IOWA CITY, Iowa – Amid the pounding of fallen trees and fallen power lines, my teenage son last Friday put up his protest for climate change for the 79th consecutive week, holding up a shaky handmade sign: “Wake up, Iowa. plan no. “
We were still without electricity or internet on Friday morning, four days after the aftermath of the hurricane-level “derecho” storm that swept a 770-mile swath from the heartland of South Dakota to Ohio devastated, and left a million inhabitants without power, along with widespread damage.
It also left an estimated 40% of Iowa’s corn crop in ruins, flattening millions of acres and the state’s major economic generator in a matter of minutes.
We were the lucky ones. In his 30-minute letter at an Iowa airport on Tuesday, President Trump had no trouble navigating the storm damage in Cedar Rapids, where tens of thousands of residents were left without power, water and shelter, in tents along the streets camping refugees from extreme weather in an undisputed humanitarian crisis.
This includes African and Southeast Asian immigrants in Cedar Rapids who have been expelled from their own countries as climate refugees.
Despite Trump’s Twitter eask that he completely withdrew on Monday at the request of President for disaster relief for Iowa for nearly $ 4 billion, the White House has denied any individual assistance to homeowners, thousands of whom have suffered damage to their homes, according to FEMA officials.
Just days away from starting school in one of only two states in the union without mask requirements, the image of my son standing alone on the side of a successful street was not merely a reminder of the precariousness of our times outside of us current crisis.
Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Trump-loving Republican, has been waiting inexplicably for a whole week for the state’s mile-to-mile derecho levels to formally ask for presidential disaster relief. That served as a strong reminder of the rape of the state and the nation over the double crisis of COVID-19 and climate change facing my son’s generation.
As Iowa continues to bird in its COVID response, declared a “red zone” by an internal report by the White House coronavirus task force last month, climate strikers have refused to attend school on Friday for several days. going to school as a way to proclaim the failure of our state and nation to declare a climate crisis.
Their motto, inspired by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg: It’s time for leaders to act on science, and to treat every crisis as a crisis.
A term coined in the 1880s by a University of Iowa scientist, Danish immigrant Gustavus Hinrichs, as a “direct blow to the prairies”, the derecho is also a devastating rejoinder for the business-as-usual our nation’s policy – if it is a false response to the COVID outbreak, or the blatant response to the emerging climate crisis – that adapting to a failed system is not “adaptation”. It’s failure.
Instead of failing our children – or allowing the failure of policymakers in Iowa and Washington to put our children on the brink of becoming a lost generation – perhaps it’s time to hit the button, pull our children out of school and fully focus time on climate solutions.
The derecho not only leveled our state. It levels our confidence in statewide and federal leadership.
That may sound hyperbolic, but as teenagers in a family that has personally experienced the pandemic, such as historic floods, fires, and catastrophic storms in their short lifespan, my children recognize that they are living in the age of potential environmental collapse – and it is terrible.
Their reaction, as climate attackers, is irresponsible resistance: School can wait – most schools in Cedar Rapids are severely damaged. Adults must first deal with the COVID and climate crisis.
“We teenagers and children would not have to take responsibility,” Thunberg told our town last fall, when she attended my son’s climate strike in Iowa City. “But right now the world leaders are acting like children and someone has to be the adult in the room.”
I’m not sure the adults in the room are listening.
Contrary to the Paris climate agreement, the Trump administration is backing environmental regulations, including the recent rules of methane leakage for gas and oil companies. Here in Iowa, despite record production of wind energy, greenhouse gas emissions rose 3.3% last year as our state went through three historic floods and recorded record heat waves and fires from the Arctic to Australia following the mega-droughts of the American Southwest.
Three months ago, our kids looked in amazement as Gov. Reynolds was recognized at a special White House party for “turning the corner” on COVID cases, in the same week that one slaughterhouse near Waterloo, Iowa, recorded 1,300 coronavirus cases and several deaths among its workers, an outbreak that included remain the worst of your nation.
In the state that has the highest per capita rate of COVID cases in the Midwest, with 50,000 cases and nearly 1,000 deaths among just 3 million residents, is it not a failure to send our children to school in the coming days? Their local school district should still be considered unsafe, according to a recent Times Opinion analysis based on guidelines from the Harvard Global Health Institute, because it consistently records more than 25 cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 people.
Not according to Reynolds, whose “Back to Learning” mandate sets benchmarks for the shift to online learning at three times the rate of COVID positivity recommended by the World Health Organization. Reynolds fired an AP reporter earlier this month for “scare tactics expounded by the media,” after asking her about concerns about school board and teacher about contracting the virus. A few days later, an AP report discovered a “horrifying data glitch” in COVID data collection in Iowa, finding that the “Iowa Department of Public Health accidentally reported fewer new infections and a smaller percentage of daily positive tests.”
It’s getting worse, according to our children.
The derecho was not the only climate phenomenon this past week: When Death Valley in California set a record at 130 degrees Fahrenheit – possibly the highest temperature ever recorded on the planet – the last fully intact ice rink in Canada collapsed, and scientists explained that Greenland’s melting ice sheet has reached a point of no return. Millions of people have been displaced by floods in China, India and Yemen in the last month, just as a new report was released that our children have lived the longest decade in human history.
“We are fighting because 11,000 scientists have warned of ‘untold suffering’ if we do not act quickly on our climate crisis,” my son wrote in the university newspaper last winter, citing a worldwide “Declaration of Climate Emergency” which for the most part part was overseen by our political leaders.
If Wall Street consulting firms like Moody’s Analytics warn the nation that impending climate change could result in the loss of an incredible $ 69 trillion in my son’s life, it’s time to respond to such warnings in a new way.
We need climate schools, not COVID schools, that reflect the realities of 2020 – not the anticated policies of the past.
Our children need to learn where their electricity comes from, visit solar farms and wind turbines, and see the importance of transitioning to sustainable energy and a smart grid, instead of relying on 20th-century coal-fired energy plants.
Instead of running our kids to the science unsafe schools for the first trimester (seven weeks), we should work with youth in our heart communities to replant trees, especially in cities like Cedar Rapids, which are now 50% of his tree dome has lost.
In an agricultural state that still imports 90% of its food, we need to visit farms and learn about regenerative agriculture initiatives to save our soil and protect our quality, and even restore native prairies – 99% of which have been destroyed in Iowa.
With the inevitable slowdown and suspension of classes at schools across the nation this fall, why should our children and schools not focus on a curriculum of climate change from the growing pools of sources of scientists, climate experts, journalists, narrators and artists, and the experiences of those in frontline communities?
Climate scientists beg to be heard. With the cancellation of the Big Ten football season, perhaps we can finally listen to them with the scope they deserve, as a collapsing ice sheet was as important as watching adult men chase a pigskin into a stadium.
How much more scandalous is this proposal than sending our children into pants and chaotic corridors of the COVID virus?
How irrational is this proposal then to send our children to school in any case, because the climate crisis is falling before their eyes?
Similarly, theorist Buckminister Fuller concluded: “You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete. “
Or, as my son says every week on his street corner, sign of climate change in hand: Wake up, Iowa.
