My wife and I just watched a great documentary on PBS called My Life as a Turkey. It tells the story of naturalist and wildlife illustrator Joe Hutto and his experience as “mother” to a brood of wild turkeys. The video powerfully reveals the complex and sophisticated lives of wild turkeys. I think this should be required Thanksgiving viewing (preferably before dinner).

I’ve embedded the first chapter above, but you can watch the whole video for free on the PBS website. I would absolutely use this as part of a Thanksgiving lesson, or in a unit that addresses animal intelligence. In our program, we use the Quest series of books by McGraw-Hill. In Quest 1(which we use in some of our low-intermediate classes), there is a unit on biology that covers animal behavior, communication and learning. This video would fit in perfectly.

This website could also be used in critical thinking exercises, as students could parse out the different motivations behind the site, and look at the different ways these issues have been covered in mainstream and progressive media outlets.

There are two issues facing our nation–high unemployment and undocumented people in the workforce–that many Americans believe are related.

Missing from the debate on both issues is an honest recognition that the food we all eat – at home, in restaurants and workplace cafeterias (including those in the Capitol) – comes to us from the labor of undocumented farm workers.

If I were doing this in class, I might also bring in materials (like this or this) on the lives of undocumented workers in the slaughterhouse industry, inviting students to look further look at the food chain we currently rely on.

Their website also features past issues of their newsletter, photos and videos, all of which are great ways to introduce a variety of issues. Dancing Rabbit was also featured on an episode of in the first season of 30 Days called “Off the Grid”.

They’re having a fundraising blogathon this Friday and Saturday. $5,000 in matching donations have already been pledged, so please join them on Sustainablog this Friday and Saturday and help raise $10,000 for sustainability education.

…here we are, too far into the new century to pretend any longer that a new age of awareness and responsibility will suddenly emerge, unless we can gather the resolve to drag it kicking and screaming from our imaginations and into reality.
…
We have paused in our centuries-long push to produce and consume ever more now, and the most optimistic might say that this is our chance to breathe deeply and consider the sort of future we want for ourselves and for our planet. Will consumption continue to rule the day, or will we find ways to do more good for humanity, with less harm to the Earth? Will we make our recovery merely fast, or can we make it smart as well?

In addition to the essays, there are photo galleries of environmental migration, political migration, urbanization and irrigation.

There is also a really great infographic that illustrates a variety of statistics (population growth, water footprint, meat consumption, etc.) in an accessible way, with further links to infographics about each of the statistics. These are purely environmental in focus, though. For example, the infographic comparing meat types doesn’t mention anything about animal welfare or health, just resource consumption and pollution.

There is also an interactive quiz and links to resources for the various statistics. Finally, you can check out the 2008 version.

Thanks Larry

In addition, they have activities on human rights, animal protection, and culture. They even have a collection of quick activities that can be done in 5 to 15 minutes.

Finally, check out the Humane Connection blog, a place where the folks at the Institute share ideas and new teacher resources.

If my students were immigrants, I would also consider looking at the factory farming industry in terms of its treatment of workers, many of whom are immigrants.

Some highlights:

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:

• 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;
• 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;
• 70 million gallons of gas — enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;
• 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;
• 33 tons of antibiotics.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:

• Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;
• 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;
• 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;
• Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.