Green Action ELTCo-Director of ECS - English Country Schools - residential English Language summer courses for children and teenagers. Coordinator of ELT Footprint UK aiming to promote environmental responsibility in UK English Language Teaching.
Trinity College London is the latest ELT organisation to rather belatedly recognise that the future of ELT might actually be affected by the survival of our species on the planet.
You can catch Christopher Graham’s session on ELT and Climate Change: Where Next? at this year’s Future of ELT 2021 conference, Saturday 26 June at 11:15 – 12:00 UK time.
Register free here.
A newly released Netflix documentary, “Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet,” features David Attenborough and Johan Rockström, one of the scientists who introduced the concept of planetary boundaries.
The film sounds alarm on planetary boundaries, but offers hope.
Highly recommended: read more here and watch the film here. #GreenELT
Amazing that it still takes a teenager to join the dots, clearly setting out the problems and the solutions in a way that our political leaders generally fail to do:
Outrage and Optimism is a weekly podcast that provides everything you need to keep up to date with the latest environmental developments: ‘We explore the challenges, frustrations and genuine outrage we need to face this crisis, and we explore the real changes already happening that offer the stubborn optimism we need to play our part in building a thriving new economy and world.’
This week’s podcast is about the nature agenda and how we cannot deal with the climate crisis without also addressing nature. Some wonderful music too from Marie Spaemann.
Highly recommended.
#TheClimateConnection podcast series from The British Council starts 12 May. It explores the relationship between the climate crisis and language education.
Ten episodes will feature a wide range of leading practitioners working in the sector – teachers, trainers, researchers, publishers and authors – from Colombia to China, Moldova to Mali, and Palestine to Poland.
In partnership with the Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll also learn more about the origins of climate-related language.
For more information about ‘The Climate Connection’ podcast visit https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/professional-development/podcast
Good to see The British Council stepping up its response to the climate and ecological emergency: see https://www.britishcouncil.org/climate-connection and register now for the free Climate Action in Language Education professional development training series – starts on 28 April.
“This is one of the most consequential decades in human history. That might sound like an exaggeration but it’s not.
By 2030 either we will have reduced emissions by 50% and will be well on our way to a regenerative world where we turn things around at the last minute; or we will have begun to lose control over our climatic system and it will matter less what we do after that.”
These are the words of Tom Rivett-Carnac who, alongside Christiana Figueres, helped bring about the successful Paris Agreement on climate change.
But one of the problems for people aware of the reality of our situation and wishing to do something about it, is burnout. So we need to strike a balance between being in touch with what is going on, without being overwhelmed by it; and take time to come back to ourselves to find a place of centred calm from where we will develop the resilience to do the work we need to do. So says Rivett-Carnac’s life coach, Jo Confino.
To learn more, watch the two men in conversation in this fascinating discussion hosted by the Climate Coaching Alliance.
“Climate change is as big a threat to world peace as war,” the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, recently told the UN Security Council, as he committed the UK, host of this year’s key climate conference, COP 26, to leading the world on action.
Yet the UK’s own influential Public Accounts Committee (PAC) comprised of UK Members of Parliament says ministers have “no plan” to meet climate change targets, two years after setting them in law.
Renowned economist Andrew Simms lays all of this bare in a brilliant article settings recent UK spending commitments in perspective: “What that leadership currently looks like is a government which announced an increase in its military spending of £16.5 billion in November 2020, and in 2020-21 spent at least £41.2 billion on the military and just £3.1 billion on reducing carbon emissions.”
Strip away the green rhetoric and what lies beneath looks very much like business as usual with all its toxic legacy for our children and grandchildren.
The normally impartial and reliable news from the BBC World Service last night might have been written by a government spokesperson.
Leading with the news that our very own Astra Zenica vaccine has now reluctantly been adopted by the French for their older citizens (they didn’t actually use the word ‘world beating’), the bulletin finished with the news that some Australian teenagers are taking their federal government to court over a Whitehaven Coal mine, arguing that the development breaches a common law duty of care to protect young people from future harm.
No mention of our very own Whitehaven, where the government has faced a barrage of criticism over its failure to prevent a new coal mine in this year of supposed climate leadership by The UK: see previous post below.