Made you click, right? Congrats to climate educator Laura Schifter, who just launched A Climate Mom on Substack, with a timely open letter post about what KPop Demon Hunters can teach parents about climate action: “This Halloween, when kids on every block dress up as Rumi from KPop Demon Hunters (the most watched Netflix film ever), the U.S. climate movement should pay attention,” she writes.
Laura’s no stranger to finding and creating climate lessons that resonate with students and their parents. She’s a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute, where she founded and directs This Is Planet Ed, an initiative focused on equipping young people with the knowledge and skills they need to be climate advocates.
OK, OK, but what’s the link to KPop Demon Hunters? Laura pulls from the movie a metaphor for climate advocacy. If you somehow haven’t seen it, a quick recap: It’s the story of Rumi, the leader of a girl group called HUNTR/X that uses their voices as weapons against the demons threatening humanity. Rumi is (spoiler alert!) herself part demon, and it’s not until she embraces her own darkness that her group can defeat their enemy. Laura, who thankfully has climate on the brain, sees this same story in the climate movement. “For years,” she writes, “the movement has fought external demons (fossil fuels, deniers, political obstruction) while ignoring its inner one: a disconnect from the very people whose collective voice we need for real action.”
Good, right?
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She points out that despite mounting evidence of global warming touching nearly every community in the country—including record-breaking heat waves, never-ending wildfire seasons, and devastating floods—climate somehow still ranks low among U.S. voters’ priorities. It’s so frustrating. She argues it ranks so low because our schools are not doing the job educating children about climate science. Also, climate advocates are failing to communicate to the public the very real health and economic impacts of global warming today.
“Climate education is not an accessory, it’s the foundation,” Laura writes, and it’s like you can hear her banging on her keyboard. “Climate literacy should be as fundamental as reading and math, taught in schools, reflected in museums, libraries, media, and everyday life.”
She goes on to implore us to educate with modern stories of climate change happening right now. Like, climate change is about children in the emergency room for heat stroke on 100-degree days. It’s about soaring electricity bills in a country that hasn’t yet transitioned to the cheapest possible energy sources—solar and wind. It’s about families with repeat Lyme disease infections because tick populations are on the rise in supercharged weather.
“When we tell these stories,” Laura explains in her new Substack, “climate change stops feeling like an abstract problem for the future and starts feeling like the urgent, human issue it is right now.”
Personal stories hold power—power that we can use to inspire neighbors to adopt rooftop solar or convince political leaders to protect us from coal plant pollution.
Just when she strays a little far afield for those KPop Demon Hunters fans, Laura neatly wraps up her argument: “Rumi learned that purity doesn’t defeat demons; honesty does,” she concludes. “We need a movement that embraces imperfection, meets people where they are, helps them understand our current world, and empowers them to use their voice. Our collective voice is more powerful than any individual action.” And on that note, cue one of the soundtrack’s most played songs, “How It’s Done.”
Read the full article on A Climate Mom.
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