US Coast Guard Academy censors ‘climate change' from its curriculum
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
The missions of the U.S. Coast Guard propel its members across changing and sometimes perilous waters, into neighborhoods damaged by ever-more-intense hurricanes and around the melting ice of the Arctic.
But the academy that trains most of the officers of the nation's sea-going law enforcement and search and rescue force has eliminated 'climate change' and related terminology from its curriculum in an effort to conform to President Donald Trump's policies.
Amy Donahue, the provost and chief academic officer of the academy, confirmed the moves in a statement posted last week on the Coast Guard Academy alumni association's website. The association said in an online post that it had reached out to her office after receiving 'several letters of concern' on how climate policy was playing out at the New London, Connecticut, institution.
Donahue wrote that the academy was required to make the changes because of the president's executive order withdrawing past climate change policies as well as a Feb. 14 directive from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Noem had ordered department officials to 'eliminate all climate change activities and the use of climate change terminology in DHS policies and programs.'
The Coast Guard falls under the authority of DHS in peacetime, making it the only branch of the military not under the Department of Defense.
Donahue maintained that the quality of education at the academy would not be harmed by removal of terminology on 'human-induced rise in global temperatures' from class assignments and materials, or the revisions she said were made to 'certain aspects of some courses,' which she did not specify. The Coast Guard Academy did not respond to requests for further details, and DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
'We have not and will not abandon science education,' Donahue wrote.
But others who know the Coast Guard and the role of the academy in shaping its future are concerned. Retired Adm. Paul Zukunft, who served as commandant of the Coast Guard from 2014 to 2018, said in an interview that cadets need to be educated about climate change in order to effectively undertake missions in harsh maritime environments and to participate in decision-making with other federal agencies, for example, when confronting disasters.
'If we're not smart about the environment that we operate in, we're going to be a much less capable Coast Guard,' Zukunft said. 'I think even more importantly, we become marginal players across the interagency process … and I think we have a lot to contribute because we are out there on a regular basis.'
Under the motto 'Semper Paratus,' or 'Always Ready,' the 43,000 active-duty members of the Coast Guard patrol the nation's waters for illegal activity, rescue thousands of people each year, respond to hurricanes, floods, oil and hazardous waste spills and more. They endure heat exposure in the tropics and perform perilous operations in Arctic waters, where shipping is surging due to the retreat of polar ice. Coast Guard Academy-trained engineers build and maintain coastal infrastructure that is battered by more frequent and severe extreme weather.
'Impacts of climate change will influence every Coast Guard mission,' wrote the service's former commandant, Adm. Linda Fagan, in a 2023 framework meant to guide how the force would address the increasing challenges to its operations.
But that document has been removed from the Coast Guard website and Fagan was relieved of her command on Trump's first full day in office. At the time, a Department of Homeland Security official said in a statement to Military.com that Fagan was terminated for reasons that included concerns over border security, acquisitions, recruiting and leadership. The unnamed official also criticized her for 'excessive focus on diversity' policies.
In the following days, the Coast Guard began shutting down programs and offices at the academy that were related to 'diversity, equity and inclusion,' including an Office of Culture and Climate and an Affinity Group program that had been in place for more than 50 years.
But the latest moves, which came after Noem's directive, appear to be the Coast Guard's first changes to academic curriculum in response to Trump's effort to upend federal policy.
Zukunft believes the academy's administration has little choice in the matter.
'Where we're at right now, I think they have very little latitude,' he said. 'There's so much scrutiny, and I would say 'DEI' and 'climate change' have become almost synonymous. If you're an advocate for one or the other, you're at great risk of losing the support of — in this case — your service secretary.'
About 1,000 cadets attend the 149-year-old academy on the banks of the Thames River just north of Long Island Sound, which has received honors for its academic programs. With no ROTC program, the Coast Guard relies on the academy as a launching pad for 80% of its officers, a far greater percentage than the other military service branches draw from their own academies.
Zukunft, who serves on the advisory board of the nonprofit Center for Climate & Security, said the Coast Guard could be hobbled in its work around the world if its leaders are not grounded in an understanding of climate change. He gave the example of Micronesia, where the Coast Guard operates under one of scores of bilateral maritime law enforcement agreements that the force has with other nations. The U.S. has seen the Coast Guard's presence in these islands as an important counterweight to China, which has sought to expand its influence throughout the Pacific.
'We're building relationships,' Zukunft said. 'And people there are concerned about saltwater intrusion. They're losing their aquifer, they're losing their fish, and do you want a Coast Guard lieutenant who says, 'I have no idea why that's happening. Maybe it's just a bad luck fishing day?'
'We know exactly why it's happening,' Zukunft said. 'Sea water is rising and the fish are moving to cooler waters. And so, [the Coast Guard officers] should be able to be making informed decisions, especially in some of these islands.'
The impacts of climate change are also manifest for the Coast Guard at home, Zukunft added.
'Our training base for our recruits in Cape May, New Jersey — they're taking on water,' he said. 'Norfolk, Virginia, is taking on water. We built a huge base in Charleston, South Carolina; it's taking on water.'
He said it is impossible to have discussions with lawmakers about the need for budgets to make those bases more resilient without talking about where future conditions are heading due to climate change.
Climate change did not come up at a congressional hearing Wednesday on the Coast Guard's infrastructure needs, but testimony of the Government Accountability Office showed that the service currently faces multiple backlogs of shore projects that will cost at least $7 billion to address — double the amount estimated just five years ago.
A technical report out of the University of Washington in 2023 said one important infrastructure vulnerability is to the nation's Aids to Navigation system, the network of buoys, beacons, lighthouses and other signal equipment that guides ship traffic. The system is maintained by the Coast Guard and is experiencing increasing damage due to intensifying storms as waters warm. Complex calculations on wind speed, wave height and water elevation are needed to assess the increasing risks.
Over the past five years, a team of professors at the Coast Guard Academy emphasized the need for climate change education for cadets in the school's engineering programs in presentations they have given at conferences of the American Society for Engineering Education.
'As the primary commissioning source for civil engineers for the U.S. Coast Guard, it is imperative that our graduates understand the projected impacts of climate change — sea level rise, altered hurricane patterns, and other associated hazards — on coastal infrastructure,' they wrote in a 2023 paper.
The coastal resiliency course included work on vulnerability and risk assessments of the Coast Guard's own facilities. Exposure to the challenges of climate-related hazards, the teaching team wrote, was 'an issue of readiness, and therefore of the utmost importance.'
No faculty members at the academy responded to queries from Inside Climate News about the removal of climate terminology from teaching materials or other curriculum changes.
Donahue, the Coast Guard provost, emphasized in her statement that the academy will continue to turn out graduates who are educated on weather patterns, atmospheric phenomena, paleoclimatology, the conditions of sea ice and other studies relevant to their work.
'We will neither ignore nor defy directives from the President or Secretary,' she wrote. 'And we will continue to teach good science that prepares our cadets to lead and execute Coast Guard missions in a global maritime operating environment.'
But some education experts say that restrictions on the language that can be used in the classroom can erode the quality of science education in insidious ways.
Jennifer da Rosa, director of the graduate program in environmental sustainability and management at Goucher College in Baltimore, has studied efforts to restrict climate education in the United States. The direction putting certain words and terminology off-limits is similar to restrictions on the teaching of evolution in parts of the country in the 20th century, she said.
'When it comes to science, the students are tasked with essentially truth-finding and the research process of truth-finding,' she said. 'If we're censoring part of that process, then students aren't fully learning how to question and test and evaluate scientific information. It's not possible to just censor words without actually starting to censor the process.'
Da Rosa questions how meteorology and oceanography can be taught without discussion of climate change.
'It is a foundational core to all these different disciplines,' she said. 'And if you remove that foundational core, it's like having a building without a frame, or, like a human body without a skeletal system. It just collapses. It doesn't make any sense without that framework.'
Glenn Branch, deputy director of the nonprofit National Center for Science Education, said the Coast Guard Academy's decision is not the only recent example of government restrictions on climate change terminology in education. Last year, Florida's Department of Education under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis told publishers they would have to remove references to climate change in order to have textbooks approved for use in public schools. Iowa's Department of Education, under Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, this year is considering removing 'climate change' and 'evolution' from the state's educational standards.
Branch said the Coast Guard Academy's provost, in her statement, reflected an understanding of the need for future officers to be educated on the changing environment they will face.
'It's certainly encouraging that she says, despite the ban on uttering the dreaded three syllables, they're still going to be teaching these topics,' he said. 'But it's still a problem. Not using the right terminology makes it harder for students to understand and discuss and process the scientific literature they're supposed to be inspecting.'
Zukunft, whose service as commandant spanned the end of the Obama administration and the start of the first Trump administration, said he witnessed the president recognize the important role of the Coast Guard in natural disasters. When Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 40 inches of rain in Houston over four days in August 2017, Coast Guard units raced to the scene from around the country and rescued more than 11,000 Texans by air and by boat.
'I ended up getting a call from President Trump, and he said, 'No stock has gone up like yours, way up,'' Zukunft recalled. 'I thought my stock was doing OK, but said, 'I'll take that as a compliment, sir.''
But at the start of Trump's second administration, Zukunft is concerned about what he sees as 'a complete unraveling' of prior policy that sets a dangerous precedent.
He believes the cadets now at the academy need to be trained not just for the political realities of the next four years, but the realities they will face in the coming decades on seas and coastlines transformed by climate change.
'I think they need to stay very dialed in, because they're going to live with this on their watch, not over the period of just one administration,' Zukunft said. 'This is going to be multi-generational, and at some point, it becomes a train wreck.'
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