Page 94 - BB_Textbook

Knowing Your Carbon Footprint and Doing Something About It
Step One: As a group, compile your best photographs into a descriptive PowerPoint presentation. Each group may take five minutes to present in class. Then as a whole class, decide on several “categories” of carbon footprint impact. Select the best pictures from the group PowerPoints and create a single class PowerPoint. Discuss ideas for reducing or eliminating these impacts. Diagram or photograph these ideas. Now remake the class PowerPoint. Show how you can change
your collective carbon footprint by showing the challenge (examples of negative impact) and opportunity (examples of positive change). Climate change is not only a burden but also an opening for progress.
For example, a category could be “overpackaged food.”
Show pictures of overpackaging. Then demonstrate natural wraps or reusable wraps.
Step Tow: As a class, develop one coherent presentation
of what the class learned. Be sure to provide photographic evidence of negative impact and positive change. Discuss whether this activity has caused you to think differently
about carbon footprint, or to imagine the role of teenagers
in addressing climate change, environmental pollution, or human-nature relations. Arrange with your teacher to share your PowerPoint via a global classroom with another Delta high school.
Step Three: Decide how your language class can expand its experiment to include other students and disciplines. If your initial effort show ways to reduce or refuse certain kinds of waste or carbon footprint impact, now consider reusing, recycling, reclaiming, renewing, rethinking, redesigning, and revaluing things in your neighborhood or at your school. For example, plastics are a petroleum product made from fossil fuels. Trillions of plastic straws are thrown away every year. They do not disintegrate (break down into natural products). They are a permanent waste ... a serious contributor to carbon footprint. To reduce, reuse, recycle, refuse, or redesign straws would mean what? Or to do the same for all the plastic in the convenience of cà phê mang đi? And so forth. You decide how far your class or school can take this task.
Step Four: Chapter by chapter, monitor in your notebooks the number of steps you took, the lessons you learned, and the hours you spent working bilingually with purpose.
94 CHAPTER 2 | CLIMATE
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