Teaching Our Young About Environmental Stewardship And Climate Change

It is critical that we teach each generation how to care for the environment so that we have a working global ecosystem to sustain us into the distant future. But that is a tricky goal.

Humans are a sentient species. While we have some awesome instincts, our greatest survival capability is the ability to gather, store, understand and retrieve information. But unless we expect each succeeding generation to re-invent the wheel, we need a way to preserve and propagate important knowledge and ideas.

Although we tend to interpret reality through the lens of our present knowledge and awareness, the roots of common societal knowledge are the result of how humans interpret and project fundamental symbols and how they incorporate new ideas and new capabilities into their existing lore.

Fusing the work of Spencer Weart, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, understanding this requires understanding how knowledge arises and is passed between generations in the complex system of a society of aware beings, an understanding that is in its infancy and that gave rise to the concept of a meme.

Dawkins originated the idea of memes as the sentient version of the biological gene - sentient traits that can compete and be passed along to subsequent generations as vigorously as physical traits are expressed through biological genes. But much faster - in a single generation as opposed to hundreds or thousands for actual genes.

It is not coincidental that powerful ideas spread and develop over time, confer advantage to groups exploiting these benefits, compete and then replace lesser ideas, in ways eerily similar to physical traits. That memes can also adapt to changing times and embody efficiencies as well, makes them even more powerful and useful to humans whose most successful trait is sentience.

Don’t be fooled by the meme’s recent trivialization into videos of raccoons riding skate boards. While cute, these confer no survival advantage to the species as a whole and are not memes.

Dennett used memes in the conceptual framework of the evolution of human society, e.g., belief systems, political structures, taboos, and mythologies. Each religion is a separate meme. Agriculture is a meme. Democracy is a meme.

And so is understanding the environment around us, a meme that has relatively recently gone from vaguely local to clearly global.

So how do we pass this meme onto each generation?

With books, of course. There are an amazing number of very well-written children’s books on the environment and climate change and only a few will be mentioned here.

For the youngest readers, the just released Bee Scared is a good one. With nothing specific on climate or heavy duty issues too much for the very young, it’s just about protecting bees. Which is good story since bees are one of those species that indicate ecosystem health.

Another book for small children is The Polar Bear’s Home by Lara Bergen, an Arctic adventure with a little girl and her father, showing how global warming affects two baby polar bear cubs and their family. It also gives tips for kids on what they can do to help slow down global warming.

For older children, What Is Climate Change? by Gail Herman explores the topic of climate change, and why it has become a social and political issue as well as an environmental issue. Young readers will learn the difference between climate and weather, how climate change is affecting nature, and the dangers we face if we do nothing about this problem.

An old favorite is Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. While not directly about climate change, the Lorax speaks for the trees, and the story is about what happens when we don’t heed the warnings of the Lorax and over-consume our precious natural resources - like trees. 

For a more complete and scientific discussion of most things energy and the environment for students and adults, I suggest visiting the Energy Encyclopedia at the University of Calgary, put together by Dr. Jason Donev and his group.

With this amount of information for all levels, we have a good chance of passing on the key information our species needs to survive.