In Ruth Poland鈥檚 college prep environmental science class at Mount Desert Island High School, students are creating eco-columns in plastic bottles that mimic nutrient cycling in the natural world:
鈥淎re you getting the fish now?
鈥淥h wait, I got one!鈥�
鈥淗ow? Oh wait, I got one too.鈥�
So far this year, Poland and her students have covered earth sciences, ecology, and will soon move on to a unit on energy.
鈥淲e'll look at the energy infrastructure map and note like, where are all of these things in Maine, and then in the country, what are the patterns of these different resources for fuels and for electricity?鈥�
But when she reviewed her upcoming lesson plans, she ran into a snag: the U.S. Department of Energy website that previously linked to a tool to calculate energy usage by state, instead contains a page about energy dominance.
鈥淭his is like the energy infrastructure map, but there's stuff missing, like they won't have the carbon emissions associated with those anymore, that sort of stuff, and I'm worried that this won't be available into the future," Poland said.
What Poland has witnessed is something many science educators experienced during Trump's first term when the Environmental Protection Agency began deleting web pages and data en masse.
鈥淵es, there are a lot of resources that are being taken down and data that's being taken away on federal sites," said Margaret Wang, executive director of Subject to Climate, a national educational non-profit that prepares ready-made lesson-plans for teachers on climate change.
A former teacher herself, Wang said she knows how sudden roadblocks to information can be extremely frustrating for busy educators.
鈥淵ou 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, you know, either do another quick Google search or I'm just not going to teach about it," Wang said
Subject to Climate uses software to detect broken links. So Wang's team can monitor sample lesson plans to see when data have vanished. She said while the non-profit's resource database has been affected, there are plenty of lesson plans still intact for teachers to use.
鈥淲e have to push through this moment in time, because this is a tipping point, and we need everybody, all hands on board for climate action," Wang said. "But we can't make students do it alone, so that's why teachers are there.鈥�
One of the first online climate resources to be scrubbed by the Trump administration in 2025 was the Environmental Justice Screening tool.
Lourdes Vera, an assistant professor of environmental science at University of Buffalo, had used it in her college-level classes to illustrate the correlation between asthma rates in marginalized communities.
鈥淪o I might show this tool right next to a redlining map, and students can very, very easily see and visualize the correlation between asthma rates and whether a neighborhood was historically redlined.鈥�
But now there's a copy of the removed screening tool available , 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. Vera, who works with one of the organizations in the collaborative, said they have rebuilt many of the online climate tools that had been removed.
鈥淒uring the first Trump administration we really could build that infrastructure and create those lists of URLs to track and so on. So, we're not starting from scratch now. We've been building this for eight years.鈥�
Organizations working on tracking and rebuilding online climate resources are known to some educators. And Margaret Wang said, word is spreading.
鈥淚've seen a movement. Educators have been emailing me and saying that, hey, I noticed that the EJ, the environmental justice screener tool, is no longer there. There's other organizations that are saving it, so here's a link to it. And I think there's an informal group of people who are starting to address these gaps," she said.
Given the strides being made in preserving government data and resources, Wang is hopeful climate education will endure.
鈥淚 painted you a story of a teacher that may no longer teach about it because it's not there, but I also painted a story of another teacher that will find it because there are indeed a lot of nonprofits working together to try to make it accessible," Wang said.
MDI High School teacher Ruth Poland is optimistic that climate education won't go away 鈥� because, she said there鈥檚 a real appetite for it.
鈥淪tudents ask to learn about climate change. There's a lot of climate anxiety among young people. It's an area of broad interest. 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."
But, Poland wonders, what will happen in a few years, when the archived data no longer reflect the latest science, and the EPA isn't updating its tools?
鈥淚 do like to use relevant, current data, and the government is the organization that finds that most of the time," Poland said. "There's amazing resources on the EPA website, on Department of Energy websites, and if those are not available anymore, there's no other organization that has that information. You can get really local stuff, maybe Maine-based stuff, but you can't get the broader view of what's going on in the United States.鈥�
