Champions of Change: Where are they now? Featuring Justin Green

We sat down with Wake Forest’s head debate coach, Justin Green, to talk about what’s changed since he was named a Champion of Change in 2021 for his work to get local high schoolers involved in debate through the Piedmont Environmental Alliance Environmental Debate Program. The final round of the debate will take place at the 2025 PEA Earth Day Fair on Saturday, April 26. The event is free and open to all.

How long have you done the Environmental Debate Tournament with PEA?

I might be slightly off by a year, but I believe we’ve done this program for eight years. The Piedmont Environmental Alliance has an educational component and an educational wing, and the Wake Forest debate team had put on a number of public debates at the Earth Day fair – so kind of like literal old school barnstorming where we have a big tent, we have a microphone, and our goal is to provoke people to stop and listen to us debate. And then given that our Wake Forest debate team actually had a fair amount of experience working with high school students, the idea was that the debate team would lead the effort in doing training for a debate tournament in the spring and the Piedmont Environmental Alliance would go recruit all judges in the field who are either experts in advocacy, like lawyers or professors of argument or legal argument.

In some cases they’re judges, literally working at the courthouse Monday through Friday, coming out and judging on Saturday. Or they’re in a field of environmental expertise. We have Wake Forest professors who study environmental justice who’ve participated as judges. We’ve had folks that do geological surveys, the Yadkin river keepers, so a number of nonprofit groups in town. So it’s a very unique tournament and experience for the students. And the unique part is that it’s a bunch of students who are, for the most part, trying debate for the first time. 

How many students participated in the Environmental Debate Tournament this year?

I think we had 140 students registered the morning of and about that puts us at 70 two-person teams. I think we had 16 – 18 schools. It’s only been growing and building, and it’s part of our mission to make sure we get debate beyond the walls of the university and kind of give back to the local schools in the area. And our students were heavily involved in a lot of tutoring. So the other students from other schools make their cases, their arguments, and our people would listen in and say, “Here’s how you make this a little bit better.” And then the day of the tournament, they helped run the tournament, and also served as sort of emergency judges as well.

Well, I was looking back at the Champions of Change notes from 2021 when you won, and was reminded that it was still COVID protocols then, so the debates were happening virtually. It said there were about 40 students. So obviously that’s a huge shift from 40 students to 140 participating now. 

Yeah, I mean we were very pumped to get 40 students during COVID years since the amount of obvious interaction, or even desire to do much was just substantially lower. But the minute we were back in person, I think that there was some momentum. And the staff over at the Piedmont Environmental Alliance have been very good in recent years about outreaching to high school teachers to let them know about the program, and then I follow up and I go into their classrooms. So I was in 17 schools this spring, some of which are in the nearby area. If they’re over 40 minutes away, I would Zoom with them, but I was still in 17 schools offering some sort of debate outreach.

That personal outreach is so important. So, what got you linked up with the Environmental Debate Program initially? I’m not familiar with the history. 

I think one of our folks was a member of their organization – I want to say maybe our director of debate. And I actually knew friends on the PEA board, and there was some sort of conversation that initially got us conversing over how we should do debate at the Earth Day Fair. We actually already work with high school students in the summer, so because we host that workshop and have for, oh goodness, 50 or 60 years, it was an easy fit for us to say let’s continue this process of working with high school students. Let’s do it during the year and get Wake students involved and get them in some service learning projects. And so we have a number of service learning projects but this is certainly one of them, and we wanted to continue it.

That’s amazing. I’m curious, what got you interested in debate in the first place?

So I started competing in the seventh grade. Really wanted to play basketball, still do, but one of those I was going to be more successful in. So I shook hands with the basketball coach after my ninth grade year and said, I’m going to go be the captain debate team instead of riding the bench for you. And I haven’t stopped since. So I thought I was going to be a high school principal, and then taught in high school and quickly got called back to college to coach again. 

So you’ve been doing this a while!

Yes. I graduated from Wake in ‘99.

Okay, and when did you start as head debate coach?

Well, I went to graduate school and was an assistant debate coach at Kansas State University, and then a high school teacher and debate coach, and then University of North Texas and Georgetown and then Kansas State and back here at Wake Forest 13 years ago.

Did the opportunity bring you back? 

Yes, absolutely. That, and the desire to leave Kansas.

Well, there you go! North Carolina is not a bad place to be. So, you’ve been doing this a long time as both a debater yourself and a coach. What sort of leadership skills do you think students get from the practice of debate?

We like to say there’s two big elements that go on here. One of them is just a simple fact that debate might be the only place where a teenage student gets to stand up and speak their mind, and adults have to listen and give it credibility. And so just the act of practicing and speaking is something that can’t be captured in any other environment. Learning how to advocate for one’s behalf is so important. And we like to say that the difference between the engineer in the cubicle and the engineer in the corner office is that the one in the corner office knows how to talk. They both can do math really well, and so leadership skills and the ability to kind of articulate and voice your opinion and have that confidence comes through.

And then the second part we think that this tournament is good because it gets our students thinking critically about environmental issues. We like to teach the complexities involved in environmental change, and we think that debate helps do that, because they always have to answer the questions: Is there a better option? Is there a better solution? What are the drawbacks? And even things we say like, “Oh, it’s good to stop global climate change.” Well, yes, but how? We recently debated whether organic agriculture is a sufficient alternative to industrial agriculture and the question of whether or not we should have crops with pesticides so they can grow in more drought resistant climates and drought areas. Is that more desirable than an organic situation where maybe your yield is lower and you might have to cut down a couple of trees, but the soil is healthier? And so those sorts of complex questions, where it’s not just yes / no, environment good / bad, but how do we address the environment with a critical eye towards research and evaluation and argument. And I think that’s what this tournament gets students thinking about at an early age.

That’s a good example. We talk all the time about how most things take trade offs, so I think teaching students those skills for prioritization and defending your priorities in that way is super important.

Yes, and the good news is almost every one of these topics has a justice angle associated with it. So we ask the questions: What does it mean for those who are buying food at the bottom of the social ladder? Or, what does it mean for those whom, when we’re talking about electric vehicles, they’re located next to the mining and it’s not pretty? And, you know, are there alternatives that involve salt flats? Yes, but those involve Indigenous lands, and so where do we go? What are the next steps? And that sort of continual questioning, I think, helps.

It definitely creates a systems thinking mindset and approach. So for this year’s final round happening at the PEA Earth Day Fair on April 26 what question are students going to be debating?

This year, they are debating resolved that small scale organic agriculture is superior to industrial agriculture. And it was about a 50/50 split in terms of who won the debates, the preliminary rounds between the Pro and the Con side, or the affirmative and the negative, but students typically prefer to defend organic although some of the students really liked the industrial agriculture angle. The studies on deforestation associated with organic agriculture were the ones that kind of got them thinking. So that was the major argument. And then the other side, organic agriculture, was more about a long term vision for the soil, and then some of the ways in which that style of agriculture is less likely to produce climatic effects.

I love that students can see both arguments and work through that. I’m curious, what do you get out of the practice of coaching?

So, selfishly, it’s what I like to do. The idea of working with students watching the light bulb go off. I don’t like to write, I don’t write, I don’t publish. But I do like to teach people how to speak. So I teach oral communication classes and we focus on how to communicate arguments. And the number of students I’ve seen go off and be successful either in my class or on the debate team say, “Hey, my time with you is meaningful.” That – you know – there’s nothing more you can ask for as an educator. But the process of education is something I knew I was going to be interested in from age 14 or 15 when I started teaching the debate class at my high school. 

Do you come from a family of educators yourself?

I don’t. I come from a family of coaches, though. I think three or four generations. 

So it’s in your blood then! 

Something like that. 

Going back to when you were named a Champion of Change in 2021, obviously a lot’s changed in the world since the COVID era. Has anything else changed since then for you or with the program?

We’ve been fortunate in that the political and cultural moments have elevated the value of debate in the minds of the educators that we work with. The coaches that have always been invested have always been invested, but more people are coming out saying, “I want a debate team. I want my students to be able to articulate their voice. Now it’s more important than ever.” The Piedmont Environmental Alliance idea of discussing educational issues associated with the environment is now more important than ever, and the major changes are that we’ve started to ask questions that are less around, “How can the government change a policy?” and instead, “How can we help individuals craft their own personal policies to address environmental concerns?”. 

So we’ve debated topics in recent years, like, must I be a vegetarian to be an environmentalist? Should I buy an electric car, rather than should the government give subsidies to electric cars? Because that conversation, it’s not as useful, to be quite frank. And so those sorts of decisions, I think, help them, and we’ve shifted a little bit of our discussion away from what should the government do to more of what should we as individuals do, just because that’s where our hands are on the lever of power. I mean, you can yell in the wind, or you can go downwind and figure out how you can go in that direction. 

Hopefully what they get from that, too, is that personal actions are even more impactful when we do them in community with others and raise the scale of them. Do you have a personal interest in sustainability yourself? Or did you come to it through this debate program? 

I think I might have been the first undergraduate group at Wake Forest that was taking classes with sustainability markers. I remember taking an environmental history class that had three students in it. And many of the debate topics that I’ve had for forever work on the environmental side. And I was a Magnolias Curriculum Project scholar with the Office of Sustainability and enjoyed that. Also my class that I teach now, debate and advocacy, has the sustainability credit associated with it. 

Yeah, a major focus of our office’s work is to help integrate sustainability across the curriculum through campus engaged learning. 

Yes, so we had Dedee and Krista come to my class last semester. And there our students did their final group advocacy project on what sustainability initiatives should be on Wake Forest’s campus. The students kind of served as mini consultants, so they heard the spiel the university is making and then they said here are some tactics we would promote in order to advance those initiatives. 

That’s great, I’m glad we’re able to help provide that context about campus sustainability. As we wrap up, is there anything else you’d say to those interested in the PEA Environmental Debate Tournament? 

If you’re interested in serving as a judge for next year, we’re always looking for more judges. We don’t need much in the way of mentorship, but if you’re interested in judging, reach out to me at greenjm@wfu.edu. But the rest of it, we’re kind of on lock for. So we’ll do it again next year!