December 7: Protect the Orangutans

Rhyming Prompt: December 7

The orangutan’s name means “man of the wood”

And they’re known for being both clever and good.

In tropical forests they spread seeds around

And help guarantee healthy plants will abound.

Of all the great apes, they’re in the most danger

Of going extinct, and what’s even stranger,

People don’t know how amazing they are!

Let’s learn about them, then let’s make them all stars.

If all our friends give the orangutans aid

Maybe their homes won’t further degrade.

A closeup image of the prompt for December 7. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border, and has a silver seal with a gold embossed frog in the righthand corner. It is propped in a lit Christmas tree.

Download the prompts for December 5-8 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).

Other Materials:

If you would like, some money to donate to help protect threatened orangutans, and some device with internet access.

Suggested Pose:

We happen to have an orangutan friend hanging around, so Frantz has been getting acquainted. Aren’t they cute together?

An image of Frantz the frog nestled inside the arms of a large plush orangutan. The prompt for the day is sitting on the couch before them.

Activity:

Spend some time learning about orangutans with your kids. You might want to check out this page from National Geographic that has lots of great information, or this page from the San Diego Zoo that has an excellent orangutan call and printable coloring page. We’ll do our best impressions of orangutans, trying to move like them, sound like them, and think like them. And then we’ll talk about more about the rainforest, how orangutans live in the rainforest, and why we need to protect the rainforest—not just because of climate change, but because without it, orangutans will not be able to survive. Once we’ve had that conversation, we’ll be making a donation to the Orangutan Foundation International and to the Rain Forest Action Network, both of which do crucial work to protect orangutans and the rainforest. The donations, of course, are completely optional.

Rationale:

This exercise is building on yesterday’s. By chatting about how palm oil in the snacks in our kitchen can drive deforestation, and how deforestation can drive climate chaos, we started to help our kids understand why they should extend empathy toward the environment. But, as we’ve already discussed, humans are more capable of empathizing with the familiar. A 2013 study that used neuroimaging to investigate empathy revealed that our brains are actually wired to register the closest members of our social group as overlapping with the self. Their concluding hypothesis “is that altruism motivated by empathy may require some level of overlap in the neural representation of self and other—one that conveys information about this extended self to other brain systems responsible for motivation and action” (Beckes et al., 2013, p. 676). If our brains are built to empathize more naturally with what is familiar—so familiar that it almost seems like an extension of the self—asking them to relate to something that is nothing like us is an almost insurmountable ask. I can think of fewer things I am likely to confuse with my “self” than an ecosystem a continent away, and I’m an adult; my children are still developing empathetically. So how do we make it work?

By introducing the orangutans, and situating them firmly in the context of the rainforest, we can hopefully give our kids a relatable tether for an abstract concept. Orangutans have a lot of human features and they’re adorable to boot, so they’re about as relatable as an animal can be. Of course there are lots of reasons for our kids to want to protect the rainforest, but knowing these distant relatives face extinction if we don’t can help us generate a sense of urgency. My kids absolutely love The Lorax, but they’re not particularly emotional about the situation until those brown Barbaloots start getting the crummies. If we can picture a Barbaloot, or an Orangutan, as one relatable victim of the compounding calamity of deforestation, we have a better chance of expanding our empathetic capacity to include less charismatic components of delicate biosystems, too.

Book Recommendation:

We’ll be reading I am Jane Goodall, by Brad Meltzer and Christopher Eliopoulos, today. The book doesn’t discuss orangutans specifically, but I love it because it shows the importance of perseverance, critical thinking, and acting empathetically across species-lines. My kids love the comix-style illustrations and the biographical information at the end. You can watch a read aloud here.

An image of the cover of I Am Jane Goodall, by Brad Meltzer and Christopher Eliopoulos.

References

Beckes, L., Coan, J. A., & Hasselmo, K. (2013). Familiarity promotes the blurring of self and other in the neural representation of threat. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(6), 670-677. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nss046

December 6: Palm Oil Hunt

Rhyming Prompt: December 6

Rainforests are known as the lungs of the earth;

They make most of the air we have breathed since our birth!

They store up the carbon that humans produce,

And cutting them down only sets it all loose.

I’m sorry to say that the forest’s in danger;

Yet just searching our pantry could be a game changer!

People cut forests to make palm oil

Which makes certain snacks less likely to spoil.

Let’s read the ingredients just to be sure

We choose snacks that won’t hurt the woods anymore!

Download the prompts for December 5-8 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).

Close up of the prompt for December 6. Prompt is printed on cream-colored cardstock with a green border and a silver wax seal with a gold embossed frog. It is nestled in a lit Christmas tree.

Other Materials:

Snacks that are free of palm oil. You can find a useful list here. We’ll likely do veggie straws, honey maid graham crackers, and fruit. Anything fresh will be palm oil free.

Suggested Pose:

Frantz has gotten in over his head, and now he’s stuck in a bag of veggie straws. Who can blame him? These things are delicious! And palm-oil free!

An image of a bag of Veggie Straws sitting on our dining room table. You can just see Frantz’s feet sticking out of the top of the bag. The December 6 prompt sits in the foreground.

Activity:

Go through your snacks and search for ones that contain palm oil (look for palmate, PKO, palm kernel oil, stearic acid, sodium layer sulfate, acetyl or octyl palmitate, elaeis guineensis, and anything ending with palmitate). Which ones are you willing to live without? If you don’t think you can give them up, try looking online; sometimes there’s an easy substitute that’s free from palm oil available from a different brand. If your kids are older, you might have them help you track down the parent company that makes the snack, and send them an e-mail asking them to stop using palm oil in their products. But the best part, for me at least, is making a list of snacks that are free from palm oil and delicious, so you know what to reach for without guilt.

We eliminated palm oil from our house years ago, but then the pandemic hit, and suddenly we found ourselves picking up shelf-stable snacks and not being able to easily read labels. It is hard to eliminate palm oil if you’re trying to avoid going to the grocery store constantly, staying too long, or breaking the bank. I’m excited for this opportunity to re-commit, but I also advocate giving yourself some grace. Choosing palm-oil-free foods more frequently is a great step, even if choosing them never is impossible.

If you’re struggling, you might want to read up on all the sneaky, alternative names for palm oil. You can also read up on the problem with palm oil here. This satirical commercial (appropriate for kids of all ages), also works to illustrate the relationship between snacks and deforestation, and might be a great point of entry.

Rationale:

For decades, hard-working environmental educators believed that if people knew about climate change they would take action. However, a significant and ever-growing body of research from the last decade has revealed that it’s (unfortunately) not that simple. Sociologist Kari Norgaard notes that while people need information about climate science in order to become invested in climatological issues, information alone is inadequate to prompt the public to take meaningful action in the face of anthropogenically motivated climate change (2011). To put it bluntly, the default climate science communication method of supplying credible climate science to the public has failed to galvanize widespread action in response to climate catastrophe. Yet climate chaos is a wicked problem; it exacerbates social injustice, promises to cause mass extinctions, and is expected to create hundreds of millions of climate refugees. As former President Barack Obama put it, “no challenge -- no challenge -- poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” If our traditional methods of environmental education are ineffective, then we must urgently conceptualize new ways to inspire a widespread and passionate commitment to climate justice.

I have a lot of ideas for how we can do this, but one involves empathy. Not surprisingly, research suggests that the relationship between empathy and proenvironmental tendencies is intertwined. In a 2015 study, researchers discovered that “other-oriented tendencies, such as compassion for others, effectively strengthen tendencies related to the conservation of nature” (Pfattheicher et al., 2016, p. 940). People who exhibit higher levels of empathy toward humans also exhibit higher levels of empathy toward nature and environmental systems, despite their abstraction. Interestingly, too, when participants were given a series of pictures, they exhibited greater levels of environmental empathy if they were paired with instructions to consider perspective-taking (i.e. “It is important for the study that you imagine how the pictured persons feel. Try to feel what the persons are currently going through and how they feel. You can let yourself be guided by your feelings” (Pfattheicher et al., 2016, p. 934). I have plenty of lingering questions about this research—how long does the effect last? How can we use this discovery to come up with something more effective than largely ineffectual environmental campaigns of the 90s that depicted polar bears and other charismatic animals under threat? Does this empathetic sentiment translate into meaningful action? But I am nonetheless compelled. If we can teach our children (and ourselves) to be more empathetic toward the environment in an ecosystemic way, to understand the complex transnational engines that drive climate chaos, and to appreciate the limited role of individual action for a problem that is undeniably irresolvable without major societal reconfiguration, then we may just be on to something.

To that end, the next couple of days are designed to help our kids process on an emotional level how grocery purchases at home drive the deforestation of the Amazon, the relentless slide toward extinction of orangutans, and the loss of one of our most essential carbon sinks. But, uhhhh, in a fun, festive way.

Book Recommendation:

My top recommendation is for Mary DeMocker’s excellent book The Parents’ Guide to Climate Revolution, which brought us this palm oil hunt. This book has tons of clearly described actionable activities to do with your kids of all ages.

I also love Over and Under the Rainforest, by Kate Messner & Christopher Silas Neal, and you can watch a read-aloud with the author here. If your kids are little, this Deep in the Forest: A Seek-and-Find Adventure by Josef Antòn & Lucie Brunellièreis gorgeous and has been a favorite for both my kids.

The cover of Deep in the Forest: A Seek-and-Find Adventure, by Josef Antòn & Lucie Brunellière

References

Norgaard, K. M. (2011). Living in denial: Climate change, emotions, and everyday life. MIT Press.

Pfattheicher, S., Sassenrath, C. & Schindler, S. (2016). Feelings for the suffering of others and the environment: Compassion fosters proenvironmental tendencies. Environment and Behavior, 48(7), 929-945. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916515574549