Despite disappearing data, Maine climate educators have options
Recently, Ruth Poland, a science teacher at Mount Desert Island High School, was reviewing her lesson plans for the next unit in her college prep environmental science class.
Clicking through a unit she had used for years, she ran into a snag: the Department of Energy website had completely changed. Where her lesson plan had previously linked to a tool students could use to compare energy sources and usage by state, it now went to a random page about U.S. energy dominance.
What Poland is experiencing is something many science educators became all too familiar with during President Donald Trump’s first term, when the EPA website began deleting climate change-related webpages and data en masse.
And, a few months into Trump’s second term, it’s happening again, though not in exactly the same way, said Margaret Wang-Aghania, executive director of Subject to Climate, a national educational nonprofit that prepares ready-made lesson plans for teachers on climate change.
“Yes, there are a lot of resources that are being taken down and data that's being taken away on federal sites," said Wang-Aghania.
A former teacher herself, Wang-Aghania said she knows how sudden roadblocks to information can be extremely frustrating for busy educators.
“You have so little time to grade all these papers, lesson plan and do all these things, so that if you're going back to a site where you used to have maybe a lesson plan or data that you would refer to and it's not there anymore. That might be the point where you decide, ‘You know what, I'm going to either do another quick Google search or I'm just not going to teach it,’" Wang said.
Maine is a national leader when it comes to climate education, said Olivia Griset, executive director of the Maine Environmental Education Association, or MEEA. That’s partially because Maine’s Department of Education has had an Environmental Literacy Plan in place for 15 years. And, the plan was revised in 2024 with a specific climate literacy plan as well.
MEEA has collaborated with Subject to Climate to create the Maine Climate Education Hub — a robust catalog of lesson plans for different age groups, from science to math to visual arts, all with a climate twist. Wang-Aghania is hoping it’ll be a tool for the busy teacher she mentions in the above scenario to get them through.
One of the first online climate resources to be scrubbed by the Trump administration in 2025 was the Environmental Justice Screening tool, which had been on the White House website.
But now there's a copy of the removed screening tool available online, thanks in part to a collaborative called the Public Environmental Data Partners. It's one of several environmental organizations established during the first Trump administration to monitor and archive federal environmental websites and data — so they’ve had eight years to build out their system and offerings. So far, they’ve rebuilt six of the online climate tools that had been removed by the current administration.
Subject to Climate uses software to detect broken links, so the team can monitor sample lesson plans to see when tools or data are taken down. While the nonprofit's resource database has been affected, there are plenty of lesson plans still intact for teachers to use, says Wang-Aghania.
Poland is optimistic that climate education will continue in Maine regardless of what happens at the federal level because, she said, there’s a real appetite for it.
“Students ask to learn about climate change. They participate because they're concerned about it. There's a lot of climate anxiety among young people. My environmental science class, we host at least two sections, sometimes three a year. It's an area of broad interest in young people, because they know that they're going to have to deal with it, and they're curious about what's going on.”
“They want to know the truth,” she said.
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It’s May, which means some of you may be a bit more than halfway through ‘No Mow May,’ — and, some of you may have no idea what I’m talking about!
It is what it sounds like: In the month of May, some homeowners choose to let their lawns grow long. The idea is that forgoing the mower will let flowers bloom in the yard, giving early season pollinators a leg up and maybe even taking a step away from a grass monocrop and towards rewilding the lawn.
It’s true that Americans’ preoccupation with a perfectly manicured green grassy lawn hasn’t been great for pollinators: Grass is the single largest irrigated agricultural “crop” in America, larger than corn, wheat and fruit combined.
“When we think of habitat loss, we tend to imagine bulldozers and rutted dirt, but acres of manicured lawn are as much a loss of habitat as any development site,” writes Bee City USA, a blog about pollinators by the Xerces Society.
But despite the catchiness and simplicity of No Mow May — and the romantic notion of putting away the lawn mower and suddenly having a yard that looks like a blooming spring meadow — it likely isn’t having much of an impact, according to many North American pollinator experts.
Firstly, there’s the issue of invasives. If you let your lawn grow as is, are there any native plants or flowers that have appeared in the past? If not, the yard is likely to be overtaken with dandelions and other non-native weeds, rather than local species. Pollinators native to North America don’t thrive on dandelion pollen, which is native to the U.K., write a group of experts in Rewilding Magazine.
“A month of long lawns filled with dandelions and other non-native weedy species just doesn’t cut it. It’s the ecological equivalent of opening a fast-food restaurant on every corner – for a short amount of time. At best, burgers and fries for a while, but not a sustained full-service menu of healthy nutrition and habitat for pollinators,” write the experts.
Dandelion pollen alone doesn’t have enough protein to sustain most bees. And dandelions, along with other common invasives, will also outcompete native wildflower species in most cases.
There’s also simply the matter of one month not being quite long enough for biodiversity to flourish. Native bees and other pollinators are often ‘experts’ who specialize in just a few local plants; without a wide variety of natives available, they won’t just start showing up.
"About 30% of our 3,600 bee species can only use the pollen in particular plants," Doug Tallamy, an entomologist at University of Delaware, told Sierra Club in a recent interview. "The most powerful plants for specialist pollinators are goldenrod, perennial sunflowers, and native asters, and they are all later blooming. To have a real diversity of plant species, get keystone native plants that support high numbers of butterflies and moths and also have pollen," he said.
However, not all is lost for No Mow May! One benefit is that, with every person who participates, there are more households challenging the norm of the perfectly manicured lawn. If nothing else, it’s a great starting point; hopefully a gateway to more biodiversity action at home.
If you’re interested in helping local pollinators, and in the process, drawing down more carbon (native plants tend to have deeper roots than grass), consider the following:
🤜 Hand-pull problem weeds instead of using pesticides, herbicides, and other products or spot treatments, which harm pollinators
🍀 Seed some local clover in with your grass
🌱 Take stock of your yard and how much of it you actually use. Plan to use a certain square footage, then frame your smaller lawn with a new, larger pollinator garden
☘️ Consider planting native trees, a pollinator garden, or a wildflower meadow in a small plot — or replacing your turfgrass lawn with native lawn alternatives.
🌷 Pick up a pollinator kit from a native plant nursery or your local Wild Ones chapter
🌾 Transform low-traffic areas, especially areas around more natural habitat, into a low-management, unmown zones so birds, bees, fireflies, and other wildlife are more protected
The final takeaway: No Mow May isn’t harmful, but it isn’t necessarily helping all that much. Ecology and biodiversity are nuanced, messy problems that won’t be solved with simplistic solutions. You’re better off incorporating native plants and trees in your yard, or choosing an area of the yard to re-wild over the long haul. Food for thought!
See you next time,
Molly
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