A Game Of Monopoly For Green-Collar Jobs Instead Of Tycoons

Named for “green business owners,” players are impact investors in a game inspired by Monopoly. They must navigate the transition from a fossil fuel economy to one powered by clean energy. The game challenges players with volatile markets, scheming lobbyists, and unreliable politicians lining the path to helping Hawaii reach its real-life goal of producing 70% of its electricity from clean renewable sources by 2050.

“Our primary aim with the game was to create something fun that could inspire people to green careers and to consider sustainability as something personally relevant to them,” according to the website.

The players are clean-tech angel investors who search the islands of Hawaii to finance wind farms, geothermal plants, car-sharing services or community agriculture advancing the state’s energy target. Scores are tallied by the triple bottom line: money, green collar jobs created, and “eco-credits” reflecting how much oil, processed food, or trash is offset by the new businesses. Investing, however, is risky. Public policy decisions and market events may go your way, or unleash disaster. A deck of Policy & Event cards throws up scenarios from a Victory Gardens crusade by Hawaii’s governor that boosts sustainable food sales to plunging oil prices that leave biofuel investors deep in the hole.

The game doesn’t fully represent real life, or the lure of easy cash, since players can’t just decamp and become oil barons. “The only options to invest in in the game are ‘green’ ones,” says Cooney. “The reason is that the game is based on the field of impact investing–those people who want to invest, but aren’t at all interested in dirty businesses.”

Cooney, who is also an “eco-entrepreneur” and sustainability professor at the University of Hawai’i’s Shidler College of Business, has developed the game into lesson plans for high schools and colleges, and is now on a national tour to promote it with tournaments to be held in New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and Asheville, South Carolina. (original article posted at: fastcoexist.com)

Link to GBO Hawaii including lesson plans

“Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish American “curriculum” that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.

Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.

Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition of “Skibbereen,” which includes the verse:

… Oh it’s well I do remember, that bleak

December day,

The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive

Us all away

They set my roof on fire, with their cursed

English spleen

And that’s another reason why I left old

Skibbereen.

By contrast, Holt McDougal’s U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to “The Great Potato Famine.” Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a “horrible disaster,” as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin’s The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the “ravages of famine” simply on “a blight,” and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as “famished and ghastly skeletons.” Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.

READ REST OF ARTICLE AT HUFFINGTON POST:
The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools