Why This Plant Could Save the World

• This video explains how hemp, a non-psychoactive strain of cannabis, can sequester large amounts of carbon, improve soil quality, and be used to produce a wide range of products.
• Students will learn that American farmers stopped growing hemp in the early 1900s because of its association with psychoactive cannabis use.
• Hemp farming is now on the rise again, but some fear that the surge in interest will lead to unsustainable farming techniques.

Positives

• The video is broken up into labeled sections, making it easy to navigate.
• The video description contains a link for "further reading and resources", offering a wide variety of articles and videos that will help students learn more about the topics covered in the video.
• This in-depth look at hemp covers history, economics, science, climate justice, and human rights topics.
  

Additional Prerequisites

• The video contains commercials or ads.
• The content of the video ends at 10:52 and the rest of the video is sponsored content.
• Students will need to be familiar with the terms psychoactive, cannabis, weed, sequester, crop rotation, commodities, and regenerative farming. 

Differentiation

• Social studies and history classes could make a timeline (digital or paper) detailing the history of hemp farming.
• Science and math classes could learn more about carbon sequestration using Trees From Thin Air, a video and activity that quantifies the amount of carbon a tree can sequester by measuring its circumference. 
• Economics and ethics classes could discuss how the cotton and nylon industries played a role in the destruction of the hemp market.
• Social studies classes could learn more about the Tribal Hemp Initiative and the positive economic and environmental effects that hemp farming could have on Indigenous communities. 
• Other resources on this topic include this Hot Mess video on the importance of soil and this experiment about soil and the carbon cycle.