Students around the world are rising up against the growing devastation of climate change. Students are marching in the streets of a growing number of cities, and demonstrating in front of parliaments and oil companies and banks. They know that we have waited far too long to make the urgent transition from coal and oil to sunshine and wind. They know that summers are becoming unbearably hot, that drought is parching the farmland, that monster hurricanes are battering coastlines, that wildfires are raging, and that the Arctic ice cap is melting.
So the young people are waiting no longer for the politicians to solve the problems. They are rising up, angry and determined. They are voting in growing numbers for candidates who care about the people and the planet. They are engaged in vibrant discussions, learning about the crisis which will challenge them for the rest of their lives.
I am enormously heartened. I am proud of this awakening generation.
When I was a student in California in the late 1960s, we rose up and roared against the hideous American war in Viet Nam. And . . . we stopped that criminal war. Now I watch the young people of today rise up and roar against the criminal burning of coal and oil, which is destroying their planet.
With a PhD in literature from Stanford University, I taught above the Arctic Circle in northern Norway for ten years, including two years with the Sami reindeer people in the heart of the tundra. From my Sami students, I learned about the early signs of climate change in the Arctic. I have also lived with the cod fishermen in the Lofoten Islands, and from them I learned about climate change in the northern seas.
For twenty years, I have researched the twin themes of Climate Change: the Problem, and Clean Energy: the Solution. As a teacher, I have learned that most schools in most countries around the world are not teaching their students the truth about climate change. Schools do not have serious courses, but add bits and pieces about climate change to a biology course or a geology course. The students do little research on their own; they read a short text and take an exam.
So I have developed a new form of education, a Weaving of Schools: a global classroom in which young people around the world can work together. This website invites you to ask the Big Questions, to see the Big Picture, as together we build a far better world than the battered planet which you young people inherit today.
You are the First Global Generation in Human History, fully able to break free from the shackles of the 20th Century—the poverty, the pollution, the plundering, the racism, and the wars—and to build the Renaissance of the 21st Century, your century.
I am John Slade, born in America, living now in Norway, a teacher who has spent his career working with great students in classrooms from California to New York, on an island in the Caribbean, in the Norwegian Arctic, and in universities in Saint Petersburg and Arkhangelsk, Russia.
I believe in the young people of the world. I have been waiting for many years for this moment . . . when a growing number of spirited young people, and the adults who support them, finally stop the madness, and rise up to the best that is in us.
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The First Global Generation in Human History >>