Assignment: Earth – Children as agents of environmental change

By Kate Cairns

The year is 1991 and my tiny elementary school in rural Ontario, Canada, is performing the new hit musical, Assignment: Earth – What Kids Can Do to Save the Planet. With synchronized gestures in oversized green t-shirts, I join my classmates in pledging our allegiance to the “E team”: a troop of environmentally conscious kids who vow to “save the planet” one flipped light-switch at a time. From “Turn it off!,” an upbeat tune about conserving water and energy in the home, to “Driving Miss Lazy,” a melodic ballad on the benefits of walking and biking over car travel, we serenade our parents with the promise of a better future through thoughtful personal choices. Now, nearly 30 years later, I occasionally find myself humming the catchy tunes. What sticks in my head most of all is the resolute opening number:

It’s our world. The challenge is ours, we’re earth saving stars.
It’s our world. We’re taking control, a leadership role.
It’s our world. And we’ve got to start right now!
We’ll use less and save more. Recycle and restore.
Buy things earth friendly, it’s more than just trendy, it’s our world.

In the preface to her 2016 book The Child to Come, Rebekah Sheldon asks “Why, when we reach out to grasp the future of the planet, do we find ourselves instead clutching the child?” Childhood studies scholars have long theorized the child as a figuration of the future. Defined by their malleability and potential, children are invested with the collective hopes and anxieties of a given era. At the same time, under the violent conditions of white supremacy and a deeply stratified world, the promise of the future is not extended to all children equally. Growing up in Ontario in the 1990s, I was invited to embrace my new responsibility for the future of the planet, as an agent of environmental change.

My school’s decision to mount Assignment: Earth reflected a growing attention to environmental issues as a legitimate subject of study. In class, I dutifully recited the “3 R’s” (Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!) and drew elaborate diagrams depicting the detrimental impact of acid rain and the growing hole in the ozone layer. Notably, this was a particular conception of environmental education centering on the agentic individual. The songs in Assignment: Earth emphasized easy, everyday decisions with apparently world-changing consequences, like turning off the tap while brushing your teeth, or ditching stryofoam cups in favor of biodegradable, eco-friendly products. Reflecting neoliberal ideals of personal responsibility and market-driven change, the protagonist of this story was the environmentally conscious consumer: one who recognizes the harmful impact of their careless choices and vows to change their ways. These changes take place at the individual level and not, for instance, through collective action to demand shifts in policy, let alone movements for systemic transformation. As an agent of the future, I had the personal capacity – the responsibility – to save the planet, alongside the individual actors in my school and generation. If this project failed, it was on us: not the generations that came before us, and certainly not the fossil fuel industry or the governments facilitating extractive practices of capitalist accumulation. After all, it’s our world.

Even as I embraced my responsibility as an agent of the future, I was taught to see environmental challenges as universal. The ravages of pollution were threatening the environments of all young people, and we were all equally responsible for addressing them. Left out of this story was the disproportionate impact of ecological devastation in poor communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color, even as a vibrant environmental justice movement had been fighting discriminatory toxic hazards throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. And despite the fact that my mostly white school included Indigenous students and was less than an hour’s drive from a First Nations reserve, Canada’s historical and ongoing theft of Indigenous lands never entered into these lessons. My growing understanding of myself as a future environmental steward relied upon what Nxumalo and Cedillo describe as “modernist colonial discourses of a mute, pure, and separate nature.” The Environment, as I came to see it, was something out there – air, water, trees, soil – a once pristine nature now threatened by the contaminating influence of human action.

The same year that I was belting out songs about recycling and green consumption, activists gathered for the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, DC. There, co-convenor Dana Alston presented a very different vision of environmentalism “woven into an overall framework of social, racial, and economic justice.” For environmental justice activists, Alston argued, the environment was not something separate called “nature,” but rather, “where we live, where we work, and where we play.” The 17 Principles of Environmental Justice adopted at the summit named colonization, military occupation, workers’ rights, and the “destructive operations of multi-national corporations” as core environmental issues. Unfortunately, none of those lessons made it into my classroom.

In Assignment: Earth’s uplifting finale, I joined other members of the E-team to confidently declare that “We Are Able.” The “we” of this vision was clear: children tasked with crafting environmental futures through our individual choices and actions. Today, we can find similar themes in many contemporary environmental pedagogies, including the child’s futurity, neoliberal rhetoric of personal responsibility, and colonial articulations of human dominance over nature. Yet, we are also in the midst of youth-led movements for climate justice that center critiques of colonialism and racial capitalism and demand radical transformations of our social worlds. Thus, the construction of children as agents of environmental change needn’t be limited to Assignment: Earth’s narrow frame; young people also participate in the shaping of childhood. As these young activists reject romanticized appeals to nature, grapple with violent histories that reverberate in the present, and foreground the limits of consumer-driven change, they work collectively to envision alternative futures rooted in environmental justice. They also make clear that these struggles are not theirs alone; building a new world requires accountability across generations, not empty platitudes about youth saving the planet.

References

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Kate Cairns. “Beyond magic carrots: Garden pedagogies and the rhetoric of effects,” Harvard Educational Review 88/4: 516-537, 2018.
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About the Author

Kate Cairns is an Associate Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. Her work brings a feminist perspective to the politics of childhood, with particular focus on how young people are positioned as the promise or threat of collective futures. She has investigated this dynamic across multiple realms, including neoliberal education reform, maternal foodwork, and youth urban agriculture. Kate is the coauthor of Food and Femininity  (Bloomsbury 2015) and has published in venues such as Antipode, Signs, and Harvard Educational Review. Her current research examines efforts to connect children and young people with their food, feminist theories of social reproduction, and youth struggles for environmental justice. You can find her on Twitter at @katefcairns.

Cite this article as: Kate Cairns, “Assignment: Earth – Children as agents of environmental change,” in Changing Childhoods, 14 July, 2020, https://changingchildhoods.com/children-as-agents-of-environmental-change/