What can schools do about climate change? Click on the above mindmap to find out more. Special thanks to Sharon Genovese for creating this mindmap.

When I was 15 years old my high school chemistry teacher told me ‘Miss Genovese, if you’re not careful you’ll get a stress induced heart attack’.

10 years later, I still remember his words and they are a constant reminder for me to ’slow down’.

Since reading the brilliant book ‘In praise of slow‘ by Carl Honore, escalating fuel prices and generally reorienting my values, I have started catching public transport more regularly. I find this forces me to slow down. It may only take 20 minutes to drive to university by car, but if I take public transport, it takes me 1 hour and 10 minutes. In that time, I get to read books, enjoy the scenery and write in my journal (activities that I usually wouldn’t find the time or allow myself to do otherwise).

Other members of my family have slowed down their lifestyles as well. For example, not so long ago my brother Stephen used to work 9-5pm, Monday to Friday as an Engineer. The work and long hours did not agree with him and he would often come home irritable and sad. So what did Stephen do? He quit his job as an Engineer and pursued his love of Art. Now he is studying Fine Arts, producing amazing art work and exercising regularly. He is the happiest I’ve ever seen him.

My dad used to work long hours on our stone fruit orchard but after our orchard was damaged by a bushfire, he reassessed his life. Now dad is spending less time on the orchard and enjoys running marathons, studying zen and working on his inventions.

Which brings me to an exciting innovative solution I heard about recently. In Japan there was a huge debate over a new apartment block that was being built. The prospective residents were arguing over whether the apartment should have an elevator installed. One group of residents argued ‘We shouldn’t install an elevator! It will just waste electricity and contribute to global warming’, whilst another group of residents said ‘But what about the elderly people who can’t move so easily? You have to have an elevator!’. Finally, a consensus was reached - a slow elevator would be installed.

The elevator would move so slowly that most people would not bother waiting for it and would take the stairs (a much quicker option). The elderly residents who really needed to use it and had more time on their hands wouldn’t mind waiting. It has been said that this innovative solution was inspired by the key word ’slow’.

There are many benefits (not just environmental but physical and emotional) that we can experience when we slow down our lives.

So ask yourself, could you benefit from slowing down? Even just a little bit?

Below are 3 ways to slow down your lifestyle.

1. Grow your own food, cook your own meals and eat them slowly

Cooking your dinner from home grown and/or locally grown produce is a great way to slow down, nourish your body and mind and help the planet all at the same time. Speaking from my own experience, I know there’s nothing more satisfying than cooking my own gourmet pizza with fresh ingredients from my own garden (free from packaging and saves me some money to boot).

Fresh Energy have produced a fantastic pdf called ‘Fight Global warming with fresh food’, they state:

“Growing crops takes energy, but turning those crops into a box of crackers or a frozen dinner entrée can take just as much energy, if not more. For example, producing a two-pound box of breakfast cereal uses the same amount of energy as burning a half-gallon of gasoline.”

Once you have cooked your meal, don’t just gobble it down. Eat it slowly. When you chew your food slowly, more nutrients are released. Studies have also found that people who eat slowly tend to consume less food. Researcher Kathleen Melanson states “Put down the fork between bites and take time to have a conversation and linger over the meal”.

2. Cut back on caffeine

I’ve only had a cup of coffee once in my life. I added so much coffee to my mug that I had the shakes for the rest of the day and my mind was overactive.

Then on law school camp, I could drink all the cheap cola I wanted. I had 7 cans in the space of a few hours. Needless to say, I couldn’t sleep that night.

Studies have found that when we slurp on our cup of coffee or can of coke, we are actually inducing a state of stress. Caffeine drives the adrenal glands to produce stress hormones that in turn produce the “fight or flight” response.

Why not consider gradually replacing your caffeine intake with healthier behaviours such as getting more sleep, eating healthier foods, switching to herbal teas, regular exercise and drinking plenty of water?

3. Leave the car at home

When you take public transport or walk somewhere, you experience the world in a different way.

Carl Honore points out -

‘When we walk, we are aware of the details around us – birds, trees, the sky, shops and houses, other people. We make connections’.

I found this to be true in Japan when I had the option of taking a cable car to get to the top of a mountain (15 minute journey) or walking up a mountain (2 hour journey). I was running low on cash at the time so I decided to walk up the mountain. I saw the greenest, brightest moss on rocks, deer, heard birds singing and even saw a screaming monkey 20 metres away! There wasn’t a single human being in sight. When I got to the top of the mountain, I was exhausted but the view was absolutely incredible.

Personal benefits aside, every litre of petrol you use driving your car releases 2 Kg of greenhouse gas into the Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists also point that the main greenhouse gas, CO2, stays in the atmosphere for approximately 200 years. What we do today will affect our children and grandchildren’s future.

I’m an Australian who can only speak English and a bit of conversational Italian. Most people in my country can only speak one language (i.e. English) or some would argue two languages (English and Australian slang). When you live in this kind of culture, it’s easy to forget that not everyone can speak or read English (arrogant, I know!).

After receiving emails from several commitment individuals (who were willing to translate our global warming mindmaps into their languages), it really hit me - global warming is a global problem. We are all in this together. We will share the same future.

There is a need for everyone from all different backgrounds to be on the same page regarding global warming. I think mindmaps can make a big difference in helping to communicate about this issue, since the pictures tell a story and you don’t need to read much (after all they say only 15% of the population read books regularly).

Below is the ‘Combating Global Warming’ mindmap translated into Vietnamese, Indonesian, Spanish, German and Japanese (Click on each image to enlarge). Many thanks to Potat, Hoang Huynh, Supreme Master TV, Thorsten Lange and Yumiko for all your wonderful work.

Indonesian global warming mindmap translated by Potat

Vietnamese global warming mindmap translated by Hoang Huynh

Spanish global warming mindmap translated by Supreme Master TV

German global warming mindmap translated by Thorsten Lange

Japanese global warming mindmap translated by Yumiko

I was really excited to receive an email from a Chinese group who had translated the global warming mind map into mandarin. Check it out!

Just imagine what would be possible with 1 billion people (one sixth of the world’s population) taking the suggested actions on the mind map (eat less meat, walk instead of drive, etc.)

I have been receiving some angry comments recently about the ‘Have no more than 2 children’ branch (somehow I don’t think the Chinese will struggle with this given their one child policy). One man, Joey, sent me a message declaring “I will have as many kids as I want thank you very much”. That’s fair enough, you can have as many kids as you want, but before you do, let’s consider the earth for a moment. With its limited resources, limited space, how much can the earth handle? If everyone is having as many kids as they want like Joey, could this be a problem?

Population is the elephant in the room which nobody talks about. As Joey has illustrated, it’s a very touchy subject. I wrote a chapter in my ebook on overpopulation and I have pasted it below. I hope it helps to explain why I have created a ‘Have no more than 2 children’ branch. It’s not because I’m evil and don’t like children. Far from it. It’s because I care about the planet and the millions of other species that inhabit it (humans included).

CHAPTER 4

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT: OVERPOPULATION

In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.
– Professor Stephen Hawking

Global warming is a by product of a bigger, more serious issue: overpopulation. One doesn’t need statistical proof to see that the world is getting crowded. We can see it clearly in our day to day lives as we struggle to find a parking spot at the shopping
centre, wait months for a doctors appointment and see oceans of new, compact suburbs springing up all around us.

Let’s take a look at the facts. For the majority of the two million years of human history, the population was less than a quarter of a million. It took thousands of years (until 1800) for the population to reach the first billion. In 1930 the population reached 2 billion, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987 and 6 billion in 1999. According to the United Nations projections, the population is predicted to reach an astronomical 9.1 billion by 2050. What’s going on? Why is our population growing so out of control? The simple answer is exponential growth. Sounds complex? Well, it isn’t.

In a nutshell, exponential growth is based on the idea that the larger a number gets, the faster it grows. This principle can be explained by looking at a child receiving his or her pocket money. The child is given two choices for increasing their weekly pocket money. The first choice is to start with $1 worth of pocket money and have this doubled every week. The second option is to start on $5 and have this increase by $1 every week.

Option 2 may give you more in the short term, however as you can see in the table above Option 1 eventually will grow much larger. We may not realise it but what is happening with the simple example of the child’s pocket money in Option 1 is what is happening with the Earth’s human population (but on a much larger scale).

Imagine that you are reading the paper and the front page states ‘Population increases by 1.8% every year’. Would you be alarmed? Probably not. Many of us would think ‘1.8%? That’s nothing!’ and we would flip straight through to the sports or comic section. Don’t be fooled though. According to Dr Albert A. Bartlett (Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado) this is an alarming figure. If the population was to continue increasing by this amount ever year then it would only take 780 years for the world population to grow to a density where there would be one person per square metre on the dry lands surface.

Stop for a moment and try to picture living in a world like that. Quite uncomfortable? Distressing? It would be like living in a crowded lift that you cannot escape from. How do people react when they are in confined spaces? Some people remain calm and cool headed, whilst others freak out and reason and common sense go out the door. They do irrational things that not only harm themselves but the people around them. With a population growing exponentially this is what is likely to happen to our planet. Professor Bartlett also states it would only take 2,400 years for the mass of the people to equal the mass of the earth (with a 1.8% growth rate in population)! Eventually we would reach a point where people could not go on living with such limited space. Something needs to change and if we don’t try to change, mother earth will do it for us.

Hurting the world

Having more people results in a tragedy of the commons situation. To explain this concept, let’s take a quick look at the overfishing of the fishery. A fisherman thinks ‘If I don’t take these fish then someone else will, so I better take as much as I can!’, but what then happens is that everyone has this mentality and starts taking as much fish as they possibly can! You end up with a dead, empty ocean with no fish at all. Perhaps Professor Elinor Ostrom’s quote below from Governing the Commons says it best:

Wealth that is free for all is valued by no one because he who is foolhardy enough to wait for its proper time of use will only find that it has been taken by another…the fish in the sea are valueless to the fisherman, because there is no assurance that they will be there for him tomorrow if they are left behind today.

The tragedy of the commons situation that is occurring in the fishery is taking place all over the world with other natural resources (i.e. water, forests, exotic species and oil). Global warming, deforestation, pollution of air, soil and water are the result of overexploiting the Earth’s resources to meet the demands of a growing population. More people on the planet means there is less water, food, energy and space to go around. There will be even less finite natural resources to go around in the western world now that developing countries like China are following in our larger carbon and ecological footprints (China recently overtook the U.S. as the world’s biggest CO2 emitter).

Helping students to understand climate change and propelling them to take action on climate change is one of the biggest challenges we are faced with today. Why is climate change such a difficult issue to understand? Listed below are some explanations.

It’s complex: Understanding climate change involves grasping a number of concepts that are separated in time and space. For example, an increase in greenhouse gases in one part of the world leads to changes in climate that arise many years later and often many kilometres away from the initial emissions. This conflicts with the tendency students have to want to make simplifying assumptions and search for causes that are close by in location and time to the effects.

It has no single cause: When thinking about a problem, students typically imagine a single cause. Climate change is due to multiple causes that are spread out all over the world. Subsequently, teaching students about climate change involves integrative and interdisciplinary thinking.

Greenhouse gases are invisible: Students tend to overlook causes that are not obvious. This poses as a challenge when it comes to climate change, as we cannot see or touch greenhouse gases.

It involves going back in time: People have difficulty reasoning about patterns over time. Studying climate change involves looking at data that goes back over hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years.

It can’t be explained through simple, linear narrative: Often when we explain how things come about to students, we do so in a linear, causal manner (e.g. X happened, then Y and Z). Climate change cannot be explained like this due to the multiple causes that global in nature.

It has no boundaries: We often see the world as a place divided up by multiple boundaries. Studying climate change requires a shift in this limited thinking to see that the atmosphere and oceans are shared by everyone on Earth.

As a result of these educational challenges, it is tempting for many of us to want to ignore or dismiss climate change. There are however various ways in which these challenges can be overcome in the classroom. These are:

1. Use lots of visual aids to make the invisible visible (E.g. 20 black balloons blown up can represent 1kg of carbon dioxide).

2. Use computers to display simulations of causal connections between the actions people take and climate change.

3. Share experiences (not just data) from all over the world with students. Consider sharing stories from hunters in Alaska, farmers in outback Australia and young children in pacific islands whose homes are being affected by rising sea levels.

4. Show students powerful visuals of humans and animals in danger of climate change rather than only images of landscapes (e.g. melting glacier). The reasoning for this is that many people can easily empathise with humans and animals but have greater difficulty empathising with such things as landscapes.

5. Students want to know how climate change relates to them. Wherever possible show students how this issue will affect them, their house, their pocket, their leisure activities, their street, their region, their country, etc.

6. Empower students by showing them the different ways they can make a difference in combating climate change (turning things off at the power point, planting trees, etc.)

If you have any other strategies on how to teach this complex topic to others, I would love to hear from you.

Would you be seen driving around in a hummer? With a 2 out of 10 rating by the Environmental Protection Agency, poor fuel efficiency and emitting over 3 times more carbon dioxide than your average car, I would think twice before stepping into one of these gas guzzlers. Hummers are virtually a symbol for everything we shouldn’t be doing, given the outlook for global climate change.

So when Brownes (a West Australian dairy company taken over recently by Fonterra Brands Australia) launched a competition (‘Chill my ride’) giving Australians the opportunity to win one of these destructive military vehicles, I got angry.

The competition is rather ironic as Australia’s dairy industry will suffer from decreased pasture production and lower milk yields resulting from increased heat stress in cattle due to climate change.

My friends and I were compelled to take action in response to this competition and the hummer. Other activists have already taken action by throwing green splotches of paint onto the hummer advertisement in the city centre.

Below are 3 simple things you can do (and that we did) to make a difference in a non violent manner.

1. Stop purchasing brownes dairy products.

2. Let Brownes (Fonterra Brands) know that you are no longer buying their products and why. You can save time by using the letter my friend created by clicking here (feel free to modify it) or create your own.

The letter can be emailed to Paul Murphy (Dairy marketing manager of Fonterra Brands) at paul.murphy@fonterra.com or posted to Paul at 327 Ferntree Gully Road, Mt Waverley, Victoria 3149.

3. Talk to others about the impacts of the hummer and this competition. Encourage them to consider buying other local dairy products instead of Brownes.

Today my friend received a long email response from the marketing manager, Paul Murphy. At the end of his response he stated:

I apologise if our ‘Chill my Ride’ promotion appears to indicate that we are not sensitive to environmental issues. Your feedback certainly prompts us to be more thoughtful when developing promotions in the future.

This ‘Chill my ride’ competition will be over in a few days time but sadly the impacts of the prize hummer and other hummers will be felt within our lifetimes and for the next 200 years at least (that’s how long on average carbon dioxide lasts in the atmosphere for). I can’t help but think to myself, when will the penny drop? When will companies and individuals wake up and see that they have been shooting themselves in the foot? With the power of all our voices, I hope this will be sooner rather than later.

Despite having given talks to hundreds of students on global warming, I struggle to have conversations about this urgent issue with some of my closest friends and family.

Earlier this year at Easter lunch, I got into a heated argument on climate change with my cousin’s partner. I expected him to be concerned about climate change because he had two baby girls. He wasn’t. I tried mentioning the amount of money he could save by trading in his big SUV for a prius. He didn’t care about saving money. I talked above sea levels rising, resulting in millions of environmental refugees. Bad move. The more desperate I became, the more he switched off to what I was saying. I ended up walking away from our conversation feeling helpless and angry.

Since then there have been many occasions where I have sold out and not mentioned climate change, out of fear of being judged as an extremist or as coming across as a wet blanket. I lost my voice on this issue with the most important people in my life.

Fortunately, I’ve got my voice back and it’s stronger than ever before. Over the past two weeks I have been immersed in social science research on what appears to work and doesn’t work when talking to people about climate change.

With Christmas lunch on Tuesday, I will come face to face with my cousin’s partner again. I feel confident about having another conversation with him about climate change and what he can do to be part of the solution.

These are some of the things all of us climate advocates should attempt to apply when talking to people about climate change.

1. Keep it personal

If my cousin’s partner is living it up on the coast in Western Australia, why should he really be concerned about sea levels rising in Bangladesh? He wants to know how climate change relates to him. If possible we must show people how this issue will affect them, their children, their house, their pocket, their leisure activities, their street, their region, their country, etc.

2. Telling people what to do

Think of a time someone told you what to do. How did you react? You probably didn’t like it much. For this reason I must avoid telling my cousin’s partner what to do at all costs. It is far more effective to have people voluntarily change their behaviour.

3. Overcome their mental barriers

“If everyone knows about it, surely someone will do something about it?” and “I won’t do anything until others start taking action” are examples of mental barriers that stop people personally acting to address climate change. Barriers such as these should be acknowledged and addressed to help people move forward.

4. Balance the problems and solutions

When you look at the language used to describe the challenge of climate change it is often described as enormous and apocalyptic. The solutions however are often presented as small, cheap and easy (e.g. change a light bulb). When you consider the scale of the problem, one cannot help but think ‘Will changing a light bulb really be enough?’ To avoid letting my cousin’s partner fall into this mindset, I must make the size of the solution be as big as the size of the challenge.

5. Watch your language

If the person you are talking to is unaware of climate change, then using terms such as ‘carbon neutral’ or ‘carbon negative’ (that require a more in-depth knowledge), are likely to confuse them and put them off. It is important to speak the person’s language. As a general rule of thumb, use plain English.

6. Monetary rewards

There is a belief that you can change behaviours by showing people how their actions can save or earn them money. Research suggests that this idea is overrated and on its own may not lead to behaviour change.

7. The message: Focus on the losses

A decision must be made on whether to focus on the benefits of engaging in a particular sustainable behaviour or the losses people are suffering as a result of their current unsustainable behaviour. Research suggests that messages which emphasise the losses are consistently more persuasive than messages which emphasise savings as a result of taking action.

8. The message: Threatening

Threatening smoking advertisements can teach us a lot about effective climate change communication. A study exposing smokers to advertisements with the basic message of ‘Smoking can kill you’ found the advertisements did not motivate smokers to quit smoking. Many smokers became defensive, rejected the message, referred to articles that suggested smoking doesn’t kill you and some became so stressed they needed to have a cigarette during the advertisement.

By using threatening messages to communicate about climate change you run the risk of having people switch off and avoid thinking about it altogether. Threatening messages work best when combined with messages that empower the person to take action against the threat.