We need to raise good stewards of the environment to care for issues like resource depletion, environmental pollution, land degradation, and accelerating species extinctions. Conservation efforts will benefit if we can better educate children on their connection to and dependency upon nature. In an effort to further such education efforts, green programs are cropping up across the country.
Green Programs in Elementary Schools
Green Teams: One of the primary ways in which students have been exposed to environmental issues is through “green team” partnerships with non-profit organizations. One of my friends, Lauren Casterson, has been helping students from Marin, California schools participate in activities, ranging from cooking nachos in solar panels installed on their school’s roof.
Throughout Earth Week in April 2012, Lauren organized Mary E. Silveira Elementary’s1 green team, comprised of eight fourth and fifth graders, who gave away “green bucks” to students exhibiting green behavior, such as bringing a waste-free lunch, composting, and recycling. At the end of the week, the students raffled off green prizes to those who had received green bucks. According to Lauren, the green buck incentives were a huge success: “interest in the green bucks grew so immensely, that students were begging their parents to pack them waste-free lunches!”
Cool the Earth: The “Cool the Earth” campaign is similar to that promoted by “Green Teams,” except that it is more focused on carbon-reducing activities taken at home.
Students receive a booklet filled with carbon-reducing actions the family can take. Every time the family takes an action specified on one of the coupons, the student returns the coupons. The coupons are tallied each month and the results are displayed on a large graph showing the number of cars taken off the road as a result of the total amount of carbon reduced that month.2
Citizen Science Projects: Citizen science research projects are usually associated with counting birds, the most known and well-established being Audubon’s 111-year-old Christmas Bird Count. However, citizen science has grown in popularity in recent years. Some projects enlist students to learn about and then count things like herring, fireflies, ladybugs, and frogs. Other projects aim to collect and record data on water quality, flower budding, and other natural phenomena.4
For example, in Poughkeepsie, New York, Environmental Scientist Chris Bowser heads a citizen science project focused on monitoring American eels in the Hudson River. Elementary students are recruited to help with eel counting and weighing. “This eel project is a great model for citizen science…For one thing, the species has a real demonstrated conservation need. We’ve seen a decline in American eels — in some populations 80 to 90 percent — since the 1970s, and we’re not sure why. The data we collect goes to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which wants this information.”5 Moreover, not only do scientists benefit, students benefit too! Volunteers like to know they’re doing something with real value. When I worked on the project in 2010, it was inspiring to watch students who were initially grossed out to count eels feel so connected to the eels by the end of the season. The more people learn about science and build a personal connection to research, the more they will care about the environment later in life.6
To find citizen science projects near you check out: http://scistarter.com/
Safe Routes to School: Safe Routes to School (SRTS) programs are led by parents, schools, and local governments who seek to improve the health and well-being of children by enabling and encouraging them to walk and bicycle to school. SRTS programs examine conditions around schools and conduct projects and activities that work to improve safety and accessibility, and reduce traffic and air pollution in the vicinity of schools. As a result, these programs help make bicycling and walking to school safer and more appealing transportation choices, thus encouraging a healthy and active lifestyle from an early age.8
Edible School Yard Projects: One of the more famous elementary school initiatives was spearheaded by famous Berkeley, CA cook Alice Waters. Waters has called for a “delicious revolution”…a movement in public education where “the hearts and minds of our children are captured by a school lunch curriculum, enriched with experience in the garden, sustainability will become the lens through which they see the world.”10 Over the last 15 years the revolution has spread from Berkeley to New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Greensboro, and Brooklyn. Foodcorps, a similar Americorps program, was initiated to build schoolyard gardens, teach cooking lessons, and foster environmental stewardship generally.11
Green Initiatives in High Schools
Greening the Curriculum: While green programs in elementary schools continue to grow, educators are concerned about incorporating climate change and other environmental studies into the high school curriculum. As Frank Niepold, climate education coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, explains, once students advance to high school, core science becomes specialized, displacing interdisciplinary, earth science-based concepts like climate change. Recent statistics show that 83% of U.S. high school students take biology, 50% chemistry, 20% physics, and a mere 20% take earth science courses. As Niepold comments, “[e]ven if the earth science classes were amazingly effective, we’re only reaching 20 percent of all high school students.” What’s worse is that many students headed for college do not get exposure to environmental science because they are fast-tracked through biology, chemistry, physics, and other advanced placement science classes without taking earth science. “The reality of climate change is that it’s utterly interdisciplinary,” says Niepold. “Effective climate change education … has to have strong earth science, biology and physics components, and it has to connect to social science, history, psychology and economics.”12 To counter this trend of specialized high school science that skips over environmental issues, projects like the University of Michigan’s “Change Thinking for Global Science: Fostering and Evaluating the Ecological Impacts of Climate Change” are being developed to test out a new curriculum. The goal of the curriculum is for students to gain a complex and sophisticated knowledge of science content and practices for climate change topics such as weather and climate, the greenhouse effect, and the impacts of climate change on humans and other living things.13
In other cases, educators are going even further to integrate environmental issues into the curriculum. Charter schools have long marketed themselves as project-based learning alternatives to public schools, and now many charter schools are being founded with a special emphasis on the environment. For example, the Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale, California is a free public charter school where students complete community service, participate in service learning projects, attend outdoor education field trips, and are encouraged to take internships.14 Other schools focus on combining environmental science teaching with leadership development courses so that students can “lead the change they wish to see in the world.” 15
Greening beyond the Classroom
Many students are joining together to say is not enough to just learn about climate change in the classroom. A group of high school students have even turned to the legal system to make demands. Five high schoolers from Ventura, California are suing the federal government in U.S. District Court, claiming that the risks of climate change will threaten their generation unless there is a major push in global energy policy. “I think a lot of young people realize that this is an urgent time, and that we’re not going to solve this problem just by riding our bikes more,” said Alec Loorz, one of the plaintiffs represented in this lawsuit on a pro bono basis.16
While leading industry officials have brushed the lawsuit aside as a publicity stunt, Loorz is serious when he says that kids his age are much more worried about climate change than many of their parents might imagine. Indeed, one British survey found that 74% of children between the ages of 11 and 14 worry about climate change. “I used to play a lot of video games, and goof off, and get sent to the office at school,” he said. “But once I realized it was my generation that was going to be the first to really be affected by climate change, I made up my mind to do something about it.”17 Other high school students have joined in the fight by signing up to receive updates from Loorz’s nonprofit Kids vs Global Warming, which organizes marches around the country.18 The youth are moving to take control and fight climate change to protect the environment for all of us. Here’s to a brighter future!
