Facing a Cleaner, Greener, and More Peaceful Future
The world is fast becoming more complex and it’s problems of sustainability are easily keeping pace. In a world that is increasingly more interconnected how do we prepare our children to face these problems with an eye toward creative and sustainable solutions? This question is the inspiration for Facing The Future, a non-profit organization based out of Seattle, Washington. Facing the Future’s aim is to arm educators with curriculum and resources to raise student’s awareness of global sustainability issues and give them the critical thinking skills necessary to come up with solutions.
- » See also: Grow Your Own Tree Hugger: 101 Activities to Teach Your Child How to Live Green
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Navigating through their website, teachers and students can learn fast facts about issues such as climate change, water, rain forests, and energy consumption. Along with these facts they can learn quick actions that they can easily do on a personal and local basis that will help combat these problems. By clicking on climate change, you will learn that burning 1 gallon of gasoline creates 20 lbs of carbon dioxide. By clicking on quick actions you will learn that by biking or walking to school, you can significantly cut the amount of gasoline you burn. There are also a number of useful links for further research on all of these issues.
Along with these useful tools on the website, Facing the Future offers a number of lesson plans as free downloads for teachers. More involved resources are available for a fee. All are very adaptable and can work as a stand alone lesson, a 1-2 week unit, a semester, or year-long course. They also offer professional development opportunities for educators and administrators in the form of online courses, educational conferences, and in-service and consulting with the goal of making these educational resources available to as many students as possible.
They do this as efficiently as possible. Facing the Future reaches hundreds of thousands of students every year at a cost of less than $2 per student. Follow-up studies on their programs show that students who have been exposed to these programs are better critical thinkers, more engaged in their studies, and more likely to believe they can make a difference in the global community.
Along with these environmental issues, Facing the Future offers resources on other issues of sustainability such as poverty, population growth, conflict, and population displacement. All of these issues are looked at in a positive, solutions-oriented approach and give students the sense that they can be solved as long as we are willing to be creative and cooperative. A lesson we can all learn.
