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When will conservation be taught in schools as a Basic Skill?
The other day my ten year old daughter asked me for something which took me by surprise. She asked me if I would take her to the Great Barrier Reef this year because she wanted to see it before it disappeared.
The reason I was surprised by this was not because I disagreed with her assessment of the situation, after all, it has been common knowledge for years that we are loosing our beautiful reef, but rather, because of her somewhat simple acceptance of this apparent inevitability.
It made me wonder, is all this talk about the impact we are having on climate change filtering down to our children as a message which heralds “immanent and unavoidable doom” rather than one of “the need to change the way we interact with our planet in order to make a positive difference”?
And if this is indeed the end result of all our talk about carbon footprints, rising sea levels, global warming and the like is our message simply being lost in translation? Why, instead, isn’t my daughter asking me what am I doing about saving the Great Barrier Reef so that it is still around when she grows up?
Are our efforts to conserve water, lower our household energy consumption, and replace our petrol guzzling cars with more energy efficient ones going unnoticed? Are we educating our children on the 3Rs and neglecting to include “conservation of the planet” as part of their basic skills curriculum?
Perhaps it is time to consider introducing a new compulsory subject into our school’s syllabus. A subject as important as reading, writing and ‘ritmatic. A subject which educates our children on how to ensure that their future is not a mere legacy of the previous generation’s efforts. A subject which equips them with the skills they need to work towards preserving their environment and minimising our footprint on this earth. A subject which teaches them how to become an active part of the solution. A subject which prompts questions like – what are we doing about saving our natural wonders like the Great Barrier reef?
That is one of those comments that stops you in your tracks and makes you think. Kids are sometimes better than we think at intuitively sensing when things are not right. Perhaps something is telling your daughter that despite the outward efforts we all make of cutting down, we’re not doing enough to save the reef. She senses that we all need to take still less from the planet. Yet, we have a chosen legal system that requires some of the most potent actors in the scenario, the corporations, to take more every year. They are compelled by law to increase profits year on year, which means they have to consume more of the earth’s limited resources. For reasons not fully clear, we don’t even seem to be willing to discuss the subject of changing the system we’ve chosen. Low energy light bulbs are not going to make enough of a difference, compared to the damage down by a legally mandated planet consumption monster and increasing rapaciousness by more and more consumers, whose appetites are fed by these corporations. But the matter doesn’t even seem to be up for discussion or on the agenda.