Recycling Alone Isn’t Going to Save Us
I walked around my backyard and looked at the aftermath of the historic heatwave that hit the Pacific Northwest at the end of June. Exposed to the 113-degree heat, parts of our luscious green plants and flower buds unnaturally shriveled as if they had skipped into autumn and teleported back a few days later. Our strawberries were so dehydrated that they looked like small peppers. And now, our raspberries that survived turned dark and aren’t actually ripe at all.
The results felt eerie and almost apocalyptic. At the trajectory that we are on now, is calling this natural disaster “apocalyptic” even an exaggeration?
Climate change is a complex and multilayered issue, and there are many people and institutions to blame. Today, I am pointing my finger at the current education system as the problem as well as the solution. I believe schools have the capability to benefit us so much more than they are currently designed for. What if we used our education system to guide us through pressing world issues and to supplement our lived experiences?
Experts report that the environmental crisis will continue to worsen if funding isn’t directed towards innovative educational approaches to address environmental issues, and it must be supported by those in humanities, arts, and social sciences, and wider society in order for it to work. In other words, a relevant education can be the key to a cleaner, healthier environment. Issues of biodiversity, ecosystems, and climate change need to be addressed as an intersectional and dynamic concept that reflects a larger issue within our society.
Environmental education can take an infinite number of forms through different ways of teaching. We’ve already seen the classic science project about the carbon cycle through a school’s community gardens, but learning about the environment could be so much more meaningful than that.
Here are just two examples of educators who took the opportunity to cultivate community through educating while highlighting the pedagogy they used. Students exposed to neighborhood violence in California were taught self-care and lessons of life and death through caring for plants through a place-based pedagogy, which means connecting learning to students’ surroundings and their local communities’ needs. Another educator turned to critical pedagogy, which examines power structures and oppression, when she used her students’ curiosity about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan to teach them about environmental racism. Not only do these teaching models connect people with their environment, but they are given the tools and language to connect their environment to their sense of self.
Education systems give us direct access to influencing the future of our planet. It’s time to center our education on interconnectedness, but there’s a long to-do list before that can happen. We need to stop isolating STEM from arts and humanities, stop separating what happens in school with the “real world”, stop valuing formal education over the knowledge gained through a lived experience, and stop leaving environmental issues for scientists to deal with on their own. It’s essential for us to think differently about environmental education, and to empower the next generation with diverse lenses and tools to solve the most difficult challenges facing humankind.
