Teaching the Culprits of Climate Chaos by Bill Bigelow

Bigelow describes an activity to teach students about whose “fault” climate change is. The five main culprits are China, India, US, consumer culture, and capitalism. He purposefully chose a mixture of governments and systems to challenge students to interrogate which is more impactful, and whether they are even different. The teacher prosecutes each “defendant” and teams of students argue their innocence and try to point fingers at other teams. At the end, all students assign a percentage of blame to each defendant.

Bigelow uses this activity to challenge students to think critically about blame when it comes to massive global issues like climate change. Personally, I appreciate that he focuses only on governments and systems, completely taking the blame off the individual. Although it’s true that individuals have an impact on the climate, corporations and governments hold far more power to contribute to change. In fact, I wonder if you could add certain corporations in the activity to more specifically illuminate the impact of consumer culture.

Bigelow also mentions an optimistic way to teach about climate change. Instead of just focusing on who does harm, he has students research successful climate moments. Understanding that when climate movements can make change teaches students that the negativity isn’t the whole story, preventing climate anxiety from turning into climate depression. I think this is especially important for students whose home countries and families might be more directly impacted by climate change (demographic breakdown of climate change-related depression).