decided to establish the Will Steger Foundation, where we support educators, students and the general public with science-based interdisciplinary resources on climate change, its implications and its solutions. Our goal is for educators and students to achieve climate literacy.
If the nation is to address climate change, it must begin with a public that is climate-literate. Starting with our educational system is critical. Teaching and understanding climate change is a process involving scientific inquiry and educational pedagogy; it is not about politics or partisanship. There is virtually unanimous scientific agreement about climate change. Yet due to both the inherent complexity of the topic and the social controversies surrounding it, confusion and doubt often persist. Climate change is now ultrapoliticized in the United States.
I’m curious to know what Northfield’s schools (district, charter, parochial) are doing in the classrooms on this ‘ultrapoliticized’ issue of climate change. Are our educators using materials like those available on the Steger Foundation’s education page, are they ducking the issue, or doing something in between?
Some personal background:
I got this email from Councilor Erica Zweifel earlier this week: Hi Griff, I am attaching some information and pictures regarding the volunteer awards that I will be giving out…