Climate Action Through Education

Biology, Impact and Zoo, End of the World classes highlight environmental issues

Caroline Petrikas, Photo and Graphics Editor and Lacy Green, Staff Writer

Biology, Impact and Zoo

With project topics varying from microplastics to irresponsible dog breeding, the Upper School social impact course “Biology, Impact, and the Zoo,” teaches students to recognize prevalent problems within their communities and to devise solutions.

While students are not limited to choosing from only environmental issues, many tackle problems related to climate change for their final project.

Led by Biology teacher Brandi Finazzo, the class covers traditional biology content, but differs because students learn to apply knowledge and skills to a real world situation.

“Over the course of a year, students build empathy by talking to people within the community and involved in their topics, develop a prototype or solution to their specific problem and ultimately compete in a ‘Shark Tank’ endeavor for funding to implement their solution,” Finazzo said.

After locating their problem and devising a solution, students present their prototypes to Dallas community and business leaders, including a representative from the Dallas Zoo, who then judge the competition and select a project to fund and implement.

The first quarter of the class covers the different intricate relationships that make up our hierarchy of life, Finazzo said. Then, students can understand when people affect one piece of this biological system, it affects everything else in that system.

The social impact portion of the class begins in the first unit and continues throughout the year. After the introduction to these systems, students participate in a “changemakers” survey that reveals the five largest contributors to climate change and inspires students to think about their individual impacts.

According to CNN’s “Project Drawdown,” refrigeration chemicals are one of the leading causes of climate change, and curbing the chemical output from refrigerators would equate to removing 673 million cars from the roadway.

“A lot of times in the past four years, the survey has provided a foundation for teams to pick their topic,” Finazzo said. “When they take the survey, it blows their mind because there are so many things that impact climate change.”

When Barbara Lou ‘21 participated in the class in 2020, the survey inspired her group to develop a solution to refrigerator disposal.

“After learning an overwhelming fact about improper fridge disposal during the brainstorming process, it opened my eyes on how much our daily actions impact climate change,” Lou said.

Lou’s project, dubbed “The Cooler Earth,” devised a convenient solution for consumers: embedding QR codes on the back of new refrigerators that directed consumers to input their zip codes on a website. The website identified the nearest eco-friendly disposal locations for old refrigerators, Finazzo said.

Lou’s project ultimately won the Shark Tank and then partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). They are currently finalizing legal obligations with the EPA to implement their QR code.

Lou’s final project successfully illustrated the class’ mission.

“It taught me that much of our individual choices as consumers play a part in impacting the climate, and that to capture the key to consumers’ empathy could create movements and transitions toward a more sustainable society,” Lou said.

Finazzo loved seeing Lou’s and all of her students’ projects reflect what they had learned about climate change and taking action.

“Seeing my students articulate their understanding and why their design is useful is a huge source of pride for me, because we’re not going to solve global warming in some small way, it’s going to be an accumulation of steps,” Finazzo said. “It’s exciting to watch them contribute to these small steps that can make a difference.”

End of the World

If the Earth’s temperature continues to rise at the current rate, when will the world come to an end? That’s the question a group of seniors explored in the new semester science course, the End of the World.

After being added to the course catalog last spring, the End of the World became a resource for students to explore how the world may one day come to an end, as well as to focus on the effects of climate change.

The class was added to the curriculum with three main goals: - To help students see how their understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology can be integrated and applied to try to address the fundamental question: how might human civilization one day end? - To teach students tools in risk analysis — the art of making decisions given uncertain or incomplete information.

Q&A with All Green Club President Charlie Hamilton

Caroline Petrikas, Photo and Graphics Editor What does All Green Club do on campus?

Around campus we strive to make Hockaday more “green.” For example, this year we’re hoping to hold a battery and possibly plastic bag drive. Since those things are not things people normally recycle, then we can take them to specific places where they do recycle them.

Why is the club important to the school?

Giving back to the earth which we come from is honestly critical because obviously climate change is a really, really big problem that is currently and will be affecting the world for years to come. And I think any way that we can help make Hockaday a better and greener and cleaner campus is really important for its local and national effects. Why did you decide to get involved? I decided to get involved because a couple years ago, my parents went vegan and at first I really objected to it because I thought that was weird. But eventually I jumped ship and became vegan too. It was more for health reasons originally, but then I got really into all the environmental reasons too. Seeing how much just diet can affect things and how horrible the climate change crisis is really made me want to get involved in any way I can. How does the club plan to increase sustainability in the school community?

We’re planning to meet with either Ms. Day and figure out how to make the campus more green. There are qualifications every school has to meet to be considered “green” or sustainable.

- To reinforce the mindset and thinking skills embodied in the Tenets of Student Excellence in science.

Dr. Marshall Bartlett, Science Department chair, began the year by defining risks and identifying existential risks to humanity. He tasked groups with picking a topic to analyze and present to the class.

Among topics varying from natural disasters, technology, and human behavior, seniors Christiana Miele, Bailey Smith and Sofia Abel chose to focus on the existential risks of climate change.

“Our goal was to determine the year by which all humans would die if the Earth warmed at the same rate it is now, assuming we don’t fix our ways or nothing kills us before then,” Abel said.

The group’s metric risk was the rate of global warming, and they presented the risk in years, not as a percentage, which differed from the other projects in the class.

After working on the project for two weeks, the group came to a conclusion about the effects that our actions will have in the future.

“Our conclusion was that if the Earth’s temperatures continued to warm at the constant rate they are now, humanity will die by the year 2661,” Abel said. “However, if the rate of temperature rises exponentially, we will die far before then.”

While the results of the presentation yielded disturbing results, the group members were able to project the risks of climate change.

“It taught me about how real this is and how drastically it could affect Earth,” Miele said. “The Earth’s global temperature naturally wavers and follows a pattern going from being as warm as it was in the 1800’s to being as cold as an ice age.”

Although the course is new, there has still been heavy enrollment, prompting the possibility of remaining in the course catalog for years to come to educate seniors on the risks of climate change.

Female education and the climate crisis

How educating women has potential to reduce global emissions

Remy Finn, Sports Editor, and Juliana Blazek, Features Editor

In February of 2020, climate activists Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai met for the first time during a visit to Oxford University. Individually, the two women represent powerful activism. Yousafzai advocates for quality education for all girls around the globe, and Thunberg challenges world leaders to act on the ongoing climate crisis. Together, however, they encapsulate the synthesis of these two problems: the connection between women’s education and climate change.

The two topics are more interconnected than they might seem. Citing Project Drawdown, UNESCO ranks educating girls and women the sixth most important issue out of 80 to find a solution to combat climate change. Female education directly connects to climate change in two ways: through population and involvement in scientific fields.

Balancing a Career and Children

“As women become more educated and seek higher education, it is a time strain and an investment in themselves to think about having children and starting a family,” Brandi Finazzo, Upper School science teacher, said. “There’s often a struggle between women who want to be moms, but also women who want strong time-consuming careers, and unfortunately, time is limited, so they tend to put off having kids until they reach what they consider to be a stable and balanced point in their life and then they open themselves up to the idea of starting families.”

According to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data on women ages 40 to 50, the median age at which those with a master’s degree or more first give birth is about 30. This is greater than the median age of first birth for women with a high school diploma or less, which is roughly 24.

“I was very goal oriented growing up, so I wanted to make sure that I had a secure, stable career before I had kids,” Finazzo said. “In my mind, I felt like it wasn't a choice between kids and a career, but then in my early 30s, I decided that I did want to settle down and have kids, and at that point, I already had a career established, so it felt completely doable for me.”

The Effect on the Environment

A study published in Environmental Research Letters presented having one fewer child as the most impactful way to reduce carbon emissions given current production, with researchers calculating that it equated to a reduction of 58 tons of carbon dioxide for each year of a parent’s life. The figure was found by adding the predicted emissions of the child and all their descendents, then dividing this by the parent’s lifespan.

In the UK, Blythe Pepino created BirthStrike, an organisation geared for women and men who have chosen not to have children due to the impending “climate breakdown and civilization collapse,” reported the Guardian. Pepino said BirthStrike does not aim to discourage people from having children, or to condemn those who have them already, but to communicate the urgency of the crisis.

Women in the Workforce

Girls are also underrepresented as both leaders throughout the world. The organization UN Women calculates that gender parity in national legislative bodies will not be attained before 2063. According to The Center for American Progress, although women hold about 52 % of all professional-level jobs, they are significantly behind men in every field in regards to leadership positions. With more girls receiving knowledge in science, technology, engineering and math fields, they will be able to continuously grow as leaders in the fight against climate change. According to USAID’s Climate Links, if more women take on the role of environmental activists, the world can continue to see more protected land areas, a reduction in climate footprints, and changing environmental laws.

Encouraging Girls to be Educated

According to UNESCO estimates, 129 million girls globally do not attend school, which includes 32 million of primary school age and 97 million of secondary school age. Poverty, child marriage, gender bias and violence are just a few examples of the myriad ways in which young girls are prevented from attending school.

In getting more girls to have the opportunity to attend a school and receive an education, girls currently enrolled in school can learn about empowerment and the opportunities that they can have in the world. Several Universities around Dallas offer courses surrounding feminism in correlation to gender and power, allowing women to be empowered to pursue any career of their choice.

“Educated women can help the environment by implementing everyday changes in the home, teaching their children, educating others, conducting scientific research, leading corporations and changing policies by becoming political leaders,” Dr. Claire L. Sahlin, professor at Texas Woman's University, said.

At Texas Woman’s University, administrator Dr. Claire L. Sahlin used to teach a course on feminist propectives of environmental issues, encouraging her students to become more aware of their effect on the environment.

“I think we need more leadership and science programs for girls from a young age, so that girls will grow up with the confidence to change public policies and to pursue scientific discovery,” Sahlin said. “Programs encouraging girls and women to travel abroad can be very beneficial in helping us see that the things we often take for granted and believe that we need are rather things that we desire and want, often to the detriment of the environment.”

Art by Grace Hoverman

“The median age at which those with a master’s degree or more first give birth is about 30. This is greater than the median age of first birth for women with a high school diploma or less, which is roughly 24.”