How to use this Page

In November, First Book and its partners the American Federation of Teachers and the Albert Shanker Institute presented the Citizen Power Project; a challenge to educators nationwide to identify, plan, and implement a civic engagement project important to their students, school or community.

Fifteen projects received grants to help turn big plans into big impact.

The projects represent a wide range of civic engagement – from teaching empathy and healthy habits to supporting student voices and helping the environment.

So far, the civic impact of these projects has been phenomenal.

In Framingham, Massachusetts, middle school English teacher Lori DiGisi knows her students don’t always feel empowered. “They feel like the adults rule everything and that they don’t really have choices,” she explains. “The issue I’m trying to solve is for a diverse group of students to believe that they can make a difference in their community.”

Using the First Book Marketplace, Lori and her class chose to read books about young people who did something to change the world — books with diverse characters that each student could identify with. Through stories, Lori’s students have begun to understand that they too can make a difference.

From here, Lori plans to narrow the focus onto the issue of improving working conditions. Students will interview custodians, secretaries, and cafeteria workers in their school to understand what their working conditions are like and ask the all-important question: what can we, as middle schoolers, do to make your working conditions better?

Meanwhile in Malvern, Arkansas, middle school English teacher Claudine James has used the Citizen Power Project to improve upon an already successful program. In 2011, Claudine visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and wanted to bring that experience back to her students.

That year her class studied the Holocaust and put together their own Holocaust Museum in their school and opened it to the public.

The reaction to the museum was something Claudine never expected.

“It was very well received by the community and in fact, we had an opening day reception on a Sunday afternoon and there was no room to even stand.”

Claudine has organized project-based learning initiatives like this every year since. The Malvern community has embraced them, and even come to expect them.

This year, powered by the  Citizen Power Project, Claudine and her class are planning an exhibit called, ‘Writers from Around the World’. They are reading books by authors from all over the globe. Her goal is to promote tolerance and understanding among her students and for them to promote those ideas to the community.

“When my students are presented with problems that other people from other cultures have to overcome, they see the world in a new light,” explains Claudine, “then they go home and spread the word.”

Artwork by one student in Racheal’s class depicting the negative impacts of climate change.

In Newark, New Jersey, kindergarten teacher Racheal Safier has her young students thinking globally. “We wanted to figure out what climate change is,” she explains, “they took a really big interest in how global warming affects animals.”

Racheal has been amazed by her student’s enthusiasm for this topic and the project, but she knows where it comes from. “Books have been the launching point for so many of the ideas generated in my classroom.”

Now that ideas are being launched, Racheal wants to show her class the next step: what actions do we take?

And they have many planned. There will be brochures distributed to parents, a table at the school’s social justice fair, maybe a video, and even letters to the President.

“I want it to be their project — and some of the things they come up with, I am really blown away.”

These three projects are just a snapshot of all the important work educators are doing around the country for the Citizen Power Project. Lori, Claudine, and Racheal are shining examples of the impact that educators can have on their students and their communities.

For educators to create change though students they need access to educational resources. First Book is proud to help provide that access for the Citizen Power Project.

When these 15 projects are completed in early 2017 be sure to check the First Book blog to see videos and pictures, and read more impact stories of impact from across the United States.

If you’re an educator serving kids in need, please visit the First Book Marketplace to register and browse our collection of educational resources. Click here to learn more about the Citizen Power Project.

The post Changing Communities with Books: The Citizen Power Project appeared first on First Book Blog.

In many walks of life there is much talk about “disruptive” developments which bring change that shatters the established way of doing things. In relation to the conservation of biodiversity, we can see two very different developments which might have such an effect on the conventional legal approaches.

The post The conservation of biodiversity: thinking afresh appeared first on OUPblog.

Fine wine is an agricultural product with characteristics that make it especially sensitive to a changing climate. The quality and quantity of wine, and thus prices and revenues, are extremely sensitive to the weather where the grapes were grown. Depending on weather conditions, the prices for wines produced by the same winemaker from fruit grown on the same plot of land can vary by a factor of 20 or more from year to year.

The post Does climate change spell the end of fine wine? appeared first on OUPblog.

Countries grow richer as one moves away from the equator, and the same is generally true if one looks at differences among regions within countries. However, this was not always the case: research has shown that in 1500 C.E., for example, there was no such positive link between latitude and prosperity. Can these irregularities be explained? It seems likely an answer can be found in factors strongly associated with latitude.

The post Climate and the inequality of nations appeared first on OUPblog.

It’s been one of those really busy weekends with nothing much to show for all the busy. Brunch with a friend, a women’s bike race, bike rides, a movie and popcorn, a letter to a friend, housecleaning, laundry, a few errands, sprout tending, cat tending, lost sleep because of warm weather, cats and the time change, too much coffee. I haven’t managed to read anything but a few poems and part of an interesting article about crows in Audubon Magazine. The weekend is drawing to a close and I am definitely not feeling weekend restful, could I have another please?

The weather Friday and Saturday was absolutely gorgeous. I got to go home from work Friday an hour early — yay! — and wouldn’t you know it, the buses were running late. At least I got to wait in the sunshine while reading Jane Eyre so it wasn’t all that bad.

Saturday was nice enough that I had all my trays of sprouts out on the deck. The extra warmth I had been giving the peppers and the shot of warm sun Saturday has finally got the seeds sprouting. The onions and tomatoes are doing great. The basil is just beginning to unfurl some tiny leaves. Today I was going to get some marigolds started but I just didn’t manage to get those pots filled with dirt and the seeds into them. Perhaps I can still squeeze it in before my head hits the pillow tonight.

While the early spring weather is pleasant, the fact that the temperature was 25 degrees F warmer than normal is disturbing if I think about it too much. If you haven’t had a chance to read the good and interesting article at LitHub, There is No Market Driven Solution To Our Climate Change Catastrophe, I highly recommend it.

Paul Mason writes of the “complacent calm” in the “world of suits” and says,

The focus is on scenarios for ‘what will happen,’ the climate catastrophe that awaits if we allow global temperatures to rise by more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But in the edge-places of the world the catastrophe is happening already. If we listened to those whose lives are being destroyed by floods, deforestation and encroaching deserts, we would better understand what is coming: the total disruption of the world.

I think many people are still under the impression that impending climate disasters are going to happen to other people somewhere else far away and not to them personally. There are going to be a lot of surprised people in the world over the course of the next 15-20 years.

The weather today was still warmer than normal but gray and damp feeling. Bookman unfortunately had to work all weekend so there was no chicken coop building. Hopefully next weekend will be conducive to getting out and putting on a roof and starting to build some walls. If not, we’ll be indoors getting the chick brooder ready. Next weekend puts us two weeks away from the arrival of the Dashwoods!

Amid failures in saving numerous wildlife species worldwide, there is an encouraging success—decades of panda habitat degradation have been transformed into a remarkable recovery. The success is taking place in Wolong Nature Reserve of China—home to endangered giant pandas and more than 5,000 residents who share a 200,000-ha mountainous area. It is also occurring in many of the other 66 nature reserves and non-reserve areas across southwestern China.

The post Pandas and people: understanding their complex relationships for successful conservation appeared first on OUPblog.

We are living with a climate system undergoing significant changes. Scientists have established a critical mass of facts and have quantified them to a degree sufficient to support international action to mitigate against drastic change and adapt to committed climate shifts. The primary example being the relation between increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and the extent of warming in the future.

The post Earth’s climate: a complex system with mysteries abound appeared first on OUPblog.

The soils surrounding the village where I live in the north west of England have abundant fertility. They mostly formed in well-drained, clay-rich debris left behind by glaciers that retreated from the area some ten thousand years ago, and they now support lush, productive pasture, semi-natural grassland and woodland. Although the pastures are managed more intensively than they were in the past, most of them are well drained, and receive regular dressings of manure along with moderate fertiliser, and are regularly limed, which keeps the land productive and the soil in good health.

The post Why soil matters more than we realise appeared first on OUPblog.

Garden not to scale and all the beds aren’t even in the right place!

Despite the cold, I was rather disturbed to learn that 13 of the last 16 winters in my area have been “Zone 5” winters. If you aren’t a gardener or in the U.S. you might not know what that means, so let me explain. The United States Department of Agriculture, USDA, long ago created a plant hardiness map. It is based on average annual extreme minimum temperatures over a 30-year period and goes from zone 1, the coldest, to zone 13, the warmest. My zone in Minneapolis is 4 which means minimum winter temperatures regularly dip below -20F/-28.9C. That’s air temperature without wind chill added in. The last time the USDA updated its zone map was 2012. I’m not entirely certain, but I think they update it every ten years.

For 13 of the last 16 winters to be zone 5 is a big deal. It won’t yet put me squarely in a warmer zone but it is definitely moving there. State climate watchers and meteorologists are speculating that within the next three to four years we will begin seeing zone six winters. This is both crazy and scary. A zone 6 winter would mean a minimum temperature of only -10F/-23.3C. Some people might wonder why I’m not cheering, why I am not excited about the bigger variety of plants I might be able to grow, why anyone would be upset over a winter that never got colder than -20F/-28.9C because, wow, -10F/-23.3C is still pretty cold.

But it is not cold enough.

Minnesota ecology has evolved around long, frigid winters. Already forests in the northern part of the state are showing signs of stress and disease. Our moose population is getting smaller every year. The emerald ash borer is spreading at a faster rate, killing the state’s ash trees. And every year incidents of West Nile virus occur earlier and earlier in the season. That we even have to worry about the virus at all is a fairly recent, within the last ten years or so, thing.

And it isn’t just ecology that is affected by warmer winters, people are too. Minnesota culture is heavily invested in cold winters. Heck, we have a frozen lake’s worth of jokes about it. And we tend to think we are better than everyone else because we can endure the frigid cold. There are winter carnivals and events that warmer winters will make difficult. This year it took so long before the cold hit, the lakes have not been able to build enough ice for the various pond hockey tournaments and many of them have been postponed or cancelled entirely.

Warmer winters are no small, inconsequential thing.

I am not quite sure how to plan for shorter, warmer winters in my garden. I continue to operate under zone 4 assumptions but clearly I am going to need to adapt. I don’t know what that means, exactly. Today I spent an hour or so figuring out where to plant all those seeds that arrived in the mail earlier this week. I am supposed to rotate my “crops” to keep garden soil healthy and avoid hungry insect problems. But, as big as my garden is—pretty much my entire backyard—it still is not large so rotating is a flexible term. I mean growing my tomatoes three feet from where they were last year and moving the zucchini from one end of the garden bed to the other counts as rotating, right?

I got it all figured out though, at least on paper. There are always revisions when it comes time to plant because I can never remember exactly how much room I have in all the various garden beds. And bundling up and walking around the garden right now won’t work because everything is under snow and I can’t even tell where the paths are and where the beds are. Spring and planting time will reveal all!

Biking

Just a quick bike note today. I did another race on Thursday and it was an entirely different mix of people than the week before. There were eight people in group D and I was still the only woman. It was a crazy fast race and I think the guy who won by just over five minutes should have been racing in the C group instead, but maybe he has low self-esteem issues and needed an ego boost or something. I came in fifth in my group riding pretty much at the same rate I had the week before. I had a great time though riding with a C group rider who had gotten dropped from the main group and playing tag with another D group rider.

I’ll try again this coming Thursday and see how it goes. One thing for sure, it is most excellent exercise and I work a lot harder in a race than I do during a regularly scheduled workout. I will be really interested to see how it all translates to riding outdoors again when spring comes.

When heads of state and other leaders of 195 nations reached a landmark accord at the recent United Nations COP21 conference on climate change in Paris, they focused primarily on sea level rise, droughts, loss of biodiversity, and ways to decrease greenhouse gas emissions in order to reduce these consequences. But arguably the most serious and widespread impacts of climate change are those that are hazardous to the health of people.

The post Climate change poses risks to your health appeared first on OUPblog.

Can anyone tell me if there is still a sun? I haven’t seen it in a couple weeks and I am worried it may have gotten lost somewhere. The skies have been covered with clouds and we’ve had rain. Rain! In December! This is Minnesota, that rain is supposed to be snow. I think the kale in the garden has actually begun growing again. Some of my neighbors’ yards have green grass. The public radio meteorologist says December temperatures are running 10 degrees above normal.

I heard an interview with Ted Cruz on the same radio station the other day. Cruz is a Republican senator from Texas and one of many presidential candidates. He is currently the chair of the Senate subcommittee on Science and Space. In the interview he said, and I am paraphrasing, that climate change is not a threat, that it is something made up by the liberals who want to increase the size of government, increase taxes and create laws that control how we live our lives. I could say so much about how Cruz and his cronies are passing laws that tell women what we are and are not allowed to do with our bodies, but I will just let that go for now.

So it is a good thing that Cruz and other republicans can do absolutely nothing about the Climate Change agreement agreed upon in France. It is far from a perfect agreement and nothing in it will keep global temperatures below 2C, the magic number scientists have singled out as being the point of no return, so to speak. But it is better than nothing. And because it is not a treaty, the U.S. government does not have to vote on it. Unfortunately, they can still make it difficult for the US to achieve a good many of the things we promised to do by not funding budget items.

With the presidential election in November 2016 and a number of seats in the House and Senate up for election, things are going to be interesting as the balance of power is sure to do some shifting. You can probably guess without too much trouble where I hope it shifts to.

Meanwhile I will try to stay positive and do things to keep my stress level and blood pressure low. Like ride my bike trainer. I did 85 miles/ 137 km yesterday! I was tired enough afterwards that I couldn’t have been stressed even if I had tried. Then there is my impending two-week vacation that begins this coming Friday at 4:00 p.m. Bring it on!

Even though the 70,000 people who live on the Marshall Islands are currently planning to move to higher ground in the Fiji Islands because the sea level is rising, I will remember that anything I can do personally to limit my carbon footprint is a positive thing.

Sometimes it feels like being vegan, taking public transit, consuming less, growing some of my own food is pointless because so small in the scheme of things. But it isn’t. Yes, the government needs to make some big changes, but we as individuals don’t need to wait for the government in order to start making changes ourselves. If everyone had two days a week without meat, or didn’t drive their own car a couple days a week, or stopped buying out of season fruits and vegetables, or washed their clothes in cold water, these small things would add up fast. It’s like this really great article says, a single action is like plucking one hair from someone’s head but if you get 1,000 people to each pluck a hair, that someone is going to end up bald.

The Paris climate agreement is a huge step in the right direction, but don’t wait for governments to begin implementing policies. We can start right now in our daily lives. It isn’t hard, it doesn’t take much, and it really does make a difference.

Climate expert Joseph Romm gives the facts about climate change and global warming, and what it means for us and the future of humanity.

The post Seven important facts to know about climate change appeared first on OUPblog.

Say you wanted to take over the world—how would you do it? Let’s agree it looks much like the world we live in today, where some countries hold inordinate power over the lives of people in others; where global systematic racism, the shameful legacy of colonization and imperialism, has contrived to keep many humans poor and struggling.

The post The Hunger Games are playing on loop— And I am tired of watching appeared first on OUPblog.

Planet Earth doesn’t have ‘a temperature’, one figure that says it all. There are oceans, landmasses, ice, the atmosphere, day and night, and seasons. Also, the temperature of Earth never gets to equilibrium: just as it’s starting to warm up on the sunny-side, the sun gets ‘turned off’; and just as it’s starting to cool down on the night-side, the sun gets ‘turned on’.

The post Climate change – a very difficult, very simple idea appeared first on OUPblog.

In this fast-moving field, legal academics and legal experts have an important task, now and ahead, in reflecting on how adjudicative processes are accommodating the disruption that climate change inevitably brings to legal systems.

The post Climate change in the courts: challenges and future directions appeared first on OUPblog.

As representatives from 146 countries gather in Paris for the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference, we’ve turned to our Very Short Introduction series for insight into the process, politics and topics of discussion of the conference. Is the UNFCCC process flawed?

The post Climate change and the Paris Conference: is the UNFCCC process flawed? appeared first on OUPblog.