Why Isn’t Sustainability Taught in School?

In my high school, the students who passed Chemistry their sophomore year with high enough grades were mandated to take Physics their junior year, while those who received grades below a certain threshold were required to take Environmental Science. I, unfortunately, made the grade and took Physics, so I never took Environmental Science in high school. Because of the grade cutoff, Environmental Science has a negative stigma. One of my best friends was in the class, though, and used to shock me with horror stories about erosion and global warming. It sounded a lot more interesting than the theory of momentum. 
Since I never learned much about the environment in high school, I became passionate about and decided to study biology. I knew Cornell had a strong biology program, so I chose to go there.

I was lucky, because Cornell happens to have one of the best sustainability education programs in the world and has an aggressive Climate Action Plan. In 2010, the school received its single largest donation from an individual in the amount of $80 million from David R. Atkinson, a Cornell alum. The money was dedicated to creating a permanent sustainability center on campus (now called the Atkinson Sustainability Center), which will help the university become a global leader in sustainability though research and collaboration.

Unlike elementary school and high school, where environmental science was often overlooked, sustainability was everywhere at Cornell. You couldn’t escape it. At every meal, you chose whether your trash was landfill waste, recyclable or compostable. Posters for sustainability initiatives and clubs were everywhere. Ithaca, where Cornell is located, is also incredibly forward-thinking, and is known as the solar capital of New York State for its high number of PV panels per capita (despite the notoriously gloomy weather).

In my biology class freshman year, there was an announcement for Sustainability Hub, a club aimed at sustainability initiatives on campus. I joined, and by the end of the year, I was totally over biology and hooked on sustainability. I changed my major to environmental science with a concentration in sustainable development, and became involved in clubs like Solar Decathlon, Lights Off Cornell, and the Student Climate Action Committee.

Despite my heavy involvement in sustainability courses and extracurriculars at Cornell, I can still draw my love for the environment back to my experiences in nature as a kid. Most importantly, I grew up three houses from the ocean in Long Beach, New York, and spent every summer day on the beach with my friends.

In elementary school, my parents surprised my sister and I to Disney World - but we were underwhelmed, because it wasn’t as much fun as camping in the Adirondack Mountains on Indian Lake, which we did every summer. (My parents were also underwhelmed, because a campsite cost $16 a night, compared to the price of a hotel at Disney). At the age of 11, I went on a cruise to Alaska with my family. We went on a whale watching tour with a naturalist as our guide, and I was so amazed that by the end of the trip, I was telling everyone that I was going to be a naturalist when I grew up. It’s still funny to me that I ended up an environmentalist, over 10 years later.

When I think back to what inspired me to become an environmentalist, it wasn’t my sustainability education at Cornell, as valuable has it has been to me. It was those experiences in the woods and on the water that have instilled a desire to save the beautiful natural resources that our world has.

We need all students of all academic and socioeconomic backgrounds studying environmental science and bonding with nature. Even if the student doesn’t grow up and become an climate change activist, we need our future citizens to grow up having that warm fuzzy feeling when they think about the environment, and being aware of the impending problems our world will face from climate change.

This isn’t just my personal opinion - numerous studies have shown that a child’s environmental education is critical to fostering positive environmental sustainable attitudes in adulthood.

For example, Filho et. al showed in their 2010 study, “The Contribution of Education Towards Meeting the Challenges of Climate Change”, that education is the means through which the individual acquires the knowledge and skills as well as the development of values and attitudes to develop a sustainable development ethic. It has been shown that youth who have increased involvement in hands-on, experiential and highly engaged activities related to the environment in their youth have stronger positive environmental attitudes as they grow up. For example, Bogner showed in his 1998 study, “The influence of short-term outdoor ecology education on long-term variables of environmental perspective”, that the the amount of time young people spend on nature-oriented activities at school during their youth is positively correlated with their environmental attitudes as adults.

If we know this to be true and we want climate change to stop going on being completely ignored, then we need to make sure that our children, especially those in urban areas without access to many natural areas, are receiving the hands-on environmental science education they need to become sustainably-minded adults. Hopefully, this will help change polling data, which shows that only only 18% of Americans believe that President Obama and Congress should make climate change a highest priority (Washington Post-ABC News).

The U.S. Department of Education is taking a step forward by awarding “Green Ribbons” to elementary schools that make their schools more sustainable, not only by improving energy efficiency, water management and indoor environmental quality, but also by providing effective environmental education. Let’s go a step further and mandate sustainability and environmental education in schools, rather than just giving out brownie points for doing so.

What do you think?