In January’s first week, driving through a stand of tall eucalypts in the Otway Ranges on a southernmost elbow of the country, my eldest boy, unbidden, connected the dots. Dad, he said, ‘the fires give air pollution to the air and they’re also burning the trees that make the oxygen’.
‘So, it’s like, double the amount of oxygen loss.’
While Australia’s Prime Minister has questioned school children’s “needless anxiety” about climate change, here was my nine-year-old expressing concern about the very air he breathes. This is his reality, the world he’s growing into.
Back in Melbourne, he spent days on end indoors with his brother, quarantined from toxic airborne smoke pollution. I walked to nearby shops for supplies wearing a face mask. We closed windows, sealed doors. Play dates with friends at their swimming pool were cancelled. Our annual bush camping holiday, on the coast north of Mallacoota, was aborted.
Never has his childhood seemed so different from mine.
Now as a new school year turns, routines renewed, might this be a defining moment of change? School is their sanctuary. Through the shared contract of education, it needs now to be a place where they also see a collective effort to do all we can to improve the world they’ll inherit.
The crisis is real. Last September a group of British psychologists warned that young people feel betrayed and abandoned by older generations over climate inaction, sparking anxiety and depression. In Australia, a recent UNICEF survey of more than 1000 young people found they are “overwhelmingly worried” about climate change; 59 per cent think it as a threat to their safety.
ReachOut Australia, a leading youth mental health organisation, polled more than 1500 school students last year and found 82 per cent think climate change will diminish their life, and 77 per cent do not believe their concerns are being addressed.
And this was before the forests burned and the great Australian summer holidays turned to smoke and ashes.
State-based education departments have so far dragged their feet on the issue. Unlike in New Zealand, who have introduced a non-compulsory classroom program for 11 to 15-year-olds to address climate change and “eco-anxiety”, there is no formal curriculum material approved for Australian classrooms to educate children on global heating.
Our boys are lucky. Growing up in Armadale, an affluent Melbourne suburb, a privilege of place affords them great benefits – but comes also with responsibility. Both attend our local primary school, where a vibrant discussion evolves among parents, teachers and students about sustainability, and how best to make a difference.
Our school is doing wonderful things. Teachers and children are composting at school, growing food in kitchen gardens, planting trees through a program run by the local council, building insect ‘hotels’ and frog habitats. The children decided last year to collect e-waste, and to ban those little plastic fish soy sauce containers from school lunch orders. An unflappable mum has coordinated a masterplan that will see asphalt soon ripped-up and replaced with a bamboo forest. A deputy principal organised solar panels on the roof. Parents recently elected a school council that’s open to change.
But there’s more to be done. Climate change must be incorporated into the curriculum. We must build bicycle sheds, support families to ride to school. We must harvest stormwater, insulate for comfort and to save energy, compost with worm farms, plant for shade, birds and bees. We will set examples. We must show children we care.
Schools, for their part, need to keep raising awareness of the ramifications of each consumer choice, of the impacts they have on the planet. Australia, on a per capita basis, is the most polluting country in the world. Our high-emissions lifestyle, a culture of over-consumption, only exacerbates the problem. My sons, as young as they are, understand this, they understand the cause and effect.
Problem is, fundamental change cannot come unless it is underpinned by governments and corporations. When Scott Morrison rebuked the teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg last year for the global climate strike she mobilised, he echoed his government’s priorities. “I want children growing up in Australia to feel positive about their future,” he said. If he truly believes this, then his government’s priorities must change – and change fast – to reflect the concerns of children, and all they are doing to abate them.
So, let’s restore our children’s trust in us. Change is within us all. It is coming from kindergartens and primary schools and trickling up. Children are offering guidance, and speaking up, offering true voices on the most pressing issue confronting the welfare of the planet. Maybe it is true, that children can save the world.
As responsible parents, in this new school year we must give them agency. Leave apathies and animosities behind at the school gate. School communities need to shine. Every school in Australia must challenge itself to reduce its carbon footprint and do all it can to encourage others to follow.
Time is now to act for better days ahead, for the very air they breathe.