I just came back from a 5 day teacher workshop at Hawaii Prep Academy in Waimea on the Big Island. The Summit was Titled “Hoku a ‘aina” (Stars and Land) and the theme was sustainability. Lots to share, as the workshop was excellent – really excellent! Hosted at the one of a kind LEED Platinum eLab at HPA (http://www.hpa.edu/academics/energy-lab) and organized by one of the smartest people I know, Dr Bill Wiecking (a polymath of the highest caliber), our group included 15 teachers from grades 1-12 at HPA, plus Alan Nakagawa (inquiry based learning specialist award winning teacher and administrator) and Mark Standley (incredible teacher, administrator, consultant and internationally respected digital storyteller http://www.mstandley.com/).

We had a keynote from Nainoa Thompson to start us off – the importance of both story and connecting to history got us off on an incredible journey. We teleconferenced with students and teachers in Alaska, West Virginia, North Carolina, Malaysia, England, amongst others. On Tuesday we visited state of the art facilities: Mauna Loa Atmospheric Observatory, Mauna Kea Observatories. On Wednesday we visited Natural Energy Labs Hawaii including stops at a solar plant that converts sun to heating mineral oil that generates MW of electricity, new generation PhotoVoltaic, Cellana: making BioFuel from Microalgae and Kona Blue – a fully functional fish farming operation. On Thursday we visited the 30 MW Puna Geothermal facility as well as the Jagger Museum at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

All of these presentations and visits were tied together with an essential question of how to deal with the coming issues worldwide of Water, Food, Energy and Culture. The teachers were challenged with thinking about how to include sustainability as a focused area of their curriculum – there was certainly great thoughts on that throughout the week.

To focus on one area, we talked a bit about the pending crisis in these areas and how to engage students about it without having them feel overwhelmed. We also talked extensively about the value of creating a new narrative to draw new attention to the problem and ways to the solution (kudos to Mark Standley for wrapping the excellent book Switch, which gives a lot of insight into ways to create change when it is difficult). I found myself thinking about the evidence from the Mauna Loa tests of CO2 that dated back from 1958 – the first real scientific data that something unprecedented was going on and I remembered the old James Burke series: After the Warming which was released in 1997. I used to show this to my students back then, because I felt there was not enough awareness of the pending issues.

I found the video on youtube:

(I actually re-watched it for the first time in a decade on my ipad, where it plays as a series of 11 10min clips).

If you have not seen it, it is worth a watching – essentially, he plays a reporter in 2050 who does a retrospective of how the Planetary Management Authority, established in 2000, saved us from our pending doom. Well here we are 11 years after that with still not enough political courage to do what is right for the planet – I think the dolphins were right to leave and thank us for the fish…(homage to Douglas Adams)

In watching it, a few things are obviously missed – the rapid rise of china’s economy, the lack of political will 15 YEARs after the evidence was clear, the greater militarism of the US in the Middle East, etc. Even though the scenarios painted are still playing out, it is clear his message was on target and we are progressively digging the hole we need to get out of deeper….

What struck me about this movie was how powerful it would be to have students create their own narrative about how we could get out of this dilemma. Imagine challenging a class of students to create a new version of “After the Warming” and tell the story of how THEIR generation got us out this mess. Yes – there will be sea rise and population shift and drought and flooding, etc. But there is also a light at the end – it applies a strategy proposed in the book “Switch” – Shape the Path. In having students envision a way to a better future, we create ownership in that vision for the very people that need it.

Or at least that is one way to get there….