As a kid, I don’t remember getting much of a formal environmental education. My “environmental education” came from my experiences hiking and skiing, gaping over miles of mountains, or kneeling on the ground, peering at rocks and bugs. These experiences filled my heart with a deep love for this world from an early age, and when I went to college, it seemed a natural choice to study the environment. Within a semester, I was experiencing the most profound form of heartbreak I can imagine. My despair weighed on me so heavily that I almost decided to change my course of study. I went to my faculty advisor, asking how I could possibly go into the future hoping to make change when there was so much information that makes our future look hopeless. He described a spectrum, with hope on one side and fear on the other. If we lie too far on the side of hope, we become complacent and fail to take action. If we are far on the side of fear, we become paralyzed and deem any action to be fruitless. We must try to balance ourselves solidly in the middle. 

At Recycle Utah, we aren’t hiding the urgency of our situation from our students. We teach about our landfill filling up, about our decreased snowfall, and about growing air pollution. But we also finish every lesson with solutions, with hope. What can you do? What are other people doing? It’s important that kids can identify what they’re seeing in real life, but also know how to take action, and that there are solutions to our environmental issues. That they have agency, even if they aren’t an adult yet. If I had this kind of education growing up, I doubt I would have experienced the shock and despair that I did in my first semester of college. I would have known that yes, our world is in crisis, but that there are things we can do, things that can help turn the situation around. 

So, what can you do, as a parent or an educator, to prepare little ones for a life in a changing world? Take your kids outside. Point out changes in precipitation and temperature; try to help them notice changes in patterns. If they are older, ask them what they think this might mean. Let them learn from their senses and really get to know the world around them. And then infuse their world with hope. Look for good news, for stories that exhibit people taking action in the face of climate change. Stories of people thinking creatively, people thinking outside the box, and people taking small action to change their immediate environment. Look for local action that you can take to change your small piece of the world, a change that kids can notice. Prepare them for what they will inevitably see as they grow up. Prepare them to think creatively and to act with responsibility and care for their home. When I think about the hope and fear spectrum, the biggest beacon of hope I see every day is in kids. If we prepare them for their future on our changing planet, then I truly believe that we can all create a world we are proud to call ours.

By Chelsea Hafer