The Climate WebPreview
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Module 1 Learning Activity

So that wraps up Module 1. Let's recap some of the key ideas and takeaways.

A key reason for this course is that we tend to think about the role of individuals in tackling climate change in ways that aren't necessarily that helpful. The idea that we really need to think about personal responsibility -- that every little thing we do helps -- can be a distraction in terms of figuring out how do we bring about the systems change that is required if we're going to successfully tackle climate change.

I have one of my political cartoons on the slide; what's happening there is that you've got some people running along the path and the guy is saying, “awesome, I've been wanting to get more sustainable and resilient.” You can see the path goes past a gym, past a recycling center, and past a healthy organic food store. But then the path just keeps going up and up and up -- and it gets to Lemming Leap and all the people who are being more sustainable go off the cliff anyway into this abyss of climate change.

I hope you like the cartoon. It illustrates that much of what we tend to think about and do in when it comes to things like sustainability is not actually doing much about climate change. That is a real problem that we've got to do better at.

That's a key goal of this module, “Why This Course?” You can dig deeper into some resources for exploring the questions that are covered here, through the PDF attached for this module. You can go into the e-book to see the graphics and this cartoon, and find more materials relevant to this module.

I hope you'll take a few minutes as part of a learning activity to dig a little deeper into some of these things and reinforce the topics that we've covered in the module.

Up Next

In the next module, we'll come back to the question of why is climate change such a risk today? Because if it weren't, then there wouldn't be much reason to continue in the course. But the reality is, is that it is a risk. Moreover, it's a bigger risk than most people recognize. That's coming up next.

Additional Materials

To get a good overview of the topic of climate risk, we’d recommend these two somewhat dated but still very relevant reports. If you click through to them you’ll also see that we’ve extracted ideas and graphics you can take a look at.

Note that when you access these reports you can jump to their “parent thought” which is likely to be a much larger collection of potentially relevant materials.

To further explore the question of “Is It Our Fault?” you may find these news and opinion pieces worth perusing. Clicking on the links will take you to that thought in the Climate Web, from which you can activate the external link and open the story in your browser.

Again, when you access these stories you can jump to their “parent thought” which is likely to be a much larger collection of potentially relevant news and opinion stories.

There is a massive literature based around the idea that “every little bit helps.” As discussed in the course it’s a more complicated topic than it might appear to be, but we’ve included a few resources here that you might want to explore. We haven’t focused on the most recent such materials, in part because the same messages get delivered year after year.

Last, just a couple of materials relating to the topic of “recycling and climate change” in case you want to dig a bit deeper.