Today marks the 40th celebration of Earth Day, the brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson. People worldwide are holding rallies, planting trees, and making statues out of recycled materials. Looking for something to do? The Earth Day Network can help you search for events in your area.
Probably because of my own experience as a parent, I’ve been thinking a lot this Earth Day about kids and their relation to the environment. I’m not sure what my two-year-old thinks of Earth Day, other than the fact that he loves being outside, doesn’t like the CO2 that comes out of our car, and gets a kick out of helping me assemble our recycling each week.
What is clear is that consciousness of the need to protect the environment has risen exponentially since the first Earth Day in 1970, and that message is reaching kids like never before. Companies have devised programs to instill eco-consciousness at a surprisingly early age. One of the biggest is Nickelodeon’s Big Green Help, a social marketing campaign that uses programs and games to get kids to recycle and eat local.
But the effort to green kids is already engendering something of a backlash. On Huffington Post, Susan Linn and Josh Golin detail how the efforts to make kids environmentally aware ironically pushes them to consume more and more. And Slate’s Emily Bazelon has a piece on a colleague’s six-year-old daughter who’s tired of the relentless greening message and wants to be “an Eco-Grinch…[who’s] tired of the preachy drumbeat of save-the-planet anxiety.” Writes Bazelon of said six-year-old:
The concept of Earth Day isn't the problem. Nor of course is the gentle reminder that our dear, fragile climate is helped when you remember to turn off the lights or the water (especially if it's hot). Also entirely unobjectionable is the beginner's science lesson about why a warmer planet wouldn't be a great thing. The problem is overkill, and discussions or curricula that don't pay enough attention to what real 6-year-olds (or 9- or 12-year-olds) can take in and grapple with. This is when green becomes the color of propaganda.
At least tangentially, these concerns dovetail with those of Adrian Parr’s Hijacking Sustainbility, which is partly devoted to examining the ways in which corporate culture has co-opted the theme of sustainability and used it to further corporate interests. As she writes:
For BP and Wal-Mart, their new ecobrands aim to offset the perception of corporate excess by promoting an image of corporate responsibility that relies on the idea that a corporation can use its power to introduce a sense of sustainable consumption into the shopping equation. I remain unconvinced by the corporate beast reincarnating itself as man’s best friend, for along with the dog we also inherit the fleas.
Whatever the ultimate moral valence of these efforts, I find myself coming back to the importance of a child’s relationship with the natural world, and wondering what effect the natural spaces near my home will have on my son.
This is an idea that’s explored at length, and from a variety of perspectives, in a book called Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations. That book contains a remarkable essay by the naturalist Robert Michael Pyle called “Eden in a Vacant Lot: Special Places, Species, and Kids in the Neighborhood of Life,” an eloquent exploration of the importance during childhood of direct experience with ordinary natural areas. He writes of his own experience, as a child, at the High Line Canal near Denver, “an unordered world of brown and green mystery:
I envied the few farm kids who actually lived along the canal and did my best to live what I imagined was their lives…Over the coming years, I sought out the winding, cottonwood-shaded watercourse for purposes of exploration and play alone and with friends; discovery of crawdads, birds, and butterflies; sulking and kicking the dust through a trouble home life; hiding, camping, fort-building, stealing corn, cooking out, and pretending every kind of life in the out-of-doors…But even in high school and later, when the chief social attractions lay in the city, I took myself to the fields and banks that had brought me up as a naturalist. I thought I was the only one, but I was wrong. Of my few peers who later became involved in life sciences – a vet, a zookeeper, a federal wildlife agent – all attributed their interest at least in part to the High Line Canal. And so I believe it goes, for such places everywhere.
Happy Earth Day, everyone.
MITPressLog RSS feed
