Environmental education is all about helping people develop the knowledge, skills, values, and motivation to participate in civic life to improve environmental and social conditions for themselves and others and to help shape the future. Civic engagement can take many forms—from volunteering to register new voters to working with others in a community to solve a problem. By giving people opportunities to get involved, it can help empower them to become more active citizens.
Transcript:
My name is Vince Meldrum. I'm the president and CEO of Earth Force.
So there are three different ways that people can get involved in their communities. First of all, they can change their own behavior. Things like using less water when you brush your teeth or recycling more items, that type of thing. That's kind of a personal engagement.
The second level that you can be involved in is you can be involved by trying to promote things with your family or others around you. And so that's kind of a community engagement when you're trying to you know, young people try to convince their parents to recycle. Or we work in our neighborhoods to try and convince others to have environmental behaviors.
But the third one, and the one that Earth Force focuses on (and in many ways, I think, is the one that's left out of environmental education occasionally,) is this idea of civic engagement.
And civic engagement is when you move beyond trying to change your own behavior and [that of] the people near you, to try and change the systems that you operate in. So you change the legislation at a state level or you change city ordinances or you work at a federal level to try and change laws. And so for Earth Force, it's civic engagement is that third level where you're moving beyond changing your own behavior, beyond changing the behavior of those around you, and trying to adapt the system itself.
Most of the time, when young people show up to make an argument for something that they want changed, the first reaction by the adults is surprised, to be honest with you. [The adults] come into the room and it's typically like, "Oh, aren't you guys so cute? You've done all this work? Let us hear what you're you know your ideas." And you can just feel the adults in the room dismissing the young people as they come in and start their presentation.
But usually by halfway through the presentation, by the time they've gotten to the points that they want to make and the adults can see that they've done real research. They have really quantified the impact of the choices that they want to make, [the adults] start to take them seriously.
And it doesn't, you know, it's like any kind of social change, it doesn't happen immediately. It takes time beyond just making a presentation at a city council. But, you know, as people work with our young people, they find more and more that it is a valuable asset, or that they are a valuable asset, and that they can help make community change.
Without some type of social engagement, environmental education, I think, does not match its potential. Right? That's really where we all want to go. If we think about why we do work in the environment—whether we're a conservation person or an education person or somewhere else—really the goal is to improve the way that we manage our natural resources, right? And the way that most of us can do that is by being a citizen, by being engaged. And so I think without that citizenship piece, environmental education loses a lot of its beauty. You know [loses] a lot of its long-term vision.
So I think those things, they're inextricably intertwined. One needs the other. Without the two of them, it's not a whole picture.