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Image courtesy of Susie Strife
A former science teacher herself, when Susie Strife decided to pursue a PhD blending her interests in environmental studies and education, she wanted to focus on the attitudes about and access to nature among an often neglected and difficult to measure age group: 10 to 12 year olds.
Her thesis, The Concrete Jungle: Environmental Awareness and Experiences of ature among Urban Children, built on theories such as Sobel’s concept of Eco-Phobia, and Louv’s Nature Deficit Disorder, but added important data that she was able to capture from 50 children through a series of interviews and artwork done by the young informants to tease out their attitudes about nature in their lives.
The findings of her research provide an important reality check on the challenges of engaging young people in the complex and often emotionally disturbing aspects of the natural world. There are many interesting tid-bits in her study, including the difference between lower income children, who have more free time to experience and think of nature as immediately accessible to them outside their doors, and higher income children, who may think of nature as somewhere distant, like the Galapagos.
Both groups suffer from a lack of access to the natural world, though for different reasons (safety was an issue for inner-city children, while having ultra-structured lives and not enough time to simply play outside was an issue for the more well to do,) and many 10-12 year old children have the equivalent of full time jobs engaged in electronic media throughout the week, whether playing video games or watching TV.
The bottom line of Strife’s research is sobering: 90% of her young informants expressed apocalyptic views, sometimes played out in their dreams, of the future of the natural world. Fear and sadness about the destruction of nature were expressed by the majority of the children. The few who didn’t fear the future had someone in their lives who empowered them to feel that they could make a difference in the world.
Climate change wasn’t the only issue the young people were concerned about. Pollution and animal factories were also high on the list. Movies were cited as the primary source of information, followed by schools and parents. The children from wealthier schools were more aware of environmental issues than those not.
Certainly, fear and sadness about the future isn’t new to this generation, as those who recall the “duck and cover” drills to prepare for possible thermonuclear attacks will attest. And certainly many religious traditions include eschatology (“the study of last things”) in their teachings. But it is disturbing to see how deeply rooted fear, sadness and a dichotomous view of the future of the natural world– one grim and polluted, one renewed and restored– is among young people today.
More research needs to be done to build on Strife’s admittedly limited snapshot, and she and colleague Liam Downey have outlined potential research pathways in their article “Childhood Development and Access to Nature: A New Direction for Environmental Inequality Research” in Organization and Environment.
The 10 – 12 year old age group is clearly important and vulnerable as they begin to take on a more nuanced and complex view of the world, and those parents who complain about their children being depressed by what they are learning about, say, climate change in classrooms do have a point: stating blunt facts, not matter how scientifically accurate, may not be truly effective “best practice” pedagogically. But watering down the science or insisting on some “balance” to environmental and climate science isn’t the answer, either.
Within the Climate Literacy community we talk of integrating science and solutions, in other words finding a “balance” between the realities being observed of basic physical dynamics of the Earth system (like, if you put heat trapping gases into the atmosphere, they will trap heat,) and truly empowering young people in particular to connect with, care about, and be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. We’ve looked at programs such as the Climate Change School Project, which appears through their evaluation to have found a good balance even among primary school students of science/information and empowerment/solutions.
The challenges of integrating science and solutions are non-trivial. How can solutions be integrated with science when they may have a particular (or perceived) policy or political bent to them? How can the science be clearly taught without sugar-coating the true horror of the situation? Some approaches bypass the science, focusing solely on solutions, emphasizing money savings and encouraging young people to become energy efficiency activists. Such efforts are well intended and may contribute to turning the proverbial supertanker.
But if we assume that a solid science understanding is integral to civic science literacy, informed decision and policy making, and ultimately the ability to develop and deploy effective, equitable solutions, perhaps in the long run simply emphasizing solutions isn’t the solution.
Obviously, young people aren’t the only ones less-than-optimistic about but future. issues of confronting (or avoiding) apocalyptic views. Joining James Lovelock, who doubts humanity’s ability (and intelligence) to successfully navigate the environmental challenges ahead, Frank Fenner, emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University, predicts that the human race will be extinct within the next 100 years as we destroy the planet through consumption run amuck.
And the New York Times Magazine‘s article “Tuna’s End: The face of the bluefine, the ocean and us” by Paul Greenberg, notes that “when PB’s Horizon Deepward oil rig collapsed into the sea, it spewed oil across the only bluefine spawning grounds int he Americas just as the tuna were preparing to mate.”
Putting on a happy face or painting the deck chairs green may be necessary at times to avoid total paralysis and/or depression, especially with the young and vulnerable. But we now need insights from all branches of science, especially the so called “soft” social sciences, in order to gain insights and, ideally, effective strategies, for addressing not only climate change and pollution, as well as the ever-present and often overlooked specter of nuclear warfare and/or holocaust.
The American Psychological Association’s resent task force report “Psychology and Global Climate Change: Addressing a Multi-faceted Phenomenon and Set of Challenges,” helps provide part of the new context needed to frame the challenges and obstacles we face. Now the sociology community has stepped up with a special issue of Theory, Culture and Society on climate change.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be exploring a series of articles from this special issue including Erik Swyngedouw’s “Apocalpyse Forever? Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change,” Sheila Jasanoff’s “A New Climate for Society,” and John Urry’s “Consuming the Planet to Excess,” that may provide us with new perspectives and perhaps even solutions to the daunting challenges we face.
