Teachers and students react: Trump team on the environment

Read after watching teachers react!

Madeline Leavy-Rosen and Lila Harakles|January 11, 2017

George Spaulding

Even as high school students, myself and my partner for this project, Madeline Leavy-Rosen, have qualms about our President’s environmental plans. We knew we weren’t alone in this based on the attitude of our environmental science teacher, Ms. Luetje. Madeline and I came up with an idea to get a couple environmental/science teachers and an economics teacher in a room together and play them clips of Donald Trump talking about his plan for the DEP and EPA. As the video progressed our three subjects: Ms. Leujte, Ms. Nardone, and Mr. Watson took notes. Here are some of our favorites…

 

  • NO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND
  • Inarticulate
  • Can he be influenced?
  • Can his plan be changed?
  • How do you gain trust with blatant dismissal of facts?
  • Science literacy – please God – If I’ve done my job right KHS students will give this planet a fighting chance
  • Tobacco dude – figures
  • Climate denier – man is the cause 
  • Alarmism? Really? 
  • Does scientific consensus mean it’s true?
  • Extreme statements for effect
  • If we got everything passed, but China did nothing, would what we did make a difference?

 

After our teacher conference, we were reassured by a couple of students (President Trump supporters) that Trump can not make much of a change without public and congress support. “You need congress to get anything actually done, so no, I believe that he has little to no effect.” (J.G)

 

Another student perspective came from Will Blastos. He showed more fear towards Trump’s ability to upset our environment’s health. “Definitely, I think that Scott Pruitt as the EPA head is insanely terrifying. Most of his cabinet is very skeptical on climate change and since congress is republican, climate legislation can be nullified.” (W.B)

 

Even though we don’t know exactly what our President will do for our environment and it’s agencies, we should all continue to make ourselves more science literate and informed. We should also continue  work as citizens and students to make our planet a greener more environmentally friendly place. As Gurski once pointed out to me,  “We are the ones that shape our communities, not them.”

 

Here are the urls to the videos we showed them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdqc27I7HGA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7CgCT3CBao

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpea8lunJ0w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTq66Zs6QHg