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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Treading carefully around oil Kevin Libin, National Post CALGARY -- Six months ago, residents of the cattle country south of Calgary invited a climate scientist to town to speak to 140 students from J.T. Foster High School in Nanton and bused in from nearby Claresholm. The guest was Tim Ball, a prominent Canadian skeptic of the theory of man-made climate change and perennial bugaboo of the green lobby. The school had been showing An Inconvenient Truth, the contentious Al Gore movie about global warming, in class, much to the consternation of a number of locals. "I think that we are lucky in a small rural community as a lot of things that kids are ‘taught' in school are headed off fairly quickly," one of the speech's organizers, Callum Sears, said in an e-mail. When he first approached the principal about bringing Mr. Ball to speak, something strange happened. "I just kept running into roadblock after roadblock," Mr. Sears recalls. Phone calls went unreturned; the speech kept getting put off. He eventually went to the parent council who helped press the principal and teachers into cooperating. The lecture was a hit. "Students have been told the opposite for so long and so often that they are really interested to hear someone whose message is completely different than the one they've been force-fed," Mr. Sears says. Not everyone was enamoured, though. After addressing the students, Mr. Sears donated 30 tickets to school staff to hear Mr. Ball at the local agricultural society's roast beef fundraiser later that evening. Just one teacher showed up. Perhaps the rest had heard enough at that point. Or maybe they had other plans. But Mr. Ball suspects that they may have been boycotting his message, which castes evidentiary doubt on whether greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming. If most teachers had their way, he says, students would be taught environmental theories straight from Al Gore's script. But in Alberta, Mr. Ball says, parents and students have always seemed more interested in hearing competing ideas. That surely has much to do with the province's exceptional dependence on the resource industry (energy accounts for 25% of its GDP, 70% of exports and more than a third of government income) and the fact that so many students' parents rely on energy companies-or at the very least, the economic ripples the industry creates-to pay the bills at home. But Mr. Ball remembers the same thing happened years ago, when Alberta parents led the way to push onto the provincial curriculum a resource called "Agriculture in the Classroom." Stunned to discover their kids were being taught fictions about farming by teachers who had often never once stacked hay themselves, Alberta parents in the '80s persuaded the province to adopt the farm-friendly program to ensure their kids got another side of the story on that particular matter, too. When it comes to where their bread is buttered, it seems parents in Alberta have not hesitated to meddle in the classroom so that their kids know it too, which these days means any discussion of environmental risks comes alongside important lessons about economic reality. Members of the province's environmental groups wish aloud for a school curriculum like the one Ontario recently unveiled. Last year that province announced it would begin "integrating environmental education into all subjects in all grades" and enforce "environmental education standards" during curriculum reviews. But with less than 2% of its economy riding on the business of extracting and exploiting non-renewable resources, far fewer Ontario parents have an interest in keeping their children's classrooms free from anti-oil polemics. Talk to Alberta teachers, however, and more than a few admit that broaching the subject of sustainability in classrooms that are largely paid for, and live in the same postal code as intensive energy businesses, can be a minefield. "I can't imagine teaching in Fort McMurray; how would you even begin to teach about the tarsands?" says Rita Poruchny, president of the Alberta Teachers' Association Global, Environmental, and Outdoor Education Council (GEOEC). "The kids are driving right by those tailing ponds. Every issue is right out the back door." David Suzuki gives dozens of talks to Canadian students every year. When he does it in Calgary, it makes the front page. When he spoke last year to a Grade 3 class at Altadore Elementary School-located in an upscale urban neighbourhood that is home to no small number of the city's white collar energy workers-Mr. Suzuki railed to the youngsters about the oilsands and the province's tread-lightly approach to regulation; a schoolhouse talk that might have gone unnoticed most anywhere else elicited outrage from newspaper editorialists ("overblown theatrics" and "wildly inaccurate statements," said the Calgary Herald) and even the premier himself accused Mr. Suzuki of "unproductive emotional rhetoric and personal attacks." The environmentalist is more popular with the Alberta Teachers' Association, which has invited him to a few conferences. The union's GEOEC's newsletters echo many of Mr. Suzuki's attitudes – blaming "massive resource exploitation" for natural disasters and politicians for "fear-mongering about perceived terrorist threats" rather than focusing on the environment. While An Inconvenient Truth is available through almost every school board resource library, there are no board-approved resources focusing on the scientific doubts about manmade climate change theory, points out Norman Kalmanovitch, director of Friends of Science, an Alberta-based, non-profit organization dedicated to countering the International Panel on Climate Change's version of the global warming narrative. The group has tried convincing Alberta school boards to authorize teachers' resources that promote alternate climate-change theories, such as sun spot activity, but so far, Mr. Kalmanovitch says, he's had no luck. Earlier this year, the group appealed to those behind the province's existing teaching resource, "Creating a Climate of Change," which, as the name implies, takes as a given the existence of manmade climate change. The resource presents as fact, for example, statistics from the IPCC that critics have since called into question - an infamous "hockey-stick graph" once thought to show radical changes in temperature over the past millennium, but which has since been undermined by Canadian studies that found the data behind it to be flawed. The group offered 15 recommended edits to the resource to update it in light of new research and include some evidence unsupportive of the manmade climate change theory (including dropping the hockey-stick graph). But while some Albertans fret about students being indoctrinated to scorn the resource industry that feeds so many of them and helps fund their education, environmentalists are just as worried that schools offer what one activist calls "token" lessons about what they consider to be urgent issues for the classroom. Provincial guides have environmental issues showing up only briefly in science: high school seniors can learn about "energy and the environment," for example, but it is optional. Most discussion about environmental issues, particularly highly political ones such as manmade climate change, gets lumped into social studies. That makes skeptics like Mr. Ball uneasy, since he believes that such lessons belong in science class, where students can learn to analyze and weigh the evidence for and against the prevailing version of things. According to the provincial rationale "social studies provides learning opportunities for students to ... understand that humans exist in a dynamic relationship with the natural environment" in addition to a dozen other things. But how teachers do that, and with what emphasis, remains at their discretion. One unit in Grade 11 social studies requires teachers introduce students to "the impact on human populations" of a selection of environmental worries: deforestation, desertification, pollution, irrigation and energy depletion, among others. The "greenhouse effect" is on the menu, but it is not compulsory. That so much of the environmental lesson is left to teachers' discretion may worry skeptics, but it also concerns those who desire more environmentalism from Alberta's schools. "Environmental education suffers here in part because we're dealing in a pretty backwards philosophy from the current provincial government and even a significant component of the civil service that still continues to look at this in this traditional either/or environment versus economy paradigm," says Rob Macintosh, a former president of the Pembina Institute, where he spent a decade operating the activist group's educational arm. "What it means is a lot of teachers are scared to look seriously at hard environmental issues because, they're scared that they will be pitting protection of the environment against the jobs that their kids' parents have." Kathy Telfer, a spokeswoman for the province's education ministry, says curriculum adjustments are being rolled out gradually over the next few years, and "the direction from the advice we are receiving is to strengthen the environmental stewardship component," for elementary science students. She does not comment beyond that, though she says the new curriculum for social studies "has a stronger emphasis on environment and sustainability, infusing various perspectives and taught from an inquiry-based approach." If that means weighing the various theories about the existence and purported causes of global warming - from the believers to the skeptics - it could mean that parent groups will no longer have to pester school administrators to host lectures from the likes of Mr. Ball, though it is bound to sow further despair among environmental activists who think the province already leaves room for too much dissent. "You're tiptoeing on eggshells simply approaching the topic," says Mr. Macintosh. "If there are seven scientists globally who disagree with the 20,000 scientists who've achieved a consensus through the IPCC . . . you feel obliged to give equal weight to those seven scientists. That's not really providing an accurate picture of the general weight of scientific opinion." To avoid the controversies, Mr. Macintosh believes educators make a habit of sticking with what he calls "superficial" environmental subjects: recycling, the role of watersheds, forest health, endangered species, that sort of thing. "We spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with recycling and solid waste as a big environmental issue in the classroom-a ridiculous amount of time relative to the importance of that particular environmental issue. Frankly, our recycling and solid waste issues are fairly well under control," he says. Not all educators believe Alberta's teachers instinctively steer clear of the subject of climate change. Rather, says Noel Jantzie, a Calgary social studies teacher, good educators know to treat the subject carefully, keeping in mind the sensitivity of parents who might have doubts about the claims, and being cautious not to make children feel guilty about their parents' line of work. "It's a question of appropriateness and providing, good, unbiased material," he says. As past president of the union's GEOEC, Mr. Jantzie's pro-environment credentials are solid enough, but he maintains he is delighted when there is debate over issues in the classroom-and there often is. "I think the important part is that debate is part of the process." And whether that comes from teachers mindful of the political and economic currents in Alberta or not, adds Ms. Poruchny, it is probably better than the alternative: shoving a single point of view down kids throats. "The worst thing you could do in the educational system is not have a balanced approach," she says. "That's our job as educators: to make our kids thinkers."
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#1. To: farmfriend (#0)
What a quaint notion.
A nation of mullets, ruled by inbred, moronic tyrants.
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