News and views {NEWS REPORT}
Children have the facts, now they need the tools to fix the climate crisis ZOE WILLIAMS discusses a recent poll which has shown that young people are justifiably anxious about the future of the planet - but also hopeful
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here was a rare nugget of hope in the assorted news and polling on the climate crisis recently; 18-to-24year-olds in Britain are the most optimistic that the planet is still salvageable, with 73% agreeing with the statement presented by YouGov, ‘We are still able to avoid the worst effects of climate change, but it would need a drastic change in the steps taken to tackle it, and fast’. Only two-thirds of older cohorts held the same view. Young people’s positive outlook stands in contrast to the actual state of the environment, to which they are extremely attuned; sure enough, the under-30s are much more worried about the climate than any other generation. While, overall, the differences don’t look stark – threequarters of the young versus two-thirds of those over 65 fall under the umbrella term ‘worried’ – twice as many young people as any other cohort described themselves as ‘very worried’. We should note one quirk of the fieldwork; ‘very’ was the strongest word in the poll. Who knows what depths
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December 2021
of anxiety would have been uncovered if the poll had included ‘extremely worried’ or ‘climbing the wall’? This generation, lacking a retiree’s capacity for denial, has the clearest sense of what its crisisridden future might look like, so these young people have to believe that environmental collapse can be averted the alternative is despair. It ought to continually surprise us to see very young teenagers engaging in direct climate action, such as school strikes across the globe, and even younger children trying to change their diets to minimise their carbon footprints; political awakenings now happen earlier and earlier. This is not an accident, or a consequence of ‘wokeness’; these anxieties are the unremarkable result of education, of curricula that diligently scope anthropogenic climate crisis and chart its course.
CLIMATE CATASTROPHE It was only during lockdown that I got a sense of how powerfully dominant in education is the drumbeat of climate
catastrophe. I call it ‘homeschooling’ but, realistically, with 12 and 13-year-olds, it was more a case of having their live lessons on in the background while I tried to concentrate on more important things, like whom to believe, Meghan Markle or Prince Charles. It was not unusual for them to have four consecutive classes that were about the environment; a geography lesson on the crisis in the oceans, design technology on the devastating lifecycle of the plastic bag, a science lesson on the feedback loops that accelerate CO2 emissions and, finally, some postapocalyptic literature in English. This, unsurprisingly – and I suppose we have to tip our hats to the emotional impact of a global pandemic at the same time – caused a lot of anxiety, to the extent that I started writing a book, just for my son, on why we weren’t necessarily doomed. I sought 10 reasons for optimism - and found five. First, it may look as though the adult world is incapable of action, and technically we have known about carbon emissions for decades, but the consensus
