{"id":58270,"date":"2025-06-29T15:45:34","date_gmt":"2025-06-29T19:45:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/?p=58270"},"modified":"2025-07-01T09:29:01","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T13:29:01","slug":"teaching-environmental-politics-during-the-trump-presidency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/2025\/06\/29\/teaching-environmental-politics-during-the-trump-presidency\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Environmental Politics During the Trump Presidency"},"content":{"rendered":"
This will be my radical action: I will teach my students the truth about climate change. I will tell them stories about people just like them who have made a difference. I will sit with them in the discomfort of the unknown, the betrayal, and the fear.<\/blockquote><\/figure>\n

When I was offered a full-time, tenure-track position in environmental politics just out of graduate school, I was elated. My research on disaster response, environmental stewardship, and community organizing, as well as my past experience teaching urban ecology made it feel like a perfect fit. It hardly occurred to me that I would be teaching about U.S. government and politics during one of the most contentious election seasons in my lifetime, or that I would have to stand in front of my students, a diverse group of people including many immigrants, and explain that even though the 14th Amendment of the United State Constitution \u2014 which they just learned about \u2014 said that anyone born on U.S. soil was a citizen, our president was trying to change that, and neither I, nor anyone else, could tell them what would happen.<\/p>\n

This spring, I was given the chance to teach Environmental Politics for the first time. Getting to design my own syllabus was exciting, and I created a course that I felt balanced important history on U.S. and international environmental efforts with a focus on local grassroots organizing. Though the content was familiar to me, it hit different under Trump 2.0 \u2015 both for me and for my students. Like many environmental courses, I assigned an excerpt of Silent Spring, the 1962 book exposing the harms of pesticides like DDT and eventually laying the groundwork for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and landmark legislation like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Referencing this history, one of my students innocently asked, \u201cAre these still in place today?\u201d The answer is, of course, yes, but I couldn\u2019t say that with as much confidence as I\u2019d like. Who knows what the future holds for these environmental protections when the administration seems set on slashing all kinds of environmental and social legislation? This exchange happened days after Trump\u2019s EPA issued rollbacks of many existing pollution regulations, and announced that it would attempt to scrap the 2009 endangerment finding that greenhouse gasses are indeed dangerous to planetary and human health<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Classroom
Classroom in an academic building. Photo: Tomwsulcer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Later in the semester as I taught about international climate treaties, I had no choice but to note that Trump had pulled out of the Paris Agreement for the second time<\/a>. When we discussed U.S. environmental history, I explained how the already insufficient previous efforts to curb federal emissions that had helped the U.S. lower our carbon footprint, along with the investments in clean energy that we know are part of the answer to avoid full climate calamity, were now being dismissed by a president who believes that the urgency of climate change is a hoax<\/a>. Our deeply partisan politics meant that an assigned reading acknowledging the relationship between Republican lawmakers and the fossil fuel industry was accused of \u201cbias\u201d by a student. When I posed the question of whether students felt it possible to discuss climate change in today\u2019s world without discussing politics, including the differences between political parties, the student dropped the class.<\/p>\n

Yet, the vast majority of my students felt betrayed in a different way. As they learned about research from the 70s and 80s (which to many of them feels like ancient history) that had already proven a link between increasing greenhouse gas emissions and environmental catastrophe<\/a>, their frustration was palpable. They expressed that they had been hearing for their whole lives about the urgency of saving the planet, and asked why people still weren\u2019t taking it seriously. Answering these questions feels especially delicate in a time where many young people are becoming more conservative, in part because they have seen the establishment fail them again and again. They are already susceptible to the conspiracies and disinformation fed to them by the algorithms on a daily basis, and I struggle at times with encouraging students to be critical of our institutions without becoming apathetic or closed off to fact-driven political discourse.<\/p>\n