Transform Society with Universal Environmental Education
By Teizeen Mohamedali, Huxley Class of 2006
Photo by Mohamed Hassan from Pexels
Addressing almost any of our current global issues will require transformational environmental change at both the individual and collective level. Transformational change means society must begin to prioritize positive environmental outcomes into everything we do.
The choices and decisions we make in our lives — everything we do — is informed by our values. Some of our common shared societal values include having a rewarding or successful career, attaining financial stability, raising resilient kids, pursuing educational opportunities, seeking spiritual satisfaction, and spending time with our families — to name a few. Although many of us espouse environmental values, these values are neither universal nor mainstream. This contributes to our current complacency and dismal progress towards transforming our lifestyles, our regulatory framework, and our economy into something the planet can sustain.
If environmental values were pervasive in our society, we would be making far more aggressive and radical changes to address the environmental issues that plague us. The status quo, however, allows legislators to avoid enacting regulations needed to ratchet down carbon pollution — and in that regulatory void, industries have little incentive to redesign their systems and processes to move towards carbon neutrality.
Globally, few countries are moving towards the greenhouse gas emission targets outlined in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Funding for research on climate mitigation and adaptation is not prioritized and we often refuse to quickly fund the infrastructure needed to bring effective mass transit to major cities that lack it. We are not sufficiently addressing the disproportionate burden of environmental pollution on communities of color, nor are we actively incorporating indigenous wisdom to inform local solutions on how to balance human and ecological needs. We also continue to debate about whether we should teach climate science in all schools — as if human-induced climate change were an opinion that must be balanced by a counter-opinion.
So how do we transform our citizenry to internalize these environmental values so they begin to influence everything we do? We need an environmentally literate citizenry. Achieving this goal demands a universal environmental education.
The goal of a universal environmental education is to achieve environmental literacy. Environmentally literate students are defined by the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE)¹ as students who:
Possess the knowledge, intellectual skills, attitudes, experiences and motivation to make and act upon responsible environmental decisions. Environmentally literate students understand environmental processes and systems, including human systems. They are able to analyze global, social, cultural, political, economic and environmental relationships, and weigh various sides of environmental issues to make responsible decisions as individuals, as members of their communities, and as citizens of the world. -Adapted from Maryland Partnership for Children in Nature, April 2009
In the same way the current education system focuses on students attaining specific levels of proficiency in language and math skills at each grade, we need to create analogous expectations for environmental literacy throughout a child’s education. The NAAEE guidelines provide a framework that I have used loosely to outline my vision of what environmental education might look like in practice, for different ages and grades.
I envision preschools as spaces which foster a sense of awe for the natural world and support the innate curiosity that three- and four-year-old children already have. Preschoolers would collect leaves in urban parks and use them to make art, count slugs after the rain, arrange rocks by shape and color, climb trees, smell dirt, examine cool bugs under a magnifying glass, grow a garden, and watch salmon return to their natal streams.
Preschools would be spaces that foster awe for the natural world and support the innate curiosity that young children already have. Photo by Teizeen Mohamedali
Elementary students would start building an environmental vocabulary including the components that make up the earth system (such as the atmosphere, oceans, and landforms) and its different habitat types. They would learn how the planet functions (e.g. the hydrologic cycle), how their lives directly depend on natural resources our planet provides (air, water, soil for food, minerals, trees for shelter) and begin to describe how humans influence earth’s systems. They would begin to answer questions such as where our wastewater goes, what the land looked like before people lived here, and what environmentally friendly choices students can make in their everyday lives (reduce, reuse, recycling, conserving water, and finding alternatives to driving).
In late elementary and middle school grades, students would learn how to classify ecosystems and learn how they function. They would understand the different climatic periods the earth has experienced through geologic time and how things have changed dramatically since the industrial age. Learning how to collect air and water samples, they would delve into more detail on water and wastewater treatment and how to synthesize environmental data. By monitoring environmental changes, students would begin to make connections between how human activities contribute to environmental degradation such as threatened or endangered species, habitat loss, wildfire suppression, air and water pollution, the effects of development on water movement and water pollution, and climate change. Finally, they would start exploring solutions such as ecosystem preservation and restoration, renewable energy and carbon offsets while making critical connections between environmental justice issues and environmental degradation.
By high school, fundamental environmental science principals would already be established, and students would conduct detailed investigations and self-driven projects by collecting real data, tracking pollution, analyzing sustainability concepts, and identifying and connecting environmental issues with potential solutions. They would discover how even scientific and technologically feasible solutions may not succeed if the requisite social, political and economic structures are not in place to receive them. In this way, they would realize the need for outreach and advocacy, civic engagement and prioritizing environmental justice issues. Finally, they would learn how to harness the power of environmental activism to influence political leadership and decision making at local, national and global levels.
Throughout the preK-12 experience, intellectual and physical immersion in the outdoors would be an essential part of the curriculum and learning experience. Researchers are already discovering how our children are experiencing ‘nature-deficit,’ a phrase coined by child advocacy expert Richard Louv. In his book, Last Child in the Woods, Louv directly links how the lack of nature in today’s generation leads to disturbing trends such as rises in obesity, attention disorders, and depression. He also shares a growing body of research which indicates that direct exposure to nature is essential for the physical and emotional health of children.
Direct exposure to nature is essential for the health and well-being of children. Photo by Teizeen Mohamedali
Universal environmental education could mitigate this nature-deficit to some extent by directly incorporating time outdoors into the curriculum, providing multiple benefits beyond environmental literacy. Students who might normally lack access to nature and the outdoors would get exposure to it through school. Hands-on learning “in the field” would also cater to different students’ learning styles. For example, students could visit the source of their water and then follow its path to their local water treatment plant, and eventually, the wastewater treatment plant. Or they would make environmental observations and collect data while walking along shorelines and from trails through the woods in local parks. These are just two of many ideas by which environmental education could literally be taken outside into the very environments being studied.
As students transition from childhood into young adults and begin to consider their options after high school, my hope is that we would see the start of a sustained paradigm shift in how the next generation approaches everything we do. More of them would make decisions through an environmental lens: living more sustainable lifestyles and solving both old and new problems within a framework that prioritizes positive environmental outcomes in all sectors of our economy regardless of the field they choose to study or the career path they ultimately pursue.
A universal environmental education would consistently engage students throughout their transformational childhood years. This would be a deep learning process: the idea is not just to mold a new cohort of ‘environmental soldiers’ who have the right vocabulary and concepts to solve our environmental problems. Instead, the goal would be to cultivate in our children a deep appreciation for our planet, an urgent desire to protect it, and an intrinsic set of environmental values which enables them to see themselves as actual agents of environmental change in the chaos of the current state of the world.
[1] North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE): https://cdn.naaee.org/sites/default/files/learnerguidelines_new.pdf
About the Author
Teizeen Mohamedali works on water quality and hydrologic modeling for pollution reduction studies at the Washington State Department of Ecology in Bellingham, Washington. As an immigrant to the United States and a Muslim American, Teizeen participates in interfaith solidarity and works to combat Islamaphobia. In her free time, Teizeen explorers the power and beauty of the outdoors with her husband and their two young daughters, as seen pictured in this article.