This lesson demonstrates how classroom and community projects can improve the local environment and benefit communities beyond one's own. Students will discuss environmental concerns, analyze these concerns, and offer practical remedies. Students will conclude by devising a project to implement the remedies and share the results with classrooms around the world.

Geography, social studies

Standard 18: "How to apply geography to interpret the present and plan for the future"

Two to four hours

• Newspaper articles highlighting environmental issues
• Drawing paper and/or poster board
• Markers, colored pencils, or other drawing materials

Students will

• learn to recognize how human activities can have adverse environmental consequences; and
• propose alternative activities to reduce the negative effects of some of these consequences.

Have a class discussion about environmental issues. Even very young students tend to have information and opinions on environmental concerns. Record what your students consider to be environmental problems. Next to each problem record how social views and activities influence or control the problem. Examples: "People consume more energy and create more pollution than necessary because many of them drive inefficient cars." "Our landfills are filling rapidly because we discard too much waste."

Examine how these issues affect the students directly. Identify specific effects in your community or school. Students should have a clear understanding of cause and effect. Then talk about similar problems in other places and how societies elsewhere are coping (or failing to cope) with them.

Explore how an action in one place can affect another place and how problems can spread. Students should recognize that what may be a minor concern today can get worse. Air pollution from a power plant in the American Midwest can become acid rain over the Northeast. Water pollution upstream can create problems downstream.

Focus the student conversation on the local environmental problem you chose. Either individually or as a group, have students diagram the interconnections between causes and effects of the problem. The diagrams should include both large-scale effects (problems that could originate in your community but spread to others) and long-term effects (those that may not be seen for weeks, months, or years).

Divide your class into small groups. Encourage each group to sketch a map showing the areas affected by the environmental problem. The map should address several questions: What are the sources of the problem? Can they be pinpointed or are they geographically diffuse? How and where does the problem currently affect people or other aspects of the environment? Using colored pencils, students should also show how the geographic extent of the problem could change in the future.

Have the groups discuss how they might improve the situation.

Students should evaluate their solutions for practicality and effectiveness. A successful solution should include a goal, steps people can take to attain the goal, and a means of measuring progress toward the goal.

Students, as individuals or in small groups, should create a proposal that offers the best solution to the environmental problem they researched. The proposal can be written, oral, or both. It also could include a poster that encourages a change in behavior.

Choose a project that addresses one of the problems your students discussed. After completing it, have your students write a letter to someone in the future. The letter should explain how they identified the problem, what solutions they offered, and what actions they took to improve the situation for future generations.

Dany Ray of Washington Middle School in Cairo, Georgia, contributed classroom ideas for Standard 18.

Earth Day Network
GrassRoots Recycling Network
National Geographic: Earth Day