A recurring theme in my biology class is how we can incorporate environmental education into our lessons. Today's "hook" was a TED video by Capt. Charles Moore on the seas of plastic garbage that are finding their way into our oceans and the bodies of marine animals everywhere.
This is an important message, and one that, as a former scuba instructor having dived in some of the world's most remarkable marine environments, is not only dear to my heart, but one that I once preached regularly.
However.
The problem with these types of messages isn't just that people don't want to hear them, though of course no one wants to hear (again and again) just how much we've raped and pillaged the planet (especially when they've paid thousands of dollars to be whisked off to a tropical island with sugary white beaches and gently swaying palm trees, surrounded by a blue pancake of an ocean as far as the eye can see, with someone to polish your sunglasses as you sip your second mojito on the balcony of your over-water villa. Not a good time to preach sustainability...). The problem is that we consistently expose youth to these messages as the prelude to and reason for the small environmental actions that we can take to supposedly mitigate the impact of all the negative things we're doing as a species to our home.
I'm not denying the value of taking whatever small steps we can to improve the state of our environment, but I think we're being dishonest if we try to convince ourselves, and especially our youth, that bringing reusable bags to the grocery store will have any measurable short- or medium-term effect on the growing plastic tide in our oceans when multinational corporations the world over are increasing, not decreasing, their production and use of entire documents worth of unpronounceable environmental pollutants. The only effect that these individual actions have is on increasing our overall environmental awareness (for whatever that's worth), and of automatizing positive environmental habits so that when the youth we're educating today finally find themselves at the heads of those same international conglomerates and in a position to take far-reaching decisions, they will do so in a way that is more sustainable for humans and the environment. Which is great, but that's a long time to ask a six-year-old to wait.
Meanwhile, youth are increasingly frustrated at their inability to do positive things now that are on the same scale as the negative things being done by others around them. They get tired of hearing the same old messages of loss and destruction. So they become increasingly despairing and begin to give up. Everyone else is still killing the planet, so what does it matter what they do?
Perhaps the problem is simply the order in which we present the information. Instead of showing students how destructive we're being, show them how they can support our environment, and give them reasons to want to. This should form the bulk of our environmental education, at least until students are mature enough to be able to process the more negative environmental impacts our species is having in a way that won't completely shock, depress and paralyze them.
Environmental marketing agency Futerra released the video "Love, Not Loss" a few years ago along with it's report Branding Biodiversity: The New Nature Message. The report aims to "kill the extinction message" and challenges environmental communicators to pull back on negative messaging about environmental destruction and inspire people to act on conservation based on their love of nature, not their fear of loss.
This video was recently relaunched at the IUCN World Summit in Korea in September, 2012 as part of the IUCN's "Love, Not Loss" campaign. This campaign aims to rekindle the love affair between humans and nature by getting us to remember what it is we loved about it in the first place. Though not aimed specifically at teachers, there are some funny videos about conservation mis-communication, which science and environment teachers could use to lead students into developing their own videos or other products aimed at reminding us of our love, awe and appreciation for the natural world.
On a related note, the Canadian Wildlife Federation provides information about how to make your own Hinterland Who's Who video — they will even provide the HWW logo, classic flute music and a sample script. It's a great multimedia activity that teachers can use as a sneaky way of getting students to learn about a species or habitat, all under the much more entertaining guise of making a video. The instructions are also available as a PDF at WILDEducation.ca, CWF's education division.
I expect that today's generation of youth will be the ones who will have have the critical mix of awareness, power and technology to make real progress on our environmental issues. If we do nothing but instill messages of despair rather than hope, they will suffer from activism fatigue before they even have the chance to be activists — and then what hope do we have?
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