"Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught In America"

Spring 2019. "Sixth-grade science teacher Kristen Del Real had invited me to come by during her prep period, so for the first time since age thirteen," Katie Worth writes, "I found myself walking the halls of my alma mater, Chico Junior High School." She had returned to find out what kids were being taught about climate change.

Worth worked with FRONTLINE and The GroundTruth Project, part of a team that won an Emmy for the interactive documentary "The Last Generation" (bit.ly/3dMzMNL) about three young people living in the Marshall Islands. Rising sea levels threaten their very homeland.

One of them moved with his family to Oklahoma, and Worth wanted to know what his textbooks said about climate change. The answer fit into her larger investigative journalism project now published in book form: "Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught In America" ($16 in paperback from Columbia Global Reports; also for Amazon Kindle).

Worth "traveled to more than a dozen communities to talk to kids about what they have learned about the phenomenon that will shape their future. What I found were points of friction in abundance." 

Del Real explains that several years earlier, students started to lose interest in their climate change "solution projects" because a history teacher "was showing them YouTube videos alleging that global warming was a hoax...."

And yet, Worth writes, "the more that scientists have studied a link between human industry and global temperatures, the more unambiguous they have found it." 

Her report explains how "climate deniers" create "climate doubters" among the general public in a striking parallel with tobacco industry tactics. She is frank in her reporting that climate scientists don't know everything, and she interviews climate skeptics and fossil fuel advocates. 

But the bottom line is that climate change is falsely presented as a debate, as if coming from "legitimate scientific disagreement."

In 2019, Paradise Intermediate seventh-grader Nakowa Kelley said in Marc Kessler's science class: "This global warming stuff? My parents said it's not true." With care and attention, Kessler tells Worth he helps students search for the truth, but it is a challenge. 

The previous November Nakowa's house disappeared in the Camp Fire.

"Able To Be Otherwise"

"Now, when I drive through Paradise with my family nearly two years after the fire," Anna Lenaker writes in her compelling memoir, "I see the charred marks the fire left in its wake all around. But I also see the frames of new houses being built...." Yes, "life is returning ... but it is a slow and painful effort--just as it is with grieving."

Lenaker faces great grief in her own life, enough almost to still her breath permanently. Yet through others' compassion, especially from her older brother Jay and his wife Teressa, girded with an inner tenacity, she is not only the homeless kid who sold her toys on the streets of Tijuana, which helped her mom buy drugs, but the adult who graduated from Brown University by way of Chico's Inspire School of Arts and Sciences and Chico State. Mind-blowing.

"Able To Be Otherwise" ($17.99 in paperback from New Degree Press; also for Amazon Kindle) weaves Lenaker's personal story with a vision of a world better addressing the triple crises of poverty, opioid addiction and climate change. "Each time we dare to acknowledge that things are able to be otherwise," she writes, "we move toward a world where everyone can breathe deeper." 

Haunted by "imposter syndrome" at Brown ("what am I doing here among all these smart people?"), her interest in philosophy, theology and public policy blossoms. After a year abroad in England studying at Pembroke College in Oxford, she graduates with a BA in Religious Studies and a Master's in Public Affairs. 

Her love of learning hearkens back to fifth grade as she settles in with Jay and Teressa (eventually moving to Magalia).

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard's notion of a "leap of faith" shapes her life's mission of removing the stigmas around what seem to be intractable challenges, "to be willing to imagine radical alternatives to the present moment.... Believing in the possibility of change is sufficient justification for continuing to take on problems as daunting as poverty, addiction, and climate change." 

Lenaker invites the reader to "take the leap" as well; one day it will enable the world to breathe, even as her story takes your breath away.

"How To Prepare For Climate Change: A Practical Guide To Surviving The Chaos"

David Pogue reports on science and technology for CBS News' Sunday Morning. A prolific author, his new book, on climate change, is a stunningly complete yet readable compendium for individuals and families trying to navigate its real-world implications.

"How To Prepare For Climate Change: A Practical Guide To Surviving The Chaos" ($24 in paperback from Simon & Schuster; also for Amazon Kindle) has a Paradise connection. Pogue assembled an "expert panel," among them Steve "Woody" Culleton. The book notes that Culleton "arrived in Paradise in 1981 via Greyhound bus...." 

Serving on the Town Council from 2004-2016, "Woody plans to run for town council again in November 2020 to help rebuild his community." He did, and now it can be told: he's back on the Council.

For Pogue, climate change is incontrovertible; the controversies about just how much is human caused are beside the point. Whether we as a species can mitigate or stop climate change, the real question for us as individuals, families and communities is how we can cope or adapt to the changes. 

"Sometimes," he writes, "people are pushed out by extreme-weather disasters, like the wildfire that drove Bob and Linda Oslin out of Paradise.... They decided not to return."

Neither did Jen and Ryan Cashman of Paradise, driven out by the Camp Fire, who became "climate refugees." (Pogue tells their story for CBS Sunday Morning at http://bit.ly/paradisepogue.) 

Where can one go that's safer? Pogue has an entire chapter with some sage advice for those seeking "climate havens": "Get away from the oceans"; "move north"; "find fresh water"; "seek infrastructure." Best bets: the Pacific Northwest and the Great Lakes states.

Comprehensive chapters cover growing food, where to invest, dealing with insurance, adjusting one's business, preparing for wildfires, floods, heatwaves, drought, hurricanes, social breakdown. Climate changes bring more mosquitos and ticks. Pogue calls it "global weirding."

Pogue gets down to the nitty-gritty, with a section on emergency notification (and the heartbreak of the Camp Fire) along with a page on lessons from that fire: "Fill the tank."

Whether we stay or go, Pogue's must-have book will fill our information tank to the brim.