Lessons from Past Environmental Movements About the Existential Threat of Climate Change for Our Collective Well-Being on Earth: A Personal Reflection

In this Voices: Reflective Accounts of Education article, Tina A. Grotzer looks back at growing up during the dawn of the environmental movement and offers a personal account of how the events of the time contributed formatively to her later research agenda and professional goals. The world has always faced environmental and existential threats resulting from human activity, and humanity has navigated these crises—not without great losses, injustices, and violence, but without global demise. Grotzer recounts the environmental threats and activism of the past sixty years and analyzes these past challenges and the surrounding environmental and social contexts in which they occurred, reflecting on the implications for the current global existential crisis of climate change. Drawing on the last few decades of research on the cognitive science of reasoning about complexity, she argues that the socioscientific problem spaces of past environmental crises were, in terms of complexity, simpler than that of climate change. She considers the politics of this earlier era and the hard-won battles for environmental justice that were characterized by an “us against them” stance and how this stance persists. She then addresses the shift to collectivity that climate change, as a global existential problem, requires and how education can support it. Grotzer offers suggestions for how educators can support students in learning about the nature of complexity and in developing the ability to engage, as Earthlings, in the ethical reasoning that they will need to secure their future.