Italy to become first country to make studying climate change compulsory in schools

Italy is to become the first country in the world in which the study of climate change will be made compulsory in schools, the education minister announced on Tuesday.

A fire in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, September this year.

Under a new law, all state schools will dedicate around an hour a week to sustainability and climate change issues from the beginning of the next academic year, said Lorenzo Fioramonti. That would amount to around 33 hours a year.

“This is a new model of civic education centred on sustainable development and climate change,” the minister told The Telegraph.

“It’s a new subject that will be taught from grade one to grade 13, from the ages of six through to 19.”

Read the story from The Telegraph by Nick Squires - “Italy to become first country to make studying climate change compulsory in schools.”

Surviving Climate Change in Italy

On a cold, wet afternoon in February 2014, Andrew Mathews stood on a mountain in Tuscany and looked out over the valley below. An environmental anthropologist and a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Mathews had gone there to see chestnut forests that were growing in the Monti Pisani, a mountainous region west of Florence, Italy. The air smelled of rotting leaves, and many of the trees were hundreds of years old.

These chestnut trees in the Monti Pisani were cut back
two years before this photo was taken. The practice
of coppicing helps create shorter trees that are less
likely to fall over in high winds.

“It wanted to be spring, but it wasn’t quite there,” Mathews recalled when we spoke, “and the leaves hadn’t really come in on the trees yet. Everything was still pretty bare.”

The chestnuts’ presence told a story of human history: For centuries, peasants in the region had harvested the nuts and cared for the trees. They would cut back branches and trunks, using the wood to heat their homes, and rake up leaf litter from the forest floor. In the early 1900s, chestnuts were a major food source for approximately half a million people in Italy, Mathews said.

Read the Sapiens story by Dana J. Graef - “Surviving Climate Change in Italy.”

The Birth of Predatory Capitalism

(Just yesterday, a university economics professor said that confronting and addressing climate change was all about understanding and repairing our relationship with money and this story suggests that his argument was correct and puts the onus on each of us to better filter out the detritus of life - Robert McLean)

A (successful) American politician who cries: “God is a white supremacist!” Neo-nazis in the Bundestag. The extreme right rising in Italy. Poland’s authoritarians purging its Supreme Court.

How did we get here? To a world where the forces of intolerance and indecency are on the rise, and those of decency, wisdom, and civilization are waning? Is something like a new Dark Age falling?

I think it has everything to do with predatory capitalism, and so I want to tell you a story. Of how it came to be born, in four steps, which span three decades.

Read the Eudaimonia story by Umair Haque from Medium -  “The Birth of Predatory Capitalism.”

Ugo understands what is happening and discusses the seven shocking events of 2014

Ugo Bardi with his
latest book, "Extracted".

Ugo Bardi understands how humans have plundered earth’s resources and subsequently seriously disrupted its climate system.

Writing on his blog “Resource Crisis”, Bardi discusses his “Seven shocking events of 2014” listed, as he points out, in no particular order.

Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. He is interested in resource depletion, system dynamics modelling, climate science and renewable energy.

His most recent book in English is “Extracted: How the Quest for Global Mining Wealth is Plundering the Planet”.

He is a contributor for The Oil Drum; president of ASPO Italy, a member of the scientific committee of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) and author of several books, including "The Limits to Growth Revisited".