US Chapter

Hey! Welcome to the US Chapter of Education4Earth, where we focus on the environmental issues local to Pennsylvania and Michigan. Here’s a bit more about the two parts of our chapter:

As part of this portion of our chapter, we focus on teaching students from other chapters topics at the intersection of environmental science and politics/sociology/economics. For instance, we teach US history in the context of global climate action-- specifically, what factors led protestors to rally after President George Bush pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, and how decades of climate denialism culminated in the People’s Climate March in 2017.

As part of our sociology and environmental science courses, we take perspectives from groups of students from other chapters to discuss how different cultures react and respond to climate change related issues in their local communities, as well as how culture influences policy decisions at the national level.

The economics portion of this program focuses firstly on fundamental economic concepts taught in AP Macroeconomics and AP Microeconomics curricula, and how they can be understood through local environmental-economic conflicts in our different chapters. For instance, we teach students of the India chapter the implications of rapid urbanization, specifically in the context of Bengaluru, and how that may impede both economic growth and exacerbate present environmental challenges such as flash flooding. We currently have 31 students being taught by 12 members of this chapter.

This part of our chapter focuses on a couple local environmental issues that the United States faces, electrical waste and overconsumption. The United States dumps 300-400 million electronic items per year (NYT), much of which has the potential to instead be recycled and made into a different product. We began the initiative in our local neighborhoods, where our leaders and members went from doorbell to doorbell collecting used devices. Since then, in the summer of 2023, we have set up two battery collection centers with information about electronics recycling in our local town, Doylestown, in order to improve recycling rates and serve as a consistent location for people to drop off their used devices. In total, we were able to collect more than 3,000 devices!

Our other initiative is aimed at addressing overconsumption in its different forms in the United States, specifically school supplies and clothing. Every year, Americans spend $41.5 billion on back-to-school-shopping, which, in many cases, leaves goods from the last year in the trash. So, we decided to run a month-long used-school supply drive in our local communities to give our old books, staplers, folders, and many other goods a continued life in other Philadelphia-area communities. We were able to collect more than 2,500 products.