Red Pill or Blue Pill

Ten years ago, I saw Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth.  It was scary; I believed it.  But I kept on with usual activities.  Climate change was not at the center of my attention.

Yet, I noticed increasing changes in the weather, unusual events. Three years ago I became a member of the WMU Climate Change Working Group and began meeting regularly with scientists and social scientists on our campus, all experts on climate change. These people were profoundly troubled and desperate that we take immediate action.  They were doing everything they could think of to alert our community.

I began to share their concern.  I became involved in the campaign of my friend and colleague Paul Clements, one of the leaders of WMU Climate Change group, running against our congressman, Fred Upton, because of his work against climate change, Upton has been identified as the "#1 Enemy of the planet Earth in the US Congress."

I started reading more.  I thought about how to address climate change in my own field of English education.  I planned a class about climate change.  I gave talks at teacher conferences.  I became a coauthor of a book about teaching about climate change, now in progress.  I accepted the opportunity to teach this section of Our Place in Nature.

Starting the teaching of this class I find myself thinking of the film The Matrix (1999).  The main character, Neo, has moments of awareness that there is something fundamental going on behind the facade of normality of his every day life. But he is not sure what it is or what to think.  Then he is given a choice, a red pill or blue pill, gain knowledge, find out what is really going on as uncomfortable as that may be, or choose to live without knowledge, to remain in his uninformed, uninvolved everyday world.  Is our class the red pill? Do you choose to swallow it?