The Climate Crisis Has a History
Articles/Websites
Grades9, 10, 11, 12, APEarth and Space Sciences, History
This resource has been reviewed by SubjectToClimate's climate scientists and verified for scientific accuracy and up-to-date information. Learn about our review process →
Provided by Zinn Education Project
What it is
- This interactive timeline traces the history of our current climate crisis back to 1452, examining human contributions to creating our current environmental emergency and scientific breakthroughs in climate change awareness.
- Students will learn about the historical events and discoveries that initiated the global climate crisis and attempts and failures to address climate change.
Teaching tips
Positives
- There are 108 stories on the climate crisis timeline, enough to create an entire learning unit.
- The article includes several teaching ideas.
- There are links to related articles, podcasts, and books that will enable teachers to enhance their lessons.
- The resource also includes links to even more teaching materials via a helpful sidebar.
Additional Prerequisites
- Teachers can share this website via social media or print it to provide a hard copy.
- Some timeline stories involve slavery and genocide, so teachers should prepare for questions.
- Students should have prior knowledge of the climate crisis.
Differentiation
- Since there are 108 stories, History teachers can assign research projects to individual students and have the students include other significant events that happened in their given years.
- Each timeline event presents only a headline of information, so teachers can have students work in small groups to provide the details of each contributing factor.
- Art teachers can have students create sketches for each main event on the timeline.
- More advanced students can read the full articles included in some events, while those with low reading stamina can read just a few of the events.
- The readings include a lot of content-specific vocabulary, so ELL students may benefit from using a tool like the Google Translate Chrome extension to translate the page.
From the scientist review
This resource from the Zinn Education Project provides an excellent and informative interactive climate crisis timeline. The timeline starts in 1452 with the Doctrine of Discovery and continues through 2023, with each timeline tile providing additional information for students to explore. This interactive timeline is well sourced, well researched, and provides a wealth of information for students to learn about the climate crisis.
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