Morgan Phillips: repairing an individualistic society

"Individualism is an ideology. It has gone hyper and is causing great personal, social and environmental harm. If you are feeling this and want to fight back, The Miracle Inn is here for you."

Dr. Morgan Phillips worked at the NGO Global Action Plan for 6.5 years, developing a climate curriculum for the school system in the UK. He recently launched his own initiative, The Miracle Inn, to apply ideas he's developed over more than a decade of work on the social basis of climate communications and democracy.

https://www.themiracleinn.org/

In this episode, produced and edited by Catherine Du, he is interviewed by Catherine, Helena Rambler, and David Case, three students at Hunter College High School in NYC.

Transcript

Morgan Phillips final 36 min

Sun, Jun 21, 2026 4:04PM • 36:03

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Climate education, socioeconomic model, consumerism, sustainability education, community building, interdependence, climate chaos, critical thinking, compassionate values, circular economy, curriculum design, climate literacy, American dream, environmental club, climate action.

SPEAKERS

David Case, Catherine Du, Morgan Phillips, Helena Rambler

Morgan Phillips  00:02

The socioeconomic model that we have is never really going to be compatible with the stable climate or with greater income equality. What is climate education? Is it just learning the facts about climate change, or is it far deeper than that to think about where does climate change come from? How does it interact with everything else.

Catherine Du  00:30

Welcome back to another episode of Bridging the Carbon Gap. My name is Catherine Du, and I'm a freshman at Hunter College High School. In this episode, Helena Rambler, David Case and I will speak to Morgan Phillips, former Director of Education and Youth Engagement at Global Action Plan, and now the founder of The Miracle Inn. Dr. Phillip's work focuses on holistic views of environmental activism, community building, and interdependence.

Morgan Phillips  01:02

looking at deeper into what the root causes are, looking at consumerism as an issue, and how that drives our behavior and drives our carbon footprints, and then helping young people come up with projects where they can start to change things at a local level, improve the environmental performance of their school, hopefully have a regenerative impact on the school environment and work with community groups to learn how to prepare clothes and electronics. We do quite a lot of that work to show what education can be like when it's not just sitting in rows in a classroom listening to a teacher going through a PowerPoint. 

Essentially, in science geography class, you learn a little bit about climate change and the facts and the science, but it's not there in depth, and we want to see more of it, but we also want to see it done well. What is sustainability education? Does it involve project-based learning? Does it involve interacting with the community or getting outdoors into nature, rather than it just being a PowerPoint slide about carbon emissions and polar bears and ice caps.

Catherine Du

You mentioned this can be conveyed in multiple ways, not just the classic classroom scene. How would you design a class for climate change? 

Morgan Phillips

It's tricky. It depends on the context, because live in New York, the distance from nature was quite staggering. Obviously, you have some green space there, but what climate education looks like in your context compared to what it looks like in more rural areas is going to be very different because of what's possible. You have to have the fundamentals. People need to understand the science of climate change and the basics of how it's happening and what its impacts are, and to have that improved knowledge and understanding. 

A lot of it really is about young people's skills, and that's both their thinking skills, but also practical skills, because we were going into climate chaos over the next few decades, because helping young people to see how climate change is related to biodiversity loss, to inequality, consumerism, and showing how all those things are stitched together, helping to look at it through different angles, come at it through those different angles as well, so helping young people to go from what their life is like every day, hundreds and hundreds of adverts encouraging you to buy things and spend money on things under the promise it's going to make you happy or successful or give you more status. There's a lot of BS in all that, that's just not reality. But is that stuff really making you happy? 

We're trying to help young people to do projects as a group, either with their friendship group or some people who acquaintances and get to know them, but also reach out with two people in their local community to get used to that sense that we are interdependent, that we need each other to survive. That's about helping us to band together, because there are big powerful factors shaping the direction the world is going in there needs to be a collective action to overcome that, so there's a lot of that building up of the desire to take action, but also the feeling that you can, because you're not alone, that the young people do want to take action and do it together, and so we have a cycle that we use a global action plan to check that our education projects are doing sustainability education, which we borrowed from Peter Sitoris, an academic, and discover book called Education for the Anthropocene, the Anthropocene being the geological era that humans have created. He has this model called Grasp, Care, Imagine, Communicate, and Act. 

So, the Grasp stuff is about understanding the world, learning some information, but also having critical thinking skills and systems, relational intelligence, that sort of stuff, and then there's care, caring for yourself, for others, for the planet. That's something that teachers are nurturing, whether they can tend to or not, but developing those compassionate values, championing those, and reinforcing them through the education, so helping people have more kindness, empathy, cooperation, collaboration, honesty, and connection to nature, and so on, for all those compassionate values. Imagine such a big one that we need to be creative, we need new ideas for how to run the world, how to structure society. It can't continue like it is now, so we need imaginative ability, come up with new ideas, imagine alternative futures. 

Key thing about imagination is that when somebody suggests an idea to you, then you can understand the idea. Quite often we get stuck when people say, how about we have something like a circular economy. If you don't have the imaginative skills, then it can be hard for you to work out what's meant by a circular economy. If then they dismiss it, you know, it's a bit too complicated. I'll just stick with what I know. So, having the imaginative skills is both coming up with new ideas, but also the ability to understand other people's ideas when they come up with them, as you've got those alternative futures through conversations and riffing off each other's thoughts and ideas, you need to turn them into something, and to do that, you need to communicate well. 

You need to be able to write well about them, speak well about them, make films about them, TikTok videos about them. You need to be able to do that communication piece to then draw more people in, so that you can then get to that fifth stage, which is to take action, then actually to go out there and start testing stuff, start piloting things, start being the change in the world that you want to see. We use the word prefigure its quite a lot, which is about if you want school to be different, you've got to start doing school differently.

Catherine Du  05:56

You left your job December of 2025 to create the Miracle Inn. I was curious, how your views have changed as a result of changing your job and starting a new project.

Morgan Phillips  06:07

Quite a tricky thing to figure that out. I think my previous job was very intense, and a lot of jobs in the environmental and geo sector are especially within the larger charities. I think it's true at every level, so it's quite hard to switch off and take time to reflect on you're trying to do, and why you're doing it. It's been nice to have a bit of a break, and we'll be calmer now, maybe to start some new ideas. And the miracle in is something I've been thinking about doing for a few years now. I've come even more of the view that we need to do some really fundamental work, if we're going to really have the effect that we need to have on the kind of policy and programs and projects around climate and nature. 

Catherine Du  06:53

I was reading your technical version of the theory of change, and you said that intersectionality, you gains momentum over the technocratic solutions that don't shift, and throughout all three phases of your theory of change, that conversation sparked the new socioeconomic model. So, I was curious, how you solve how climate education ties into this broader picture within your theory of change.

Morgan Phillips  07:14

Yeah, great question. I think for some context of the theory of change for the miracle, and is looking at the big picture of how society might change over the coming decades, hopefully in a positive way to address climate and nature crisis. Set that out in three phases, about 10 steps of what might happen. Theoretical, we don't know whether we're at the Miracle, and is one of 1000s of organizations that will hopefully contribute to that positive change in formal education, especially in schools. I think climate education will continue to be stuck in geography and in the sciences, and the goal will be to help learners to develop a scientific understanding of the causes, impacts, and the different responses to climate change, be those litigation or adaptation responses. So, it'll be quite scientific, but technical to people to understand the issues and what might be done about them, and that's fine, and obviously necessary, but I think what's interesting is in the humanities, teachers and learners there, they can explore how climate change intersects with other issues like poverty, colonialism, physical health, mental health, economics, racism, politics. We can look at those root causes and start to see that they aren't single issues, they'll have similar roots in the ideologies and the ideas and the traditions that shape the socio-economic system that we're in. 

By doing that, the conversations can start to reveal the need for a new socio-economic model, and the possibility of what that might look like. Saw that conversation come about, because joining up all those dots and seeing how there aren't just all these single issues that people are trying to solve independently of each other, they're all related, and we all have similar roots. So, can we think about what the roots are? 

I think that's starting to happen a bit more now. People are recognizing that the socioeconomic model that we have is never really going to be compatible with your stable climate or with greater income equality, both within nations and between what is climate education, but isn't just learning the facts about climate change, or is it far deeper than that to think about where does climate change come from? How does it interact with everything else? Therefore, what really needs to happen on it, it's more than just behavioral nudges and technological solutions

Catherine Du  09:42

In your TED talk, you mentioned educating the youth is important, but there's still a knowledge action gap. So, how do you think students can build community like interdependence?

Morgan Phillips  09:51

The knowledge action gap, it's the idea that whilst we can learn the facts about climate change, when people have a lot of knowledge and understanding of climate change, that knowledge understand doesn't necessarily turn into action, you can turn into some action, but not constantly lots of different action, because we have so many different drivers of our behaviors and high climate change knowledge, environmental knowledge is one of them. Um, how students can kind of build it to me to independence. 

I think it's really interesting, because I think schools, especially state schools quite often a melting pot for people being probably for a lot of people now in that kind of socially fragmented society, it's probably the only time in their life where they're regularly mixing with people from different backgrounds, levels of income in their household, people from different parts of the world, different parts of the country, different ethnicities, different levels of ability, and so on. And when they're in that melting pot, they're learning to rub along with each other and get along as best they can. In like, doesn't necessarily happen in other kind of domains in people's lives, especially in societies which have become heavily individualized or hyper individualized, but some schools will facilitate that process for helping young people to rub along with each other much better than others. 

There are schools where age groups mix regularly, they invite people in from outside of the school into the school regularly. One kind of culture is more conducive to that team interdependence than another. 

So, I think you know, my son, he's five, he's in a primary school here in West Wales. They facilitate that mixing between students, because it's quite a small school, but suddenly been there for a year, and he's already a friend of children who are two or three years older than them, that mixing goes on. The other thing the school does really well is to involve the children, the teachers, and the parents. Parents get invited to concerts and plays in the school, but also to help with running them and to help children to practice and get better at them. Between us, as a school community, we make things work. There's been examples of parents coming up with ideas for, like, a sponsored run for children to do, and the whole school did it, but it was reliant on parents getting involved in it. That's interdependence. The event wouldn't happen if everybody didn't chip in. We were all dependent on each other to make it happen, and so children, those environments, they're far more likely to think of themselves as an interdependent self rather than a kind of independent self or a rugged independent self, so that's how schools can nurture that interdependence, that understanding that don't stand on your own two feet, you do need other people, and you do need to help other people, and that's who we are as a species. We're naturally cooperative. Sadly, not all schools are like that. 

There are schools that think the kids have got to learn to be independent. They need to be able to stand on their own two feet, get through their exams. They need to be taught not to rely on others, not to seek help, not to give help, just to focus on themselves, and I think that's what a great thing for society, because it nurtures people feeling alone and losing the ability to support others and to cooperate, our social muscles, our ability to work with others and learn from others. 

So I think the next challenge is, how do you bring that spirit of interdependence and that culture into workplaces, into communities, into volunteer opportunities. As children move into , there's independence with more than human species, so that sort of recognition that ended on them, kind of even like rivers and oceans and the atmosphere, and so on, and that kind of nurturing bats is another level up. So, this, this is well, schools that do things like forest school, and we have beach school where we are. The children spend a whole day on the beach, getting sand under their fingernails and understanding what beaches and what that environment is, and how they're part of it, and connected to it. 

One of the things we did at Global Action Plan, my previous charity, was to work a project with young people to improve things in their schools, but they reached out into the community to try to find different community organizations that they could draw on, and then understand how the school is interdependent with the communities around them, so schools who think beyond the walls or the fences around the school and actually think about their entire neighborhood as the school, but not just the playground and the physical buildings, actually have a think about their education space as being far more than just the school.

Catherine Du  14:37

If you were to design like a curriculum for students on climate change, what would be in it to build this interdependence beyond the human species?

Morgan Phillips  14:47

I always have this kind of idea that all education should be for the environment. It doesn't necessarily all need to be about it either. I think in terms of designing a curriculum on climate change, I just think about the entire curriculum should be related to it and have a few positive impacts on how to design it. 

You need the science, you need the technical understanding, to understand what it is on a physical level, that's the cognitive part of it, but they need to get into that humanities part of it, understanding its origins, where it comes from, that's the key missing part in climate education at the moment, is getting into those deeper philosophical and political understanding, the origins of climate change, and the reasons why we're not tackling it, and some urgently as we need to. 

Thinking about how curriculum is designed up is really important, because a lot of countries, and this is true in the UK, we have different education systems in each of the four nations of the UK, but they're all broadly similar in the sense that the curriculum is a national curriculum, which is set from the center, from national government. 

They do it in a consultative way, and they bring experts in to support with it, but they decide what's in the curriculum, then schools have some freedom to add bits onto it, or decide how they're going to deliver the curriculum, but a lot of schools, it tends to be quite formulaic, and they'll not deviate too far from what they're supposed to be doing, or mandate to do. 

What would be wonderful to see, and I wrote some essays about this couple of years ago. Be to have a three thirds curriculum, where there's a national curriculum, but it only takes up a third of your time in school, maybe cover some of the real basics around maths and literacy and the sciences, but then you have a local curriculum, which is where we have an assembly process where citizens in and around a school come together to figure out what young people might need to learn, which is relevant to where they actually live in the original circumstance. Then have a third, which would be more of a hyper-local one, where teachers in the classroom and their children decide what to learn, and trust them that they'll pick interesting topics, because we definitely know that young people learn best when they're able to decide what they're going to learn themselves and choose how to do it. Giving them a third of the day or a third of the week to get stuck in on projects they want to learn about helps them to grow and develop and creates opportunities of interdependent learning, young people could decide to work together in a group of five or six, dig deeper into one aspect of climate change, for example, do a project on it, learn triggering that project, then another group might be doing something on water or energy or a different topic entirely, like some sporting topic, and so on. 

I think that would be way to support young people to learn in different ways, and hopefully learn in more effective ways, and develop a kind of love of learning, which is really what should be developed in schools. 

I'd love to hear about your education, and how you're experiencing the climate crisis, and the educational response to it. 

Helena Rambler  18:05

For me? My mother works in this world, so I was exposed at a pretty young age. In terms of my schooling, I've gotten not a lot of formal education on it. I had a class in fifth grade, then we touched upon it in seventh or eighth grade, but it's always been just a part of earth science, sort of focusing on the biology of the rest of the world. It's never really been the main focus of a class, but my school does have the environmental club, where people can come and discuss the climate crisis and learn about it. So I've definitely even just that club, it's run by students by everyone, kind of bringing in what they know and doing research together. I've learned so much more through that.

Morgan Phillips  18:48

Why do you think it is that you don't get told more of it? Both of you guys can answer this, but why do you think it is that it's marginalized in your learning?

Helena Rambler  18:55

I honestly don't know. There is a class returning next year that is on and off every year, and not a lot of people take it. There's only one section, 25 out of 400 people take it, because this class is offered to juniors and seniors. So, a small amount of people are searching to gain that education on the climate crisis, and it could be fear or being uncomfortable with the topic. It's honestly a mystery.

Morgan Phillips  19:21

Maybe it is a supply and demand thing. If the demand is not there, then the school just thinks if only 25 people want to do the course, then why would we prioritize it? And it may be a fair thing, both on the by half of the students, but also the teachers as well. They wrote about how to teach it. David, what are your thoughts?

David Case  19:35

My opinion is there are certain things entrenched in our educational system, and climate education isn't one of them, it goes back to what you said, a slideshow is about polar bears and ice caps, it is surface level and pessimistic as a question of how can we condone climate education to have a positive outlook and for it to be something that people are driven to engage with rather than talk to fear and feel hopeless about, I think it's just even if you think about who's teaching climate courses, the teacher who would be teaching our climate science selective is a physics teacher, and he's passionate about climate himself, but that's a very self-driven thing, and he had to seek out his own climate education. I think systematically we just aren't set up to support climate education on a large scale, and I think that results in fewer capable teachers, fewer people who are interested, and it keeps it that way cyclically. 

Morgan Phillips  20:33

I think it's a similar story here. We talked about the curriculum earlier, and how it gets constructed, some of it's designed at national level, some of its regional level, or by NGOs coming in with their different programs, and some of it's developed in the school itself by those teachers who do have a passion. 

Schools that don't have that teacher send hardly any education happens around sustainability, with relying on there being a teacher with the time and the kind of motivation to go the extra step to make it happen, and that's the systemic shift we need to see. 

We need more teachers to be educated in how to do climate education, and it isn't just so they can scientifically deliver the facts in the PowerPoint way. It's actually that they can think about how do we develop critical thinking skills, systems thinking skills, imagination, teamwork, and collaboration. Actually, what is interesting thinking about the teachers who are doing that already for you, like doing the stuff around imagination, like teachers in the arts, and so on, who aren't - he wouldn't call it climate education, but it has the effect, because it is creating those outcomes for young people. So that's what I hope is helping teachers to see how they're already contributing, even if they don't feel like they know the facts, so they can be accidental environmental educators

Helena Rambler  21:41

On the national scale, climate change and the issue of the climate crisis is very politicized. Those who come up with the book curriculum for students in general, either they don't want to incorporate it because they don't want to add that political nuance and try to indoctrinate the kids or get backlash from our parents or the community individuals who have decided what goes into the curriculum, maybe believe on the political scale or on the worldly scale it's not as important or does not align with their beliefs.

Morgan Phillips  22:10

It's a vicious cycle. You need the climate education so that people understand the need for more climate education. Lots of decision makers probably haven't delved into it in depth. Deprioritize it and therefore it gets marginalized, and that's what you've seen in the UK. As the impacts of climate hit more and more, it becomes harder to keep marginalizing, hopefully. 

I had another question. What does the American dream mean to you now? Is it something that gets taught? What is it for you? I'm interested to know what it means for a couple of 17 year olds in New York.

Helena Rambler  22:37

I don't know. When I think of the term American Dream, I just relate it to a term that people wouldn't use anymore. At the time that it was really popular, it got disproved. Many people would come to America to achieve the American dream, and I feel like I've seen so many kind of stories and so many situations where this American system has just prevented individuals from reaching that dream.

David Case  22:58

I was also kind of scared by the question, because I wouldn't say think about the American dream very often, so it's interesting to think that someone who maybe isn't living here has a different view of it. Anesthetic, or as long as some people don't have opportunities to attain the lives they're looking for, they don't think about in the context of what is the American dream as it pertains to me, but instead it's more in what ways can I still pursue things I'm passionate about and interested in, and have some impact on the world. I think there could be more done in terms of education to open pathways to people learning more about climate, about the environment, and having the opportunity to make larger scale impact with things they're interested in. This case, climate, that is more driven by something standardized rather than having to be as an individual.

Morgan Phillips  23:49

We did a survey last summer. We spoke to about 55 students attending an environmental conference. It's not a representative sample, but we asked them, you think about your future. Do you want to make lots of money or do you want to make a difference? I want to put that to you guys. Let's see what your reply to that would be.

David Case  24:04

Personally, I think money is important, but it's always been secondary to me. I think about how short life really is. Obviously, it's privileged for me to be able to say this, given I live in New York City, and I can come home to a loving family and dinner on my table, and I don't have to worry about certain things other people have to worry about, in terms of money. I have never really had the passion to pursue money in the same way that other people sometimes have, in terms of them wanting to go into certain careers, because there's money in it, but certain things, just way our system is structured, won't be able to give you a livable wage, it's definitely about finding a balance in terms of being able to sustain your life in terms of what you're getting financially, but also anyone really truly would prefer to have some sort of impact on the world around them. I think it's just a question of are they able to do that and still be financially comfortable.

Helena Rambler  25:00

For me, money's always been the thing that people think about a lot, especially with our school. There's a lot of pressure on your future and the college you'll go to, the next steps in life. Then from that, how you will become successful in a profession. And I said, there's so much focus on what your future will be, but for me, I'm still not positive what I want to do. But one thing that I do know that I want is, I want to work with people. I feel like being able to see change or see a positive effect in real time, that is going to be important to me. And I guess that kind of turns back to your American dream question. My American dream would just be having enough money to build myself a comfortable lifestyle and have the opportunity to build a happy life. Also, knowing that my role in society is something positive, and not just for the purpose of making more money.

Morgan Phillips  25:48

There was a small organization in the States called Center for a New American Dream, which was seen through the toxicity of the kind of American dream of a big house and four cars and loads of foreign holidays and all the brands and money for money's sake is actually what real life is about. It was one of the things which inspired our Good Life Schools project. 

How is success presented to you at school? You said there, I need to get to this college and then you get this job, as of a way of putting into your head what success is in life, but how is it coming across? How do they get it across to you? They're doing it to motivate. What does it look like? What does it sound like success from your schools?

David Case  26:24

We're in a pretty lucky situation, because we have teachers who really all care about your well-being as a student and how you're doing as a person. In terms of at least the teachers I've had, there isn't this push for you need to be achieving these grades, and it's definitely more of a qualitative and a personal thing, that's definitely something I'm really grateful for, but then again, large scale, there is partially peer driven in terms of people around you, but also just going back to what you're saying about social media being harmful, the internet also makes it seem that you need to be reaching certain things, getting certain standardized test scores getting into certain colleges or universities, and that there's a much more material hallmark for success than there is in the environment around you, and I think that can definitely be harmful too. I think I'm lucky to be in a place where that isn't impressed on me from everybody around me, I can only speak for myself, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were other people who didn't have the people around them, the teachers around them, who make them feel supported and successful in different ways.

Morgan Phillips  27:33

Oh, the second question we asked people in that survey was, we asked them, "Do you want to make a difference or make money? And then we asked them, "What do you think your peers want, do they want to make money or make a difference? And they fed back to us that the responses we got around the make a difference or make loads of money, more than half said they want to make a difference, and third said they want to make money. Then we had the don't know cohort, but when we asked them what do they think other people their age want, their assumption was that 75% of them just want to make money, and hardly anybody wants to try and make a difference. 

There's this disconnect, because when you ask people directly whether they care about issues and want to make a difference in the world, most people do want to. Our perception is that other people don't. That's part of the individualistic society we live in. We have this misperception about each other and what our goals are, but it can have quite a big effect on how we see the world and how confident we feel about being the person who steps up and says I want to make a difference, because they get worried that's an unusual thing to say, but it's not actually, it's actually the most normal response.

Helena Rambler  28:31

In the UK, what is the overall sense of knowledge around climate change, or the sense of action towards climate change? And then how do you view America compared to the UK?

Morgan Phillips  28:42

We have an organization called the Royal Meteorological Society, and they've been doing some studies of the climate literacy of people your age who've been through our education system as it is now, and the results of that were pretty rubbish. 

Climate literacy levels are really low, people don't really understand that they either overestimate or underestimate the impacts of it. People are aware of climate change, and the surveys tend to show that people want there to be action on it, and they're kind of keen on it. 

But what happens then is when there's proposed actions, which suddenly clash with their desire to do other things, there tends to be pushback. At the moment, there's big push for renewable energy, and because the UK is quite densely populated that means lots of wind farms and solar farms on what would previously just be green fields, and then lots of big electric cables and pylons suddenly support for climate action drops, and they backlash.

 We see that happening, and this is stirred up by the media, because the fossil fuel lobby are powerful. They love to jump on any backlash and throw it out of proportion. Nobody wants this to happen. It's terrible, and they do that, so we're suffering that misinformation, disinformation thing. 

The UK's government loves to talk about itself as a world leader in climate change, but it really isn't. We have managed to reduce our carbon footprint as a nation, but only really because we're outsourcing it now. We've closed all the factories, and we import them largely from Southeast Asia. All the pollution is happening over there, but it doesn't show up on our accounts, so our footprints dropping. But really, it's just being outsourced. Speaking to different educators in the US, what's really interesting to hear is that they don't feel like anyone's coming to save them anymore. 

On climate, to prepare young people for the future is being done at a micro level. Now, school by school is what can we do to help young people to adapt and be resilient and build a movement for bottom up change. The US feels five or six years ahead of us in terms of what's happening politically, but we've got right wing populism sweeping across the Western world. There's a lot of it in Europe, there's a lot of people in power who are as right wing, if not more than Trump, UK could come into power, and there's a lot of fear that's going to happen here, and there's a little bit of resignation as well that we can't really hold back the tide. How can we prepare for it, and how can we learn from what's happening elsewhere to be more resilient too when it happens? 

But then think about we're coming to the end of neoliberalism as a guiding central ideology in the Western world, and it could be replaced with right-wing centralized controlling authoritarian type governments, or it could go the other way, which would be towards more decentralized and more citizen-led. There is a movement building around that, about helping people to see how connected they are, the power of collaboration, how we can do things from the grassroots level across everything, but education being one example of that, and that's where the hope lies for me, is that actually we can start that movement, we can see that we're not alone in caring, and that we can collaborate, and we can come together to do stuff, and take the power back from the center. Examples of that happening is exciting. 

You can see it happening in schools, that they can gain more control over what's going on, and shape curriculums themselves, the fair faith that most people are decent people, and they want to make the world better. If you give them more freedom, they'll actually go and do that. 

That's my hope, that the power doesn't get stuck to the middle, because then teachers just become delivery agents of somebody else's instructions. We need to give teachers more freedom, or chance to do the good stuff, because most teachers want young people to have a good life, and they want young people to be caring and compassionate and intelligent, and they want to provide that, and they will if you give them enough freedom to do it.

David Case  32:10

Speaking with you right now, it's a nice feeling to get the sense that there are people who care about these things, share the same interests, and are committed to working toward a better vision for the future.

Morgan Phillips  32:20

When Twitter started, it was a positive space for connecting with people, we're making a difference in the world, and to learn from each other. It's changed the online world. This conversation we're having now is thanks to the internet, and we're learning off each other and getting the sense of solidarity that other people are trying to create change in the world. If you're going to be out there doing good stuff, creating change in the world, or helping others to create change, there's more people like that in the world than there are to selfish individualists. That's where the hope is. How do we become the collective force and regain the power to control what's going on? 

How strong does your community feel at the moment? What sort of things are you involved in?

Catherine Du  32:53

So, in my immediate locality, I live in a kind of not really urban place, it's more like individual houses and stuff, so there isn't much of a strong community. We say hi to each other in passing, but we don't really build such a strong community where we talk to each other. Part of that might be due to the age gap of people on my street. There's everyone from really old people to really young people, and so in my immediate neighborhood, there isn't much of a community, but within my school, there's a lot of community building. Events, we have clubs where we can learn about climate change and any topic that we're interested in, and a lot of grade-wide trips where we get to bond with people, learn more about each other, and socialize.

Morgan Phillips  33:31

Is it quite far between where you live and where you go to school?

Catherine Du  33:36

Yeah, it's about an hour and a half one way, like a train ride.

Morgan Phillips  33:39

Oh, wow. Okay, yeah. So it's very different kind of geographical community in your sort of local community around your home. What sort of things would you like to see happening there? If you, if you could make them happen or get together with people to make them happen?

Catherine Du  33:57

Very good question. I think something that I would like for us to do is like attend some sort of like public rally together, because I feel like a lot of climate activism centers around like rallies, protests, and things like that, and if we can sort of I feel like the community that we build like in just like a few hours of you know listening to people talk about their experience of climate change, talking like reminding of ourselves, of our own, you know, experiences and motivations and inspiration about climate action, or whatever, like social justice issue, like the sort of collective values that we build together, sort of would help to create a stronger community.

Morgan Phillips  34:41

Yeah. And what's next for you, Catherine? After your current studies.

Catherine Du  34:49

I'm not sure. Still figuring it out. I mean, I'm in ninth grade, so not really sure.

Morgan Phillips  34:57

Yeah, and I think what you're doing with this, with this podcast, I listened to quite a few of the episodes. They're really brilliant, and I hope you're enjoying it. And you're gaining great skills just by doing this sort of thing, because it's not easy to start talking to a random stranger on an evening and have a constructive conversation. So yeah, thanks so much for it, and yeah, really good luck to you all.

Helena Rambler  35:32

Thank you for listening to our tiny podcast about the giant topic. We've learned we have listeners all over the world, and we're curious who you are and what you would like to hear on the show, so if you'd like, please send us an email at podcast at the City atlas.org That's podcast at the City atlas.org. Thanks for listening.