At a national park in Virginia on Monday, President Joe Biden announced that people can start applying to the American Climate Corps, a program that is expected to connect workers with more than 20,000 green jobs. 

“You’ll get paid to fight climate change, learning how to install those solar panels, fight wildfires, rebuild wetlands, weatherize homes, and so much more that’s going to protect the environment and build a clean energy economy,” Biden said at the Earth Day event. 

The American Climate Corps (ACC) is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 to employ men in environmental projects on the country’s public lands — projects like trail building, planting trees and soil erosion control. Nearly 3 million people were put to work in an effort to address both Depression-era unemployment and to shore up national infrastructure.

But it wasn’t very diverse. Although Black and Native American men were allowed to enroll, the work was segregated. And women could not apply. For a brief time, a sister program created by Eleanor Roosevelt — mockingly called the “She-She-She camps” by its detractors — trained 8,500 women in skills like typing and filing.  

The Biden administration is adamant that this iteration of the program will attract a more diverse conservation and climate workforce, promising that the program will “look like America” and expand pathways into the workforce for people from marginalized backgrounds.

On Monday, Biden announced the launch of a long-awaited job board where applicants can look for opportunities. Some positions were created through the American Climate Corps partner agencies like the Forest Service, which announced the Forest Corps — 80 jobs in reforestation and wildfire mitigation — or the USDA’s Working Lands Climate Corps, with 100 positions. At the same time, the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy announced a new project that will place corps members in priority energy communities — places that have historically been the site of coal mining and power plants — for work in community-led projects like environmental remediation. All of these positions have a term limit, although they vary; some listed on the website are seven-months for example, others are over a year long. 

Other jobs listed on the site are compiled from existing conservation corps programs; either state-run programs like the California Conservation Corps or those run by nonprofits like Conservation Legacy. These provide opportunities for young people in local communities to do everything from prescribed burning on public lands to solar panel installations on schools. 

So far, there are 273 listings on the website, ranging from working on trail crews to invasive plant management to wildland firefighting positions. There is also an “ag literacy” position to teach kids about where their food comes from, and a posting for a climate impact coordinator who will help a Minnesota nonprofit develop climate resilience projects. That’s a far cry from the administration’s goal of 20,000 jobs.

But supporters of the program say opportunities to expand ACC are endless — from home weatherization positions to planting tree canopies in urban areas. The question is whether these mostly taxpayer-funded jobs will attract and retain a diverse workforce and benefits women and LGBTQ+ workers, as well as people of color. 

“We know that it is going to take everybody to solve the climate process and we need to field the whole team. That’s exactly the way we’ve thought about building this program,” said Maggie Thomas, special assistant for climate to Biden.

Because the program is working with The Corps Network, a national association of about 140 conservation groups, there is already some data on how modern-day organizations operate, said Mary Ellen Sprenkel, president and CEO of the network. “They collectively engage almost 25,000 young people a year and are very diverse — young people from urban areas to rural areas. There is a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status and education level.”

According to the organization’s data from 2023, the most recent year available, 44 percent of their members were women and 3 percent were gender non-conforming or gender expansive.

Fifty-nine percent identified as White, while 14 percent were Black, 23 percent were Latino, 4 percent were American Indian, 3 percent were Asian and 2 percent were Pacific Islander. 

Sprenkel sees those numbers as progress. “What has evolved out of the original CCC has naturally become much more diverse in terms of member opportunities. And so building on that for the ACC, I think it will naturally happen,” said Sprenkel. 

In addition, any of the jobs created through federal agencies in collaboration with the ACC must adhere to the administration’s Justice 40 initiative, which means 40 percent of the benefits must go to marginalized communities, in this case either through job creation, or through the projects being funded through monies like the Inflation Reduction Act. 

One aspect of parity will be how well these jobs pay. Many of the positions listed on the ACC site are funded through AmeriCorps, which pays modest living stipends that have been criticized as “poverty wages.” AmeriCorps “was designed for middle class White people who could get support from their parents to have this opportunity,” Sprenkel said. But the Biden administration wants to ensure that all young people can serve, she continued, not just those who can afford to take lower-paying positions.

Sprenkel said the administration is aiming for positions to pay a living wage — with some wiggle room that allows for lower wages as long as housing and other benefits are provided. “[They’ve] said we would like for programs to strive to pay their members $15 an hour, but if that is the result of a package where you’re providing housing and transportation, that’s OK.”

One way the administration has aimed to increase pay transparency is to list an hourly wage equivalent for the jobs posted on the ACC website, said Thomas. This number could factor in stipends for transportation, living expenses and educational awards. Many jobs currently listed go above the $15 minimum — though some require more than entry-level experience. 

There are also efforts in the works to increase the low stipends of current AmeriCorps members. “The president has called on Congress to raise the minimum living allowance for all of our crew members to at least $15 an hour as a starting point,” said Yasmeen Shaheen-McConnell, senior advisor for AmeriCorps. In the interim, she said, many corps positions have been able to offer packages equivalent to $15 an hour through public and private partnerships with states and outside organizations.

Madeleine Sirois, a research analyst with the left-leaning think tank Urban Institute, has been researching workforce development pathways in the clean energy transition. She said offering paid opportunities to enter a new career is a good starting point. “So many people want to upskill, they want to get new credentials, and maybe change career paths. But then they can’t leave their current job that maybe only pays 10 bucks an hour,” she said. 

But other benefits are important, too, if the program is going to be equitable in its rollout, said Sirois. “It’s been mentioned on the portal that there are health care, child care, transportation and housing available, but it does say only some opportunities will offer that,” she said. “So it leaves me with the question of: Who has access to that and who doesn’t?” 

Among the initial 273 listings posted on the ACC site, The 19th found only four that listed child care as a benefit, though Shaheen-McConnell said that eventually more of the positions will offer it. 

Sirois said another important aspect of the ACC will be whether it will lead to actual jobs in clean energy and climate work after corps service ends. She was heartened by Monday’s announcement that the ACC had partnered with the North America’s Building Trades Alliance TradeFutures program, which will provide every ACC member access to a free pre-apprenticeship trades readiness program. Trades jobs make up the foundation of the clean energy transition, but have historically gone to men. Just 4 percent of women are trades workers in the United States. 

“These are all really important, especially for getting women and people of color into these jobs, and apprenticeships that will lead into quality careers that are unionized in many cases. So I think that’s fantastic,” said Sirois. However, while the administration has also touted that ACC positions will offer workforce certifications and skill-based training, Sirois said those are only offered for some corps members. Getting clarity on how many of these jobs will lead to improved employment opportunities will be key. 

It’s going to take time to see how the program plays out, she said, and learn if it will be successful in placing women and people of color in trades jobs, despite historic discrimination.

“When we talk about moving people into jobs, it’s making sure we’re very specific about what kinds of jobs in terms of the quality,” she said. “It’s about opportunities for advancement, having meaningful work, a workplace free from discrimination and harassment, and feeling that you have a voice on the job.” Sirois hopes the administration will collect data on corps members that tracks completion rates and job placements after service, and that the data can be disaggregated by gender and race.

Thomas said American Climate Corps jobs should be considered the earliest stage of the workforce development pipeline — leading to better paying jobs down the line. “This is an opportunity for young people to take action right now in communities across the country, on climate projects that we know have a tangible impact today.”

This story was originally published by The 19^th and reprinted with permission.

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Ignorance and apathy are not a winning combination when facing down an existential threat. But that’s exactly what Susie Jaramillo, of Encantos Media, found when her team was conducting focus groups with tweens. They were working on their just-released educational video series on climate change, “This Is Cooler.”

“There’s misconceptions around what is actually causing climate change,” she said. “There are so many false narratives: Kids think it’s litter, pollution or a hole in the ozone layer. Zero knowledge in terms of solutions, and zero awareness in terms of the jobs that are available.”

Only two of sixteen 10- to 12-year-olds interviewed could explain the basic facts of climate change; one had done a fifth-grade research project and the other had visited the Climate Museum, a temporary exhibit in New York City.

On top of not knowing the facts, kids this age expressed some pretty dark feelings. Jaramillo said she heard “a lot of lizard brain negativity; doom and gloom. There’s a lot of cynicism, sarcasm — adults dropped the ball. There’s a fatalist mentality — ‘there’s nothing we can do, so oh, well.’”

Meanwhile, teachers report a confidence gap in teaching about climate change. Many say that they feel ill-equipped to tackle it, even as most agree it’s important to teach, and that their students are bringing up the topic and are concerned about it.

One potential ally that could help: educational media. In a 2021 survey of education professionals by the company Kaltura, 94 percent said that video increases student satisfaction and directly contributes to an improvement in student performance.

But a report I co-authored with Sara Poirer in 2022 for This Is Planet Ed, an initiative at the Aspen Institute (where I’m an adviser), found that children’s media is still largely silent on climate. Zero of the most popular family movies of 2021 referred to climate change or related topics, and even when reviewing educational, nature and wildlife-themed TV shows for kids, we found that only nine of 664 episodes, or 1.4 percent, referred to climate change.

Related: Little kids need outdoor play – but not when it’s 110 degrees

To help break the silence, This Is Planet Ed now has a Planet Media initiative, dedicated to encouraging creators to make more scientifically accurate and entertaining media that engages kids on the causes, solutions and even the opportunities to be found in our changing climate.

Planet Media supported the creation of Encantos Media’s just-released “This is Cooler” video series, which is aimed at tweens. It uses a combination of live action and animation, with snappy editing, plenty of humor and positivity, to get across some basic info in terms kids can understand. For example, it compares heat-trapping greenhouse gases to a too-thick blanket making the planet warmer. The series also looks at green career opportunities, like solar panel installer or sustainable fashion designer.

Jaramillo said she was inspired by successful YouTube influencers who inform while they entertain. “It’s super engaging,” she said. “It’s not your typical climate education video.”

Just like the tweens she talked to, many children’s media creators also hold the misconception that climate change equals doom and gloom. I’m currently running an informal survey of people in the children’s media industry for a chapter in an upcoming book on climate change education. More than four out of five of our respondents agreed that “children’s media should cover climate change, its causes, impacts and solutions, in developmentally appropriate ways.”

But when asked why there isn’t more coverage of the topic to be found already, the top three responses were “creators don’t have the background knowledge,” “too scary” and “too controversial.” One respondent, who works in climate change education, said, “My children (ages 6 and 8) no longer want to watch nature documentaries because they always manage to describe how climate change threatens or is killing wildlife and their ecosystems. It’s too scary and they feel helpless.”

Related: How student school board members are driving climate action

One of the most successful kids’ science media creators out there says that doesn’t have to be the case. “It’s important to meet kids where they are. To care about the planet you first have to love it,” said Mindy Thomas, co-host of “Wow in the World” from Tinkercast. The kids’ science podcast reaches about 600,000 unique listeners a month. And at least one in five episodes touches on the environment.

Thomas and her team participated in Planet Media’s recent “pitch fest,” an open call for more content that puts across the core facts of climate change in an age-appropriate way, as well as depicting solutions. “We wanted to use our platform to help elevate this important initiative,” said Meredith Halpern-Ranzer, co-founder of Tinkercast. “Climate activism is always something we’ve been really passionate about.”

Often, Halpern-Ranzer and her team find their “wow” by focusing on emerging climate solutions, like a plant-based substitute for single-use plastic, or white paint that can cool down a city. Last fall, they launched Tinker Class, a National Science Foundation-funded hub for teachers to use the podcasts in their elementary school classrooms, as the instigators for “podject-based learning” activities (the “Wow in the World” team really likes puns). About 2,000 teachers have participated so far. Similarly, This is Planet Ed has created an “educational guide” to reinforce the key messages that Planet Media content is trying to get across.

Ashlye Allison teaches fifth grade in a Title I elementary school in South Seattle. She crafts her own curriculum on climate change, following the Next Generation Science Standards, which seek to improve science education using a three-dimensional approach.

“I want it to be connected to their daily lives and what’s going on in Seattle, and about, ‘what can we do about this?’” She showed the “This Is Cooler” video to her students, and said they found it more engaging than other videos she’s used in class.

Just as Jaramillo found, Allison said her students especially liked the video’s reference to solutions like solar power and electric school buses. “If it’s just doom and gloom, nothing can happen, and so I don’t care. That’s what my kids took out of it: solutions. That’s what they quoted the most, is how to fix it. And I think they would be interested in more ways people are fixing different problems.”

This column about climate change outreach was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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This story was originally published by Grist and is reprinted with permission.

Editor’s note: Since publication, the University of Arizona’s Office of Scholarships and Financial Aid has reviewed Alina Sierra’s circumstances and forgiven her debt. Her remaining Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, loan has been paid by a private donor. 

Alina Sierra needs $6,405. In 2022, the 19-year-old Tohono O’odham student was accepted to the University of Arizona, her dream school, and excited to become the first in her family to go to college.

Her godfather used to take her to the university’s campus when she was a child, and their excursions could include a stop at the turtle pond or lunch at the student union. Her grandfather also encouraged her, saying: “You’re going to be here one day.”

“Ever since then,” said Sierra. “I wanted to go.”

Then the financial reality set in. Unable to afford housing either on or off campus, she couch-surfed her first semester. Barely able to pay for meals, she turned to the campus food pantry for hygiene products. “One week I would get soap; another week, get shampoo,” she said. Without reliable access to the internet, and with health issues and a long bus commute, her grades began to slip. She was soon on academic probation.

“I always knew it would be expensive,” said Sierra. “I just didn’t know it would be this expensive.”

She was also confused. The university, known colloquially as UArizona, expressed a lot of support for Indigenous students. It wasn’t just that the Tohono O’odham flag hung in the bookstore or that the university had a land acknowledgment reminding the community that the Tucson campus was on O’odham and Yaqui homelands. The same year she was accepted, UArizona launched a program to cover tuition and mandatory fees for undergraduates from all 22 Indigenous nations in the state. President Robert C. Robbins described the new Arizona Native Scholars Grant as a step toward fulfilling the school’s land-grant mission.

Sierra was eligible for the grant, but it didn’t cover everything. After all the application forms and paperwork, she was still left with a balance of thousands of dollars. She had no choice but to take out a loan, which she kept a secret from her family, especially her mom. “That’s the number one thing she told me: ‘Don’t get a loan,’ but I kind of had to.”

Established in 1885, almost 30 years before Arizona was a state, UArizona was one of 52 land-grant universities supported by the Morrill Act. Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, the act used land taken from Indigenous nations to fund a network of colleges across the fledgling United States.

By the early 20th century, grants issued under the Morrill Act had produced the modern equivalent of a half a billion dollars for land-grant institutions from the redistribution of nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous lands. While most land-grant universities ignore this colonial legacy, UArizona’s Native scholars program appeared to be an effort to exorcise it.

But the Morrill Act is only one piece of legislation that connects land expropriated from Indigenous communities to these universities.

In combination with other land-grant laws, UArizona still retains rights to nearly 689,000 acres of land — an area more than twice the size of Los Angeles. The university also has rights to another 705,000 subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other resources underground.* Known as trust lands, these expropriated Indigenous territories are held and managed by the state for the school’s continued benefit.

State trust lands just might be one of the best-kept public secrets in America: They exist in 21 Western and Midwestern states, totaling more than 500 million surface and subsurface acres. Those two categories, surface and subsurface, have to be kept separate because they don’t always overlap. What few have bothered to ask is just how many of those acres are funding higher education.

The parcels themselves are scattered and rural, typically uninhabited and seldom marked. Most appear undeveloped and blend in seamlessly with surrounding landscapes. That is, when they don’t have something like logging underway or a frack pad in sight.

In 2022, the year Sierra enrolled, UArizona’s state trust lands provided the institution $7.7 million — enough to have paid the full cost of attendance for more than half of every Native undergraduate at the Tucson campus that same year. But providing free attendance to anyone is an unlikely scenario, as the school works to rein in a budget shortfall of nearly $240 million.

UArizona’s reliance on state trust land for revenue not only contradicts its commitment to recognize past injustices regarding stolen Indigenous lands, but also threatens its climate commitments. The school has pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2040.

The parcels are managed by the Arizona State Land Department, a separate government agency that has leased portions of them to agriculture, grazing, and commercial activities. But extractive industries make up a major portion of the trust land portfolio. Of the 705,000 subsurface acres that benefit UArizona, almost 645,000 are earmarked for oil and gas production. The lands were taken from at least 10 Indigenous nations, almost all of which were seized by executive order or congressional action in the wake of warfare.

Over the past year, Grist has examined publicly available data to locate trust lands associated with land-grant universities seeded by the Morrill Act. We found 14 universities that matched this criteria. In the process, we identified their original sources and analyzed their ongoing uses. In all, we located and mapped more than 8.3 million surface and subsurface acres taken from 123 Indigenous nations.* This land currently produces income for those institutions.

“Universities continue to benefit from colonization,” said Sharon Stein, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of British Columbia and a climate researcher. “It’s not just a historical fact; the actual income of the institution is subsidized by this ongoing dispossession.”

The amount of acreage under management for land-grant universities varies widely, from as little as 15,000 acres aboveground in North Dakota to more than 2.1 million belowground in Texas. Combined, Indigenous nations were paid approximately $4.7 million in today’s dollars for these lands, but in many cases, nothing was paid at all.* In 2022 alone, these trust lands generated more than $2.2 billion for their schools. Between 2018 and 2022, the lands produced almost $6.7 billion. However, those figures are likely an undercount as multiple state agencies did not return requests to confirm amounts.

This work builds upon previous investigations that examined how land grabs capitalized and transformed the U.S. university system. The new data reveals how state trust lands continue to transfer wealth from Indigenous nations to land-grant universities more than a century after the original Morrill Act.

It also provides insight into the relationship between colonialism, higher education, and climate change in the Western United States.

Nearly 25 percent of land-grant university trust lands are designated for either fossil fuel production or the mining of minerals, like coal and iron-rich taconite. Grazing is permitted on about a third of the land, or approximately 2.8 million surface acres. Those parcels are often coupled with subsurface rights, which means oil and gas extraction can occur underneath cattle operations, themselves often a major source of methane emissions. Timber, agriculture, and infrastructure leases — for roads or pipelines, for instance — make up much of the remaining acreage.

By contrast, renewable energy production is permitted on roughly one-quarter of 1 percent of the land in our dataset. Conservation covers an even more meager 0.15 percent.

However, those land use statistics are likely undercounts due to the different ways states record activities. Many state agencies we contacted for this story had incomplete public information on how land was used.

“People generally are not eager to confront their own complicity in colonialism and climate change,” said Stein. “But we also have to recognize, for instance, myself as a white settler, that we are part of that system, that we are benefiting from that system, that we are actively reproducing that system every day.”

Students like Alina Sierra struggle to pay for education at a university built on her peoples’ lands and supported with their natural resources. But both current and future generations will have to live with the way trust lands are used to subsidize land-grant universities.

In December 2023, Sierra decided the cost to attend UArizona was too high and dropped out.

UArizona did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Acreage now held in trust by states for land-grant universities is part of America’s sweeping history of real estate creation, a history rooted in Indigenous dispossession.

Trust lands in most states were clipped from the more than 1.8 billion acres that were once part of the United States’ public domain — territory claimed, colonized, and redistributed in a process that began in the 18th century and continues today.

The making of the public domain is the stuff of textbook lessons on U.S. expansion. After consolidating states’ western land claims in the aftermath of the American Revolution, federal officials obtained a series of massive territorial acquisitions from rival imperial powers. No doubt you’ve heard of a few of these deals: They ranged from the  Louisiana Purchase of 1803 to the Alaska Purchase of 1867.

Backed by the doctrine of discovery, a legal principle with religious roots that justified the seizure of lands around the world by Europeans, U.S. claims to Indigenous territories were initially little more than projections of jurisdiction. They asserted an exclusive right to steal from Indigenous nations, divide the territory into new states, and carve it up into private property. Although Pope Francis repudiated the Catholic Church’s association with the doctrine in 2023, it remains a bedrock principle of U.S. law.

Starting in the 1780s, federal authorities began aggressively taking Native land before surveying and selling parcels to new owners. Treaties were the preferred instrument, accompanied by a range of executive orders and congressional acts. Behind their tidy legal language and token payments lay actual or threatened violence, or the use of debts or dire conditions, such as starvation, to coerce signatures from Indigenous peoples and compel relocation.

By the 1930s, tribal landholdings in the form of reservations covered less than 2 percent of the United States. Most were located in places with few natural resources and more sensitive to climate change than their original homelands. When reservations proved more valuable than expected, due to the discovery of oil, for instance, outcomes could be even worse, as viewers of Killers of the Flower Moon learned last year.  

The public domain once covered three-fourths of what is today the United States. Federal authorities still retain about 30 percent of this reservoir of plundered land, most conspicuously as national parks, but also as military bases, national forests, grazing land, and more. The rest, nearly 1.3 billion acres, has been redistributed to new owners through myriad laws.

When it came to redistribution, grants of various stripes were more common than land sales. Individuals and corporate grantees — think homesteaders or railroads — were prominent recipients, but in terms of sheer acreage given, they trailed a third group: state governments.

Federal-to-state grants were immense. Cram them all together and they would comfortably cover all of Western Europe. Despite their size and ongoing financial significance, they have never attracted much attention outside of state offices and agencies responsible for managing them.

The Morrill Act, one of the best known examples of federal-to-state grants, followed a well-established path for funding state institutions. This involved handing Indigenous land to state legislatures so agencies could then manage those lands on behalf of specifically chosen beneficiaries. 

Many other laws subsidized higher education by issuing grants to state or territorial governments in a similar way. The biggest of those bounties came through so-called “enabling acts” that authorized U.S. territories to graduate to statehood.

Every new state carved out of the public domain in the contiguous United States received land grants for public institutions through their enabling acts. These grants functioned like dowries for joining the Union and funded a variety of public works and state services ranging from penitentiaries to fish hatcheries. Their main function, however, was subsidizing education.

Primary and secondary schools, or K-12 schools, were the greatest beneficiaries by far, followed by institutions of higher education. What remains of them today are referred to as trust lands. “A perpetual, multigenerational land trust for the support of the Beneficiaries and future generations” is how the Arizona State Land Department describes them.

Higher education grants were earmarked for universities, teachers colleges, mining schools, scientific schools, and agricultural colleges, the latter being the means through which states that joined the Union after 1862 got their Morrill Act shares. States could separate or consolidate their benefits as they saw fit, which resulted in many grants becoming attached to Morrill Act colleges. 

Originally, the land was intended to be sold to raise capital for trust funds. By the late 19th century, however, stricter requirements on sales and a more conscientious pursuit of long-term gains reduced sales in favor of short-term leasing.

The change in management strategy paid off. Many state land trusts have been operating for more than a century. In that time, they have generated rents from agriculture, grazing, and recreation. As soon as they were able, managers moved into natural resource extraction, permitting oil wells, logging, mining, and fracking.

Land use decisions are typically made by state land agencies or lawmakers. Of the six land-grant institutions that responded to requests for comment on this investigation, those that referenced their trust lands deferred to state agencies, making clear that they had no control over permitted activities.

State agencies likewise receive and distribute the income. As money comes in, it is either delivered directly to beneficiaries or, more commonly, diverted to permanent state trust funds, which invest the proceeds and make scheduled payouts to support select public services and institutions.

These trusts have a fiduciary obligation to generate profit for institutions, not minimize environmental damage. Although some of the permitted activities are renewable and low-impact, others are quietly stripping the land. All of them fill public coffers with proceeds derived from ill-gotten resources.

For a $10 fee last December, anyone in New Mexico could chop down a Christmas tree in a pine stand on a patch of state trust land just off Highway 120 near Black Lake, southeast of Taos. The rules: Pay your fee, bring your permit, choose a tree, and leave nothing behind but a stump less than 6 inches high.

“The holidays are a time we should be enjoying our loved ones, not worrying about the cost of providing a memorable experience for our kids,” said Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard, adding that “the nominal fee it costs for a permit will directly benefit New Mexico public schools, so it supports a good cause too.” The offer has been popular enough to keep the program running for several years.

The New Mexico State Land Office, sometimes described by state legislators as “the most powerful office you’ve never heard of,” has been a successful operation for a very long time. Since it started reporting revenue in 1900, it’s generated well over $42 billion in 2023 dollars.

All that money isn’t from Christmas trees.

For generations, oil and gas royalties have fueled the state’s trust land revenue, with a portion of the funds designated for New Mexico State University, or NMSU, a land-grant school founded in 1888 when New Mexico was still a territory.

The oil comes from drilling in the northwestern fringe of the Permian Basin, one of the oldest targets of large-scale oil production in the United States. Corporate descendants of Standard Oil, the infamous monopoly controlled by John D. Rockefeller, were operating in the Permian as early as the 1920s. Despite being a consistent source of oil, prospects for exploitation dimmed by the late 20th century, before surging again in the 21st. Today, it’s more profitable than ever.

In recent decades, more sophisticated exploration techniques have revealed more “recoverable” fossil fuel in the Permian than previously believed. A 2018 report by the United States Geological Survey pegged the volume at 46.3 billion barrels of oil and 281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, which made the Permian the largest oil and gas deposit in the nation. Analysts, shocked at the sheer volume, and the money to be made, have taken to crowning the Permian the “King of Shale Oil.” Critics concerned with the climate impact of the expanding operations call it a “carbon bomb.”

As oil and gas extraction spiked, so did New Mexico’s trust land receipts. In the last 20 years, oil and gas has generated between 91 and 97 percent of annual trust land revenue. It broke annual all-time highs in half of those years, topping $1 billion for the first time in 2019 and reaching $2.75 billion last year. Adjusted for inflation, more than 20 percent of New Mexico’s trust land income since 1900 has arrived in just the last five years.

“Every dollar earned by the Land Office,” Commissioner Richard said when revenues broke the billion-dollar barrier, “is a dollar taxpayers do not have to pay to support public institutions.”

Trust land as a cost-free source of subsidies for citizens is a common framing. In 2023, Richard declared that her office had saved every New Mexico taxpayer $1,500 that year. The press release did not mention oil or gas, or Apache bands in the state.

Virtually all of the trust land in New Mexico, including 186,000 surface acres and 253,000 subsurface acres now benefiting NMSU, was seized from various Apache bands during the so-called Apache Wars. Often reduced to the iconic photograph of Geronimo on one knee, rifle in hand, hostilities began in 1849, and they remain the longest-running military conflict in U.S. history, continuing until 1924.

In 2019, newly elected New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham began aligning state policy with “scientific consensus around climate change.” According to the state’s climate action website, New Mexico is working to tackle climate change by transitioning to clean electricity, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, supporting an economic transition from coal to clean energy, and shoring up natural resource resilience.

“New Mexico is serious about climate change — and we have to be. We are already seeing drier weather and rising temperatures,” the governor wrote on the state’s website. “This administration is committed not only to preventing global warming, but also preparing for its effects today and into the future.”

No mention was made of increasingly profitable oil and gas extraction on trust lands or their production in the Permian. In 2023, just one 240-acre parcel of land benefiting NMSU was leased for five years for $6 million.

NMSU did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

More than half of the acreage uncovered in our investigation appears in oil-rich West Texas, the equivalent of more than 3 million football fields. It benefits Texas A&M.

Take the long drive west along I-10 between San Antonio and El Paso, in the southwest region of the Permian Basin, and you’ll pass straight through several of those densely packed parcels without ever knowing it — they’re hidden in plain sight on the arid landscape. These tracts, and others not far from the highway, were Mescalero Apache territory. Kiowas and Comanches relinquished more parcels farther north.

In the years after the Civil War, a “peace commission” pressured Comanche and Kiowa leaders for an agreement that would secure land for tribes in northern Texas and Oklahoma. Within two years, federal agents dramatically reduced the size of the resulting reservation with another treaty, triggering a decade of conflict.

The consequences were disastrous. Kiowas and Comanches lost their land to Texas and their populations collapsed. Between the 1850s and 1890s, Kiowas lost more than 60 percent of their people to disease and war, while Comanches lost nearly 90 percent.

If this general pattern of colonization and genocide was a common one, the trajectory that resulted in Texas A&M’s enormous state land trust was not.

Texas was never part of the U.S. public domain. Its brief stint as an independent nation enabled it to enter the Union as a state, skipping territorial status completely. As a result, like the original 13 states, it claimed rights to sell or otherwise distribute all the not-yet-privatized land within its borders.

Following the broader national model, but ratcheting up the scale, Texas would allocate over 2 million acres to subsidize higher education.

Texas A&M was established to take advantage of a Morrill Act allocation of 180,000 acres, and opened its doors in 1876. The same year, Texas allocated a million acres of trust lands, followed by another million in 1883, nearly all of it on land relinquished in treaties from the mid-1860s.

Today, the Permanent University Fund derived from that land is worth nearly $34 billion. That’s thanks to oil, of course, which has been flowing from the university’s trust lands since 1923. In 2022 alone, Texas trust lands produced $2.2 billion in revenue.

The Kiowa and Comanche were ultimately paid about 2 cents per acre for their land. The Mescalero Apache received nothing.

Texas A&M did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

For more than a century, logging has been the main driver of Washington State University’s trust land income, on land taken from 21 Indigenous nations, especially the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. About 86,000 acres, more than half of the surface trust lands allocated to Washington State University, or WSU, are located inside Yakama land cessions, which started in 1855. Between 2018 and 2022, trust lands produced nearly $78.5 million in revenue almost entirely from timber.

But it isn’t a straight line to the university’s bank account.

“The university does not receive the proceeds from timber sales directly,” said Phil Weiler, a spokesperson for WSU. “Lands held in trust for the university are managed by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, not WSU.”

In 2022, WSU’s trust lands produced about $19.5 million in revenue, which was deposited into a fund managed by the State Investment Board. In other words, the state takes on the management responsibility of turning timber into investments, while WSU reaps the rewards by drawing income from the resulting trust funds.

“The Washington legislature decides how much of the investment earnings will be paid out to Washington State University each biennium,” said Weiler. “By law, those payouts can only be used to fund capital projects and debt service.”

This arrangement yielded nearly $97 million dollars for WSU from its two main trust funds between 2018 and 2022, and has generally been on the rise since the Great Recession. In recent decades, the money has gone to construction and maintenance of the institution’s infrastructure, like its Biomedical and Health Sciences building, and the PACCAR Clean Technology Building — a research center focused on innovating wood products and sustainable design.

That revenue may look small in comparison to WSU’s $1.2 billion dollar endowment, but it has added up over time. From statehood in 1889 to 2022, timber sales on trust lands provided Washington State University with roughly $1 billion in revenue when Grist adjusted for inflation. But those figures are likely higher: Between 1971 and 1983, the State of Washington did not produce detailed records on trust land revenue as a cost-cutting measure.

Meanwhile, WSU students have demanded that the university divest from fossil fuel companies held in the endowment. But even if the board of regents agreed, any changes would likely not apply to the school’s state-controlled trust fund, which currently contains shares in ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and at least two dozen other corporations in the oil and gas sector.

“Washington State University (WSU) is aware that our campuses are located on the homelands of Native peoples and that the institution receives financial benefit from trust lands,” said Weiler.

In states with trust lands, a reasonably comfortable buffer exists between beneficiaries, legislators, land managers, and investment boards, but that hasn’t always been the case. In Minnesota’s early days, state leaders founded the University of Minnesota while also making policy that would benefit the school, binding the state’s history of genocide with the institution.

Those actions still impact Indigenous peoples in the state today while providing steady revenue streams to the University.

Henry Sibley began to amass his fortune around 1834 after only a few years in the fur trade in the territory of what would become Minnesota, rising to the role of regional manager of the American Fur Company at just 23. But even then, the industry was on the decline — wild game had been over-hunted and competition was fierce. Sibley responded by diversifying his activities. He moved into timber, making exclusive agreements with the Ojibwe to log along the Snake and Upper St. Croix rivers.

His years in “wild Indian country” were paying off: Sibley knew the land, waterways, and resources of the Great Lakes region, and he knew the people, even marrying Tahshinaohindaway, also known as Red Blanket Woman, in 1840 — a Mdewakanton Dakota woman from Black Dog Village in what is now southern Minneapolis.

Sibley was a major figure in a number of treaty negotiations, aiding the U.S. in its western expansion, opening what is now Minnesota to settlement by removing tribes. In 1848, he became the first congressional delegate for the Wisconsin Territory, which covered much of present-day Minnesota, and eventually, Minnesota’s first governor.

But he was also a founding regent of the University of Minnesota — using his personal, political, and industry knowledge of the region to choose federal, state, and private lands for the university. Sibley and other regents used the institution as a shel corporation to speculate and move money between companies they held shares in.

In 1851, Sibley helped introduce land-grant legislation for the purpose of a territorial university, and just three days after Congress passed the bill, Minnesota’s territorial leaders established the University of Minnesota. With an eye on statehood, leaders knew more land would be granted for higher education, but first the land had to be made available.

That same year, with the help of then-territorial governor and fellow university regent Alexander Ramsey, the Dakota signed the Treaty of Traverse De Sioux, a land cession that created almost half of the state of Minnesota, and, taken with other cessions, would later net the University nearly 187,000 acres of land — an area roughly the size of Tucson.

Among the many clauses in the treaty was payment: $1.4 million would be given to the Dakota, but only after expenses. Ramsey deducted $35,000 for a handling fee, about $1.4 million in today’s dollars. After agencies and politicians had taken their cuts, the Dakota were promised only $350,000, but ultimately, only a few thousand arrived after federal agents delayed and withheld payments or substituted them for supplies that were never delivered.

The betrayal led to the Dakota War of 1862. “The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state,” said Governor Ramsey. Sibley joined in the slaughter, leading an army of volunteers dedicated to the genocide of the Dakota people. At the end of the conflict, Ramsey ordered the mass execution of more than 300 Dakota men in December of 1862 — a number later reduced by then-president Abraham Lincoln to 39, and still the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

That grisly punctuation mark at the end of the war meant a windfall for the University of Minnesota, with new lands being opened through the state’s enabling act and another federal grant that had just been passed: the Morrill Act. Within weeks of the mass execution, the university was reaping benefits thanks to the political, and military, power of Sibley and the board of regents.

Between 2018 and 2022, those lands produced more than $17 million in revenue, primarily through leases for the mining of iron and taconite, a low-grade iron ore used by the steel industry. But like other states that rely on investment funds and trusts to generate additional income, those royalties are only the first step in the institution’s financial investments.

Today, Sibley, Ramsey, and other regents are still honored. Their names adorn parks, counties, and streets, their homes memorialized for future generations. While there have been efforts to remove their names from schools and parks, Minnesota, its institutions, and many of its citizens continue to benefit from their actions.

The iron and taconite mines that owe their success to the work of these men have left lasting visual blight, water contamination from historic mine tailings, and elevated rates of mesothelioma among taconite workers in Minnesota. The 1863 federal law that authorized the removal of Indigenous peoples from the region is still on the books today and has never been overturned.

Less than half of the universities featured in this story responded to requests for comment, and the National Association of State Trust Lands, the nonprofit consortium that represents trust land agencies and administrators, declined to comment. Those that did, however, highlighted the steps they were making to engage with Indigenous students and communities.

Still, investments in Indigenous communities are slow coming. Of the universities that responded to our requests, those that directly referenced how trust lands were used maintained they had no control over how they profited from the land.

And they’re correct, to some degree: States managing assets for land-grants have fiduciary, and legal, obligations to act in the institution’s best interests.

But that could give land-grant universities a right to ask why maximizing returns doesn’t factor in the value of righting past wrongs or the costs of climate change.

“We can know very well that these things are happening and that we’re part of the problem, but our desire for continuity and certainty and security override that knowledge,” said Sharon Stein of the University of British Columbia.

That knowledge, Stein added, is easily eclipsed by investments in colonialism that obscure university complicity and dismiss that change is possible.

Though it’s a complicated and arduous process changing laws and working with state agencies, universities regularly do it. In 2022, the 14 land-grant universities profiled in this story spent a combined $4.6 million on lobbying on issues ranging from agriculture to defense. All lobbied to influence the federal budget and appropriations.

But even if those high-level actions are taken, it’s not clear how it will make a difference to people like Alina Sierra in Tucson, who faces a rocky financial future after her departure from the University of Arizona.

In 2022, a national study on college affordability found that nearly 40 percent of Native students accrued more than $10,000 in college debt, with some accumulating more than $100,000 in loans. Sierra is still in debt to UArizona for more than $6,000.

“I think that being on O’odham land, they should give back, because it’s stolen land,” said Sierra. “They should put more into helping us.”

In January, Sierra enrolled as a full-time student at Tohono O’odham Community College in Sells, Arizona — a tribal university on her homelands. The full cost of attendance, from tuition to fees to books, is free.

The college receives no benefits from state trust lands.

Editor’s note: April 17, 2024: This story has been updated to include new information on trust lands in Montana that came in after publication.

This project was supported by the Pulitzer Center, the Data-Driven Reporting Project, and the Bay & Paul Foundation.

This story was reported and written by Tristan Ahtone, Robert Lee, Amanda Tachine, An Garagiola, and Audrianna Goodwin. Data reporting was done by Maria Parazo Rose and Clayton Aldern, with additional data analysis and visualization by Marcelle Bonterre and Parker Ziegler. Margaret Pearce provided guidance and oversight.

Original photography for this project was done by Eliseu Cavalcante and Bean Yazzie. Parker Ziegler handled design and development. Teresa Chin supervised art direction. Marty Two Bulls Jr. and Mia Torres provided illustration. Megan Merrigan, Justin Ray, and Mignon Khargie handled promotion. Rachel Glickhouse coordinated partnerships.

This project was edited by Katherine Lanpher and Katherine Bagley. Jaime Buerger handled copy editing. Angely Mercado did fact-checking, and Annie Fu fact-checked the project’s data.

Special thanks to Teresa Miguel-Stearns, Jon Parmenter, Susan Shain, and Tushar Khurana for their additional research contributions. We would also like to thank the many state officials who helped to ensure we acquired the most recent and accurate information for this story. This story was made possible in part by the Pulitzer Center, the Data-Driven Reporting Project, and the Bay & Paul Foundation.

The Misplaced Trust team acknowledges the Tohono O’odham, Pascua Yaqui, dxʷdəwʔabš, Suquamish, Muckleshoot, puyaləpabš, Tulalip, Muwekma Ohlone, Lisjan, Tongva, Kizh, Dakota, Bodwéwadmi, Quinnipiac, Monongahela, Shawnee, Lenape, Erie, Osage, Akimel O’odham, Piipaash, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Diné, Kanienʼkehá:ka, Muh-he-con-ne-ok, Pαnawάhpskewi, and Mvskoke peoples, on whose homelands this story was created.

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MIAMI — Shiva Rajbhandari doesn’t want you to think there’s anything impressive about the fact that he ran for a school board seat at age 17.

He doesn’t want you to consider it remotely awe-worthy that he campaigned on a platform to turn his Idaho district into a leader on climate change, or that he won, against an incumbent, in the highest-turnout school board election in Boise history.  

What’s impressive, he says, are his Boise public school teachers, who educated him on climate change beginning in seventh grade, not because of any state science guidance but because they recognized its importance. They also “told me every single day that your voice is powerful, that you can make a difference,” he said. 

“This is something that should be accessible to every student,” Rajbhandari, now 19, told an audience at the Aspen Institute’s annual climate event earlier this month. But “not every student has that.”

Rajbhandari, like many of those I spoke with at the Miami event, sees education as fundamental to reducing the harms of a warming planet. By giving young people the skills and resilience to fight climate change, and by harnessing school systems – often among the largest employers and landowners in communities – to reduce their carbon footprint, education can unleash positive changes for a less-apocalyptic future.

“We must recognize that education is the climate solution,” said Rajbhandari, who spoke on a panel organized by This is Planet Ed, an Aspen project that has pushed to get education on the climate agenda and vice versa.

Here are some of my takeaways from the conference, both in terms of how climate change is affecting students and learning, at all education levels, and how education systems can tackle the problem.

Early education:

• Danger lurks for the youngest kids: Kids ages zero to 8 are especially vulnerable to climate change and its harms, such as heat waves; it’s also when kids’ brains are developing most rapidly and laying the foundation for climate resilience is especially critical, said Michelle Kang, chief executive officer for the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
• No need to wait until kindergarten: Kids can be introduced to activities like composting and recycling,and values around a healthy planet, at very early ages, Kang said.
• It’s about access, too: Kang mentioned visiting a child care program in Texas that had lost its shade structure in a storm and no longer had a way to take kids outside safely in the heat of the day.

K-12:

• Money, money, money: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal and the Inflation Reduction Act contain hefty financial incentives and support for schools to reduce their carbon footprint through solar rooftops, electric buses and building efficiencies. Many don’t know of those opportunities, speakers said. 
• Confront the topic differently so it’s not just “the polar bears are dying, the seas are warming and the coral reefs are bleaching, and people in sub-Saharan Africa may not in 50 years have enough to eat,” Rajhbandari said. The issue is urgent, immediate and personal, he noted, but students also need to know they can have a positive impact: “The key there is talking about solutions and talking about agency.” 
• Silence won’t help: Laura Schifter, an Aspen senior fellow who leads This is Planet Ed, recalled hearing from a student who’d become alarmed by a U.N. report about climate change and was shocked that no adults in her school were talking about it. “She started to think, am I the crazy one, that I’m so worried and no one else is worried?” Schifter said. 
• A perfect storm: Climate threats are sharpening the focus on other threats to public schools, like expanded school choice and vouchers. Luisa Santos, a Miami Dade school board member, noted public schools in the city serve as hurricane shelters. School privatization could complicate that role if fewer school buildings are district run and are instead led by many different private operators, she noted.

Higher education:

• New world, new needs: Climate change is starting to reshape the workforce, with new opportunities in renewable energy, sustainability and other sectors, speakers said. Higher ed needs to identify these new needs and help prepare students to fill them, said Madeline Pumariega, president of Miami Dade College.
• For example: She noted that her college started a program for automotive technicians focused on electric vehicles: “We can have the workforce so we don’t find ourselves saying, well sorry, we were trying to do this but we didn’t have the workforce to be able to.”
• Changing existing programs: Colleges are increasingly infusing climate studies into an array of fields – culinary students need to learn about reducing food waste, while future nurses need to know about mitigating the health effects of climate change, speakers said.
• Change begins on campus: There’s also a push to incorporate campus sustainability efforts into coursework. At University of Washington at Bothell, for example, students in several majors worked to restore campus wetlands. At Weber State University, in Ogden, Utah, students in engineering and other fields helped make buildings more efficient. And SUNY Binghamton offers a class called “Planning the Sustainable University” in which students have developed dorm composting, improved furniture reuse rates, and more. 

It’s sobering to contemplate climate change, especially from Miami, where sea level rise threatens to swamp much of the city in the coming decades. But I was reminded of messaging I heard at last year’s Aspen conference, from Yale University senior research scientist Anthony Leiserowitz: “Scientists agree, it’s real, it’s us, it’s bad, but there’s hope.”

Important sources of that hope are students, educators and school systems.      

This story about climate change solutions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletters.

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Yancy Sanes teaches a unit on the climate crisis at Fannie Lou Hamer High School in the Bronx – not climate change, but the climatecrisis. He is unequivocal that he wants his high school students to be climate activists.

“I teach from a mindset and lens that I want to make sure my students are becoming activists, and it’s not enough just talking about it,” the science and math teacher said. “I need to take my students outside and have them actually do the work of protesting.”

The school partners with local environmental justice organizations to advocate for a greener Bronx. Sanes recently took some students to a rally that called for shutting down the jail on Rikers Island and replacing it with a solar energy farm, wastewater treatment plant and battery storage facility.

Sanes gets a lot of support for this approach from his administration. Social justice is a core value of Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, and the school also belongs to a special assessment consortium, giving it more freedom in what is taught than a typical New York City public high school.

For Sanes, who grew up in the neighborhood and graduated from Fannie Lou Hamer himself, getting his students involved in activism is a key way to give them agency and protect their mental health as they learn what’s happening to the planet. “This is a topic that is very depressing. I don’t want to just end this unit with ‘things are really bad,’ but ‘what can we do, how are we fighting back’.” Indeed, climate anxiety is widespread among young people, and collective action has been identified as one way to ameliorate it.

Related: Teaching ‘action civics’ engages kids – and ignites controversy

Sanes is at the far end of the teaching spectrum when it comes to promoting climate activism, not to mention discussing controversial issues of any kind in his classroom. Conservative activists have already begun branding even basic instruction about climate change as “left-wing indoctrination.” The think tank Rand recently reported in its 2023 State of the American Teacher survey that two-thirds of teachers nationally said they were limiting discussions about political and social issues in class. The authors of the report observed that there seemed to be a spillover effect from states that have passed new laws restricting topics like race and gender, to states where no such laws are on the books. 

The current level of political polarization is having a chilling effect, making civics education into a third rail, according to Holly Korbey, an education reporter and the author of a 2019 book on civics education, “Building Better Citizens: A New Civics Education for All.” “We are living in this time where there’s increased scrutiny on what schools are telling kids,” she said.

She said that, as a mom living in deep-red Tennessee, she wouldn’t be happy to have a teacher bringing her kids to protests. “I really don’t want schools to tell my kids to be activists. I think about how I personally feel about issues and flip that around.  Would I be okay with teachers doing that? And the answer is no.”

Even Sanes has a line he won’t cross. He taught his students about Greta Thunberg and her school strikes, but he stopped short of encouraging his students to do the same. “I specifically cannot tell students, you gotta walk out of school,” he said. “That goes against my union.”

And yet, there is a broad bipartisan consensus that schools have an obligation to prepare citizens to participate in a democracy. And, emerging best practices in civics education include something called “action civics,” in which teachers in civics and government classes guide kids to take action locally on issues they choose. Nonprofits like Generation Citizen and the Mikva Challenge, Korbey said, cite internal research that these kinds of activist-ish activities improve knowledge, civic skills, and motivation to remain involved in politics or their local community. Others have argued that without a robust understanding of the workings of government, “action civics” provides a “sugar rush” without enough substance.

Related: The climate change lesson plans teachers need and don’t have

Even at the college level, it’s rare for students to study climate activism in particular, or political activism more generally. And this leads to a broader lack of knowledge about how power works in society, say some experts.

“Having visited many, many departments in many schools over the years, I’m shocked at how few places, particularly policy schools, teach social movements,” said sociologist Dana Fisher. Fisher is currently teaching a graduate course called “Global Environmental Politics: Activism and the Environment,” and she also has a new book out about climate activism,“Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.”She’s taught about social movements for two decades at American University in Washington, D.C., and the University of Maryland-College Park.

“It’s crazy to me that, given that the civil society sector is such a huge part of democracy, there would not be a focus on that,” she added.

Through empirical research, Fisher’s work counters stereotypes and misconceptions about climate activism. For example, she’s found that disruptive forms of protest like blocking a road or throwing soup on a masterpiece are effective even when they’re unpopular. ”It doesn’t draw support for the disruption. It draws support for more moderate parts of the movement,” she said. “And so it helps to expand the base.”

As an illustration of the ignorance about disruptive action and civil disobedience in particular, Fisher noted K-12 students rarely hear about the topic unless studying the 1960s era, and “a very sanitized version. They don’t remember that the Civil Rights Movement was really unpopular and had a very active radical flank that was doing sit-ins and marches.”

In 12 years of public school in Shreveport, Louisiana, for example, Jada Walden learned very little about activism, including environmental activism. She learned a bit in school about the Civil Rights Movement, although most of what she remembers about it are “the things your grandmother teaches you.”

Related: How do we teach Black history in polarized times?

Walden didn’t hear much about climate change either until she got to Southern University and A&M College, in Baton Rouge. “When I got to college, there’s activism everywhere for all types of stuff,” she said.

She’d enrolled with the intention of becoming a veterinarian. “When I first got there. I just wanted to hit my books, get my degree,” she recalled. “But my advisors, they pushed for so much more.” She became passionate about climate justice and the human impact on the environment, and ended up majoring in urban forestry. She was a student member of This Is Planet Ed’s Higher Education Climate Action Task Force (where, full disclosure, I’m an advisor.) 

If it were up to her, Walden would require all college students to study the climate crisis, and do independent research to learn how it will affect them personally. “Make it personal for them. Help them connect. It will make a world of difference.”

Korbey, the “Building Better Citizens” author, would agree with that approach. “Schools exist to give students knowledge, not to create activists,” she said. “The thing we’re doing very poorly is give kids the knowledge they need to become good citizens.”

This column about teaching climate activism was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Samantha, 11, asks her seventh grade teacher’s permission to leave the classroom each time the subject of climate change comes up.

Samantha, from a small town in Massachusetts, sees stories about climate change on social media and in the news. She has asked her family about it, and while not wanting to scare her, they acknowledge the disastrous impact that climate change is increasingly having on our planet, including the connection between Earth’s rising temperatures and the increase in extreme storms and wildfires.

It is because Samantha knows all of this that the mere mention of climate change triggers her anxiety. Samantha’s parents are at a loss about how to help her. Unfortunately, a growing number of children and their parents are grappling with similar emotions.

Mental health clinicians and researchers have begun to notice and document what they call climate anxiety or eco-anxiety, which is defined as chronic stress caused by concern over the effects of climate change. According to an international group of researchers, specific symptoms of this phenomenon among children and young adults include intense feelings of sadness, anger, powerlessness, helplessness and guilt — all of which can fuel more general and severe anxiety or depression. Therefore, while combatting climate change itself, we must also address the anxiety that it is causing.

Another study confirms the finding that depression, general and severe anxiety and “extreme emotions such as sadness, anger and fear” are all mental health outcomes associated with eco-anxiety. These mental health challenges are not pathological, but considered to be normal human responses to a rapidly changing world.

Related: How the effects of climate change threaten student mental health

Meanwhile, they can contribute to inaction: A national survey found that nearly 50 percent of Americans age 18 and over are fatalistic when it comes to climate change, believing that individual actions make no difference in changing its course. Yet actions are, of course, vital.

Is the solution to climate change to hide its harms from children to protect their mental health? Of course not. Climate change is a real threat, one that needs immediate solutions involving people across the globe working together. In fact, the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change cites climate education as a key component of the global campaign to address this issue.

One solution is to teach about climate change by focusing on strategies to address its consequences. The goal of climate education should not only be to teach students the scientific basis of climate change but also to empower them to address it — not thrust them into a state of despair.

To this end, we need a climate education framework that provides facts about the problem, describes mitigation and adaptation strategies and fosters the resilience youth need to navigate their changing world and act. Below, we sketch out what this framework looks like.

Solution-focused instructional design

The framework’s academic content must include science classes that encourage students to explore the science of climate restoration and environmental protection — not just the impact of climate change. It must also include civics lessons about the role students can play, now and in the future, in influencing government policy related to climate adaptation and mitigation. Project-based learning, citizen science learning — such as NASA’s GLOBE program — and service-learning are positive, solution-oriented approaches that can be drawn on to inspire youth and prepare them to be tomorrow’s environmental stewards.

Deeply integrated social and emotional learning

But such academic content alone is not enough, even when focused on solutions. It is also essential to include social and emotional learning (SEL) in all aspects of climate change education.

SEL is a much-discussed, research-based approach to helping students build emotional intelligence, acquire emotional agility and foster meaningful relationships. These emotional skills are key to young people’s success in school and in a rapidly changing world and include nonacademic skills such as regulating emotions, perspective-taking and setting and achieving goals.

Some of SEL’s core social-emotional competencies can help students manage their climate change-related stress and prepare them to act. For example, SEL helps build capacity to manage emotions amid adversity; fosters social awareness skills, such as understanding group behaviors and influences; develops relationship skills, such as communicating effectively and collaborating with others; and nurtures self-management skills, such as channeling strong emotions into productive behaviors. Weaving SEL approaches into instruction could help bring a sense of agency to the many young people who are feeling anxiety and concern.

We need to develop this climate education framework today, and we need to roll out curricula quickly and widely. There is no time to waste.

Related: One state mandates climate change education in almost all subjects – even PE

Around the world, kids like Samantha are sitting in class, haunted by images of a disintegrating planet. We can and must provide them with a sense of purpose — a known driver of positive youth development and a protective factor against mental health struggles. We can and must prepare them to be capable climate restoration champions who know how to preserve both our planet and their own mental health.

Shai Fuxman is a behavioral health expert and senior research scientist at Education Development Center, where he leads initiatives promoting the positive development of youth.

Chelsey Goddard is an expert in prevention science and vice president at Education Development Center, where she leads the organization’s U.S.-based health, mental health and behavioral health work.

This op-ed about climate anxiety was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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“Mom, are there any more Earths?”

Angelique Hammack, a teacher in California, creates lesson plans about climate change for the website SubjectToClimate. She often starts from a question posed by one of her four children.

Her 7-year-old, who has autism, has been really interested in space lately. “He was asking me questions about the solar system and about black holes, and I started pulling out all these books I had on outer space,” she said. “He’s got a telescope for his birthday, he’s been looking at the moon.”

When he asked the question about whether there were more Earths, Hammack saw the opening to create a climate-related lesson that explains how Earth is a “Goldilocks planet,” with just-right conditions for life to thrive.

New York state is currently considering several climate education bills. If the proposed policies become law, the state will join California and New Jersey in mandating that climate topics be introduced across grade levels and subjects, not just confined to science class. A wide range of science and environmental groups such as the National Wildlife Federation and Earthday.org back this interdisciplinary approach to climate education.

But as the movement for teaching climate grows, thanks to new standards and increasing student curiosity, teachers are on the hunt for materials and lessons they can rely on. “I think there’s a big disconnect,” said Lauren Madden, professor of elementary science education at The College of New Jersey. “Teachers really need materials that they can use tomorrow.”

For the last few years, Madden has been researching the experiences of teachers who are tackling this topic. She shared some of her results with The Hechinger Report. SubjectToClimate, a large free repository of climate change lessons, also shared some data on its most popular lessons and materials.

Madden said that what teachers need most are clear strategies that allow them to plug climate lessons into existing curricula, so that climate can be interwoven with existing requirements, rather than wedged into an already-packed schedule. “Teachers want and need straightforward starting points in terms of instructional materials,” she said.

Yen-Yen Chiu, director of content creation for SubjectToClimate, agreed. In response to demand, she said, the organization is beginning to create teacher pacing guides, like a middle school math pacing guide that maps specific climate resources from their database to math standards.

Here’s an overview of more key findings from Madden, and from Hammack and Chiu at SubjectToClimate.

• Younger learners have big questions: At SubjectToClimate, the most-searched lessons are for grades K-5; and there is unmet demand for grades 3-5. Hammack said it can be tough to find materials that are simple enough for the youngest students. “I created a unit on energy — I intended it for K-2 but we ended up changing it to 3-4,” she said. “Energy is so abstract for a K-2nd audience.” 
• Energy, extreme weather and humanities: Energy is the most popular topic on SubjectToClimate. There’s also growing interest in lessons related to extreme weather, and lessons that relate to non-science subjects, such as writing and public speaking. One art lesson — on “Energy and Art” is among the top 10 most popular on the site.
• Facts and evidence: Madden finds teachers (especially new ones) want to gain familiarity with facts they might not have learned in a general education curriculum. They also need to be able to clearly and simply attribute scientific findings to specific data: i.e., how we know that atmospheric carbon is rising, or that storms are getting bigger. This presents a bigger challenge, requiring the development of scientific literacy, Madden said: “I think it’s important that we explain what counts as evidence.”
• Debate, but not doubt: In the United States, climate change is still a highly politicized topic. Teachers need help to present debates in an evolving field of research without losing sight of the overwhelming scientific consensus. This also includes lessons that directly combat misinformation or disinformation that students might bring in from outside the classroom. “Teachers want to know where scientific debate is appropriate. For example, wind vs. solar is a topic that can yield productive discussion, while whether climate change is exacerbated by human activity is not,” said Madden. The New York Times recently reported that a Republican state representative wants to amend standards in Connecticut in a way that would obscure that consensus in the name of open debate.  
• Climate brings up feelings: While a lot of introduction of climate topics is happening in response to new state standards, Madden said students are also bringing up the topic, for example, in response to extreme or unseasonable weather. And that’s making some teachers nervous. “Teachers worry that they are not knowledgeable enough about the science of climate change to answer students’ questions appropriately,” she said. “There is also concern about inciting dread and anxiety in children, especially at the lower grade levels.” Hammack said that she finds herself wondering how deep to go: “Some of the videos I’ve been watching are scaring me and I’m 44!” And Madden said those climate emotions are, if anything, stronger among kids in higher grades. “In my experience, it’s preteens and teenagers who have that sense of understanding the scope of these problems,” she said. “They are very concerned.”
• English Language Learners: There’s a gap in resources for these learners. Madden points out that in Spanish, “clima” is the word for both “weather” and “climate,” which can at times cause confusion. SubjectToClimate lists 93 resources suitable for Spanish speakers and/or Spanish classes.
• Focus on solutions: Related to concerns about climate anxiety, is a clear desire for lessons that deal with solutions. Among the SubjectToClimate top 10 most-trafficked lesson plans are two that deal with renewable energy, one about conservation, one about reducing, reusing and recycling, and one about green transportation. Underscoring the demand, This Is Planet Ed (where, full disclosure, I’m an advisor) and The Nature Conservancy are currently collaborating on an initiative to create more short-form content for children focused on hope and solutions.

“I have to say that the message that comes across loud and clear to me has been — telling the truth is really important, and focusing on areas for solutions and optimism,” said Madden. “There are really great things happening at the edges of what humans are capable of right now.”

This column about climate change lessons was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Pleasantville is a mostly Black and Hispanic community located between two major freeways, the I-10 and the 610, in Houston, Texas. This placement is no accident, said Bridgette Murray, a retired nurse and local community leader: “The highway plan in the 1950s was used to divide communities of color.” Today, an estimated 300,000 vehicles stream by on a daily basis, she said. The neighborhood is also close to the Houston Ship Channel, exposing it to heavy industrial pollution.

But state air monitoring stations aren’t placed to capture all the hazards concentrated in that small area. So Murray’s group, ACTS (Achieving Community Tasks Successfully), has been partnering for almost a decade with urban planning expert Robert Bullard at Texas Southern University, to do their own air quality monitoring. ACTS just won a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to expand the program.

Bullard has been called the father of the environmental justice movement. His 1990 book “Dumping in Dixie” documented the systemic placement of polluting facilities and waste disposal in communities of color, as well as those communities fighting back. He said scientists and communities need each other.

“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people,” he said. “We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”

“It’s a mutual respect,” Murray said of the relationship between her group and the Texas Southern researchers. “You have to have a partner that respects the ideas you are bringing to the table and also allows you to grow.”

Bullard is co-founder, with Beverly Wright, of the HBCU Climate Change Consortium, which brings together historically black universities and community-based organizations in what Wright has termed the “communiversity” model. There are partnerships like the one in Houston all over the South: Dillard and Xavier Universities, in New Orleans, working on wetlands restoration and equitable recovery from storms; Jackson State is working in Gulfport, Mississippi, on legacy pollution; and Florida A&M in Pensacola on the issue of landfills and borrow pits (holes dug to extract sand and clay that are then used as landfill).

Bullard said it’s no accident that so many HBCUs are involved in this work. “Black colleges and universities historically combined the idea of using education for advancement and liberation, with the struggle for civil rights.”

When these partnerships go smoothly, Bullard said, universities provide community-based organizations with access to data and help advocating for themselves; students and scholars get opportunities to do applied research with a clear social mission.

“We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”

Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University

A lot of growth is happening in environmental justice right now. ACTS’ $500,000 EPA grant is part of what the White House touts as “the most ambitious environmental justice agenda ever undertaken by the Federal Government.” Notably, President Biden’s Justice40 initiative decrees that 40 percent of all federal dollars allocated to climate change, clean energy, and related policy goals flow to communities like Pleasantville: marginalized, underserved, and systematically overburdened by pollution.

Expanding on this model, the EPA has allocated $177 million to 16 “Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers” — a mix of nonprofits and universities that will help groups like ACTS get federal grants to achieve their goals.

But, warned Bullard, all the new funding might cause a gold rush, raising the danger of attracting bad actors. Sometimes, he said, universities act like “grant-writing mills,” exploiting communities without sharing the benefits. “You parachute in, you mine the data, you leave and the community doesn’t know what hit them. That is not authentic partnership.”

Murray, at ACTS, has seen that kind of behavior herself. “A one-sided relationship where they came in to take information,” she recalled. “The paper was written, the accolades [for researchers] happen, and the community is just like it was, with no ability to address anything.”

“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people.”

Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University

It takes sensitivity and hard work to overcome what can be a long history of town-gown tensions between universities and local communities. “You have to earn trust,” said Bullard. “Trust is not given by a memorandum of understanding.” One way to break down barriers is to make sure that all participants — whether they have a GED or a PhD — share the air equitably at meetings between researchers and community leaders. And those meetings might be held in the evenings or on weekends, because community groups are often run by volunteers. 

Denae King, a PhD toxicologist, works with Bullard as an associate director at the Bullard Center. She said she’s always looking for a chance to give space to community partners like ACTS, and reduce or equalize any power dynamic.

“I just ended a meeting where someone was asking me to put together a proposal to showcase environmental justice at a conference,” she said. “Before I would be willing to do that, I want to make sure it’s OK to showcase community leaders in this space. I might split my time in half and we co-present. Or it may look like me helping the community leader to prepare their presentation. I might be in the room and say nothing, but my presence says, I’m here to support you.”

This column about the ‘communiversity’ was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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As part of a new program, every third grader in Albuquerque Public Schools spends a day at the Los Padillas Wildlife Sanctuary just outside the city. There, a wide variety of local landscapes are packed into five acres: a meadow, piñon, juniper and cottonwood trees, an arroyo and even a pond — a rarity in the desert.

“All the way into October they can fish in the pond with a net,” said Monie Corona, an environmental education resource teacher for the district. “There’s cattails, dragonflies. For the kids to feel like they’re playing, but they’re actually learning — that to me is the key thing.”

The sanctuary borders the black mesas to the west and to the east and the Rio Grande bosque — a term for a forest near a river bank. To the south is the Pueblo of Isleta, one of New Mexico’s many Native American communities: There are 19 different sovereign Pueblos, plus Apache and Navajo communities, across the state.

Research on the physical, psychological and academic benefits of outdoor learning for kids is well-established, and is now informing the development of climate education. What’s also becoming well-known is the essential role of traditional and Indigenous ecological knowledge in the effort to cope with the climate crisis. Authorities as disparate as UNESCO and the U.S. Forest Service, have underlined the value, not only of specific place-based and historical knowledge of flora and fauna, but of traditional ways of relating to and understanding humans’ place in the natural world as we seek to adapt to and mitigate climate change.

And, as recently noted in a review of the potential impact the education sector can have on U.S. cities’ climate plans by This Is Planet Ed (where, full disclosure, I’m a senior advisor), Albuquerque Public Schools is among those pioneering the attempt to connect outdoor learning with local and Indigenous knowledge.

During Los Padillas field trips, the children spend time with Indigenous educators like Jered Lee, whose ancestral roots are in the Naschitti Region of the Navajo reservation in the northwest corner of the state.

“What they learn in the classroom is very important, yes. But what they learn through their own healthy exploration of their senses, that’s also important,” he said. “Even though I don’t live in a dirt floor hogan like our ancestors, their values can still be applied to my livelihood today.”

Related: For preschoolers after the pandemic, more states say: Learn outdoors

Perhaps surprisingly, Lee doesn’t much care for the term “climate change”; he finds it too political. “We hear that we live in unprecedented times; well, when was it ever precedented? As far as I have understood, as far as our traditional stories, the world has always been changing,”

he said.What he seeks to instill in his brief time with the children is a sense of gratitude for being alive, and connection to other living things.

“They sit on the grass, and I sit on the earth with them, and try to see things from their eyes … I ask them to name their five senses, which they all know, and then I say, ‘Who taught you how to use them?’ And they might say ‘My mom,’ and then they think about it … and it’s almost like they refer to a divine source. They didn’t have to be instructed, and it’s in line with other growth processes in the natural world.”

Lee shares with the children a version of the Navajo creation story, and another one about horses, but he won’t tell them to a reporter on tape: They are part of an oral tradition passed down to him from his elders. He will say that he talks to the children about the rhythms of nature, and humans’ place in the world.

“The movement of nature, the rising of the dawn, the daytime sky, the evening light and the darkness of night, and how that process regenerates itself and the elongation of that process creates the spring, summer, fall, winter, and creates our being, our livelihood … for many it’s like we’re separate from that, we’re above that and we’re more intelligent than that. But the most intelligent people I know adhere to nature and know there isn’t a knowledge that surpasses that. It’s a humbling realization for people but it’s also good.” 

“What they learn in the classroom is very important, yes. But what they learn through their own healthy exploration of their senses, that’s also important. Even though I don’t live on a dirt floor hogan like our ancestors, the values associated can still be applied to my livelihood today.”

Jered Lee, a Navajo nation member who participates in Albuquerque Public Schools’ outdoor learning program

Some 80 percent of the students enrolled in Albuquerque Public Schools are people of color. Around 5.3 percent are American Indian, and are served by the district’s Indian Education Department.

Monie Corona works within that department in a newly created position, supporting Los Padillas and other outdoor programming. Her watchwords are “cultural humility, cultural relevance and the cultural landscape.” She said this collaboration, bringing Indigenous learning to all students in an outdoor setting, “has been a long time coming, let’s put it that way. As a [white] teacher coming in 30 years ago, I was not prepared for working with Native American students and their culture. There’s a lot of things we have to understand and be able to respect as well.”

She said her focus and that of her colleagues sharpened in 2018, after a state court’s decision in Yazzie/Martinez v. State of New Mexico found that the state wasn’t doing enough to meet its obligation to help all students become college and career ready, especially low-income students, Native Americans, English language learners and students with disabilities. New Mexico’s high school graduation rate is consistently among the lowest in the nation; Albuquerque’s is even lower, at 69 percent in 2022.

Corona hopes that the Los Padillas program, as well as aligned efforts to bring Indigenous traditions into the school garden program and into outdoor learning opportunities at all grade levels, will enhance student engagement, particularly for those with Native heritage.

“Making sure the kids know their culture — it’s not easy,” she said. “We want to build up their self esteem, their motivation to be at school.”  

Lee said that just about every time he speaks to a class, one or two children will raise their hand and say, “I’m Navajo, too!” or name another tribe. But his aim is to share his culture and language and find commonalities with students, no matter their background. “Here in Albuquerque there’s different cultures. And I’ve realized this about many cultures around the world, the more you talk to them, our language, our customs may be different but the root of our cultural values are very similar.”

This story about outdoor learning was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Dora Ramos is a family child care provider in Stamford, Connecticut, where the temperature climbed above 90 degrees for a few days in July. She takes care of children in her home, which has a large backyard, and was able to adapt, still getting the children outside, even on the hottest days.

“Our parents bring the children at 7:10 a.m., so we bring them outside very early — first thing,” she said. “We have sprinklers; they use the hose to fill up pots with water and ‘cook.’”

But in Dallas, where the high hit 110 degrees on August 18, it wasn’t safe or possible to play outside for weeks-long stretches this summer, said Cori Berg, the director of Hope Day School, a preschool there. “It was cranky weather for sure,” she said. “What most people don’t really think about is what it’s like for a child in a center. They’re cooped up in one room for hours and hours and hours.”

Much research supports young children’s need for movement, outdoor play and time in nature. Regulations in many places require kids in child care facilities to have access to outdoor play space, weather permitting.

But increasingly, the weather does not permit. And leaders in the world of early childhood development are starting to call attention to the imperative to design and upgrade child care centers — and the cities where they are located — for our climate-altered world, with the needs of the youngest in mind.

“During the smoke some kids felt very sad that they couldn’t go outside. And the caregivers had to explain to them what was wrong.”

Jessica Sager, who runs the network All Our Kin

“They have the least responsibility for causing the climate crisis but will bear the brunt of it,” said Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force, which has just issued its first set of recommendations. (Full disclosure, I’m an advisor to This Is Planet Ed, which convened the task force in collaboration with the think tank Capita.)

“One of the things we have to do is take the climate resources coming through the Inflation Reduction Act, and make sure that we prioritize young children, both in multifamily housing and early care/education,” said Garling. But while children under 5 have a developmental need to spend time outside, extreme weather — whether heat, wildfire smoke or other air pollution — is particularly dangerous for this age group. Young children breathe twice as much air per pound of body weight, Garling pointed out.

Related: OPINION: We must help our youngest learners navigate enormous risks from climate change

Ankita Chachra is a designer, architect and new mother working on the issue of climate-resilient cities for children at the think tank Capita. She recently blogged about choices made in cities around the world, from Copenhagen to her native Delhi, that can help preserve outdoor play. These can sometimes be simple adaptations. When it’s very hot, Ramos, for example, takes her children outside first thing in the morning.

“Copenhagen has parks that do flood with extreme rain,” Chachra said, but permeable surfaces, like grass, allow the water to drain away quickly. “Asphalt, rubber, and metal get extremely heated when you don’t have shade to protect those surfaces. Grass, mulch, and wood absorb heat differently. A shaded street or area is 4 degrees Celsius cooler than those that don’t have shade,” she added. And when cities make room for parks over cars, there is more equitable access to safe, cooler outdoor space.

Cori Berg, in Dallas, is grateful for her yard’s “two giant pecan trees — those giant shade structures are really expensive.”

When children just can’t go outside, early child care educators said they have to improvise. Jessica Sager, whose network All Our Kin supports in-home family child care providers in 25 states, did an informal survey at The Hechinger Report’s request to ask providers how they are coping with extreme weather.

“One of the things we have to do is take the climate resources coming through the Inflation Reduction Act, and make sure that we prioritize young children, both in multifamily housing and early care/education.”

Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force

“I heard a lot of stories about the wildfires in particular,” she said — the smoke from Canadian fires affected at least 120 million Americans this summer. “Our educators had air purifiers — we had gotten them during Covid. Our coaches had already worked with educators about doing indoor gross motor play — obstacle courses, scavenger hunts. Balls, scarves, parachutes. Putting a mattress on the floor and letting kids jump up and down. A lot of song and dance activities. Or putting colored tape on the floor and pretending it’s a balance beam. ”

On a city-wide level, some have proposed bringing back free or cheap indoor playspaces, such as the McDonald’s ball pit, perhaps repurposing disused shopping malls.*

But despite all this creativity, it’s emotionally difficult for both providers and children when children can’t play outside because of severe weather and other hazards — Berg’s “cranky weather.”

“During the smoke some kids felt very sad that they couldn’t go outside,” said All Our Kin’s Sager. “And the caregivers had to explain to them what was wrong.” There’s a “real parallel to what caregivers had to do during Covid,” to make a scary reality understandable for little kids, she said.

Garling and other policymakers are conscious that they are bringing up climate threats at a time when the early childhood sector already feels besieged.

The United States government spends much less than the average of its peer countries on early child development in a good year, and supplemental funds provided during the pandemic have just fallen off a cliff, leaving the sector even more cash starved. Group child care in private homes is often parents’ most affordable solution: The National Center for Education Statistics says 1 in 5 children under 5 spend time in these settings.

Related: COLUMN: Want teachers to teach about climate change? You’ve got to train them

But these home-based programs pose a major infrastructure challenge. Garling’s organization recently released a new interactive map showing that in New York City, these centers often — 37.2 percent of the time — include basement space. And 1,638 centers, serving 22,000 children, are at risk of flooding in storms such as the one that hit the city with more than 8 inches of rain on September 29.

“At times it feels overwhelming. There’s so many things early care and education professionals have to worry about,” Garling said. But on the other hand, she argued, there are federal funds the sector can and should claim for retrofitting and upgrades now.

“I feel like there are current opportunities through [the Inflation Reduction Act] that are creating more urgency — in a good way,” she said. “This is not something I was talking about two years ago and now it is 80 percent of what I talk about all the time. “

“They have the least responsibility for causing the climate crisis but will bear the brunt of it.”

Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force

In the meantime, early childhood educators are working hard to instill a love of nature in the children they care for, in all kinds of weather. Berg has been taking her teachers on nature walks, and introduced a curriculum about Texas’s many state parks. 

The Connecticut child care owner, Ramos, who grew up visiting a farm in her native Peru, sees empathy blooming in her toddlers as they encounter the natural world. “One day a one year old was walking and saw a little slug on the ground,” she recounted. “He points — ‘Oh no, oh no!’ He was so sad. The father immediately went down, picked it up and put it on the grass. It made my day.”

*Clarification: This sentence has been updated to clarify the support for indoor play spaces.

This column about outdoor play was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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