Here’s an update from across the Atlantic from NAAEE.  This includes:

  • Let’s Keep Learning from Each Other: Help GEEP Reach 100 Country Profiles!  GEEP is aiming high! Join our campaign to have 100 country profiles on our website by World Environment Day on June 5. We’ll feature new profiles on social media; share your story now!  Read more.
  • How Two Environmental Educators Shaped Who I Am Today.  In Teacher Appreciation Week, NAAEE staff member Stacie Pierpoint gave thanks to two high school science teachers who influenced her life-long interest in the environment.  Read more.
  • What I Miss Most About Teaching Outside.  Nearly two months into COVID-19 school closures, eePRO group moderator Natalie Crowley reflects on what she misses most about taking her students out into nature.  Read more.
  • Environmental Education and the New Normal.  How do we make the facilities we teach at as flexible as our teaching? It is no surprise that things won’t be the same in the wake of current events.  Read more.
  • Fire Stones for our Souls.  In these strange times of the pandemic, First Nations offer a timeless lead into an alternate way of life with knowledge from past generations and the responsibility of passing on to future ones.  Read more.  ∫∫∫

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Teach the Future is promoting its new twitter account, and there is a new episode of the UKSCN podcast ‘Podcast for the Planet’.  If you wish to listen to it please click on the link here.   ∫∫∫

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The London & South East Schools Eco-Network eco-resources digest continues to grow, as does the idea for a Virtual Schools COP26  with a number of organisations interested in joining forces. Please email environment@spgs.org if you are interested.   ∫∫∫

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Students from Highgate School in London have made online lessons about climate change to help educate young people about the crisis and how they can stop it.  The lessons can either be given live online (with a presenter and discussions) or downloaded and completed individually.  One lesson is aimed at 8-12 year olds and another at 16+.  The lessons are:

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In its Schools Brief, the Economist  has published the fourth of 6 weekly articles on the climate.  These will be valuable reminders to those of us who’ve been following these events for 40 years or more, and a sobering story for those relative new to our failed attempts to curb CO2 emissions.  We think that these articles will be useful for older students studying environmental issues in schools, and for their teachers too.  This weeks BriefBad Times, looks at the severe, widespread and sometimes surprising damage that will be done by climate change.  This is how it ends:

“The big unknown, though, once you get to the century time scale, is the stability of the great ice sheets. It is widely believed that there are points of no return after which such sheets are doomed slowly to collapse, thus increasing sea levels by many metres. Where these points of no return are is not clear. It is possible that they might be passed even if warming is kept to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial.

A high likelihood of drought and crop failures; changes to regional climate that upset whole economies; storms more destructive in both their winds and their rains; seawater submerging beaches and infiltrating aquifers: what is known about the impacts of climate change is already worrying enough. The known unknowns add to the anxiety. It is not just the question of the ice sheets, an uncertainty massive enough to weigh down a continent. There are other tipping points, too, which could see ocean currents shift, or deserts spread. And in the spaces between all these troubles are the unknown unknowns, as surprising, and deadly, as a thunderstorm that kills through pollen.”  ∫∫∫

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Ashden has free teaching and learning resources to enable young people to find out more about climate solutions, sustainable energy and how people live and work around the world.  It also says join them online 3 – 4pm on 2 July to find out who has won this year’s awards and to hear positive climate action stories.  There will be a mix of film, conversations and poetry that will highlight the stories of people offering much-needed hope for a brighter, greener decade to come.  ∫∫∫

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The Royal Institution Christmas lectures are a good source of entertaining environmental education for a lockdown.  Recordings go back to 1968.  The last few have focused on:

  • Secrets and Lies – Hannah Fry unmasks the hidden numbers, rules and patterns that secretly control our daily lives
  • Who am I? – Alice Roberts and Aoife McLysaght bring our evolutionary story to life
  • The language of life – Sophie Scott takes us on a journey through one of the fundamentals of human and animal life – the unstoppable urge to communicate.
  • Supercharged: fuelling the future – Saiful Islam leads an incredible journey through the invisible presence that drives everything around us.  ∫∫∫

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You can keep an eye on osprey pair, Louis and Aila, live from the heart of an ancient Caledonian pine forest c/o the Woodland Trust.   Just click here.  Meanwhile, nominations are open for the Trust’s Tree of the Year award.   ∫∫∫

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30 Days Wild is back again this year with more activites you can do during lockdown every day in June.  Can you do one wild thing a day throughout the whole of June?  The Wildlife Trusts believe you can.  Join thousands of people taking part in the annual nature challenge.  Do it for your health, wellbeing, wildlife and the planet!   Registrations are now open.  ∫∫∫

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Stork chicks have been born in the wild in the UK for the first time since 1416.  Their nest is on the Knepp Estate in Sussex.  The estate says:

“This is a hugely exciting development for The White Stork Project, a pioneering partnership of private landowners and nature conservation charities, which aims to restore a population of approximately 50 breeding pairs in southern England by 2030 through a phased release programme over a five year period.”  ∫∫∫

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The Journal of Moral Education is publishing a Virtual Special Issue on environmental virtues and sustainability education.  ∫∫∫

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