Health Trotter

July 30, 2021 at 05:30PM When school facilities closed for in-person learning in early March 2020 , the assumption was that the shutdown and pandemic would be temporary blips in the memory of our students. Some 16 months later, school facilities are finally preparing to re-open for in-person learning . We could go about business as usual, but after the devastation of the pandemic, and the increasingly widespread climate-change-linked weather disasters, it’s obvious we should not. Emerging from the crisis of COVID-19 gives us an opportunity to rethink our public schools, to simultaneously the structural inequalities that pervade the system, and prepare it for the climate emergency ahead. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Lawmakers have had difficulty grappling with the layering of immediate and longer-lasting crises. That’s where we think the Green New Deal for Public Schools , introduced to Congress by Representative Jamaal Bowman (NY) on July 16, comes in. Building on the ...

July 30, 2021 at 04:30PM The best way to appreciate the planet fully is to leave the planet entirely. To inhabit a world is to get awfully used to it. The sky is up there—big as ever. The ground is down there—solid as ever. The ocean is over that way. Canada is up the other way. There are happy places—Paris, Bora Bora. There are parts of the world—North Korea, Afghanistan—where people suffer tremendously. Our own place in all of that determines who we become. We’re like wine grapes; we have a terroir, a home soil that flavors us and changes us, and once we’ve become one thing it’s hard to become—or even understand—something else. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But for a tiny handful of us—fewer than 600 in all of human history—there’s been a way outside of all of that, and it’s by flying above all of that. Ever since Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space, 60 years ago this April, astronauts have come home to describe what they call the Overview Effect: the ch...