{"id":1534,"date":"2019-02-15T15:48:55","date_gmt":"2019-02-15T15:48:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/sci\/?p=1534"},"modified":"2022-05-20T11:43:10","modified_gmt":"2022-05-20T10:43:10","slug":"victims-saviours-or-villains-children-in-popular-climate-imaginaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/sci\/2019\/02\/15\/victims-saviours-or-villains-children-in-popular-climate-imaginaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Victims, saviours or villains? Children in popular climate imaginaries"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Fifteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg pulls no punches in calling out the world\u2019s leaders on their inaction on climate change.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou say you love your children above all else, yet you are stealing their futures in front of their very eyes,\u201d she said to a packed auditorium at the United Nations Conference of the Parties<\/a> (COP24) in Katowice in December. Greta has become a familiar figure in the climate movement since beginning her school strike<\/a>\u00a0outside the Swedish parliament in August 2018. Her strikes inspired a nation-wide day of action in Australia in November,<\/a> and have galvanised the global #fridaysforfuture <\/a>movement.\u00a0 Greta, who was diagnosed with Asperger\u2019s and selective mutism at age 11, explained in a TEDx talk in Stockholm<\/a> that she speaks only when she thinks it necessary. Calling out the world\u2019s inaction on climate change, she continues, \u201cis one of those times\u201d.<\/p>\n

Greta\u2019s public addresses are laced with irony. One of her discursive techniques is to upturn ideas of ir\/rationality and im\/maturity and, by implication, their societal associations with adulthood and childhood. \u201cYou are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children\u201d she said at COP24. Greta\u2019s message is clear: the current generation of adult leaders are entirely irrational for not acting on growing evidence of the catastrophic impacts of human-induced climate change, and a new generation must act to change this.<\/p>\n

Greta\u2019s intervention demonstrates the exceptional moral currency of childhood in public debates. Talk of the \u2018new generation of climate activism\u2019 <\/a>sparked by Greta\u2019s actions imagines children as the saviours of the climate movement. Yet Greta\u2019s talk belies another powerful imaginary of children as victims. Greta\u2019s phrase \u201cstealing their futures\u201d invokes how children, who have not caused the environmental chaos they are born into, will live for the longest with the consequences. She is by no means alone in evoking children\u2019s futures to make a case for urgent climate action. Shortly before the landmark COP21 summit in Paris, UN chief negotiator Christiana Figueres spoke of her children<\/a> as the main motivation for her work: \u201cI realised that I was turning over to my daughters […] a planet that had been diminished, by our carelessness, by our recklessness.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, it is difficult to find a speech on climate change that doesn\u2019t reference \u2018future generations\u2019 as the main rationale for action. Intergenerational justice<\/a> is at the heart of climate change discourse. \u00a0<\/p>\n

And of course, this makes sense. Why else do we act if not for the sake of future generations?<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, in the dual positioning of children as victims and saviours of climate change, the difficulties that children might encounter in reconciling these roles is underexplored. One area that allows for such exploration is children\u2019s experiences of Education for Sustainable Development, which since the publication of the United Nations\u2019 Agenda 21<\/em>, has been routinely prioritised in the global sustainability policy toolkit.\u00a0 The often unquestioned rationale of Education for Sustainable Development is\u00a0that children become \u2018agents of change\u2019<\/a> by carrying environmental messages between schools and homes, thereby making household practices more sustainable.\u00a0 \u00a0As a UNICEF report entitled Our Climate, Our Children, Our Responsibility<\/em> states, <\/u>children\u2019s own awareness of climate change is \u201cthe key to influencing wider household and community actions and, therefore, policy responses.\u201d However, as colleagues and I found in our research into everyday family lives and environmental concerns in India and the UK, <\/a>this envisaged role for children fails to take into account the generational positioning of children in family negotiations of practices underpinned by ideas of adult rationality, as well as the difficulties of changing practices that are shaped by various structural factors and constraints.<\/p>\n

As I argue elsewhere<\/a>, \u2018children\u2019s imagined role as \u2018agents of change\u2019 assumes a straightforward crossover between childhood\u2019s symbolic power and children\u2019s embodied and emotive \u2018pester power\u2019 in everyday life (Walker, 2017a). This is not borne out in practice. The problematic assumption that knowledge leads to action underpins the \u2018behaviour change\u2019 model central to many consumer-led climate policies.<\/a> This model rests on the theory that greater knowledge of the environmental impacts of everyday behaviour will prompt \u2018consumers\u2019 into action, perhaps with some nudging<\/a> by governments along the way. This model has been criticised by social scientists who use theories of practice<\/a> to show how changing practices is more complicated than is acknowledged in many climate policies. But where does this model leave children when intensifying environmental education efforts don\u2019t always lead to changed practices? And where children in industrialised countries consume resources at the same\u2014or greater\u2014rates as the adults lambasted by Greta, does that make children climate \u2018villains\u2019?<\/p>\n

An alternative strand of environmental education agrees that children do not need more knowledge of environmental problems, but rather they need to learn to appreciate and value nature through spending more time outdoors. Here again, children are presented as victims, this time of adult constraints. In this approach, critically appraised by geographers of childhood and youth<\/a>, \u00a0<\/a>reconnecting children to nature is seen as the key to nurturing concern for the environment, as well as solving a whole host of societal ills, from childhood obesity to poor eyesight from \u2018screen time\u2019, to raised carbon emissions from indoor climate control and technological devices. This approach is presented in the 2012 National Trust report Natural Childhood<\/em>,<\/a> which draws on psychologist Richard Louv\u2019s highly influential \u2018nature deficit disorder\u2019 theory. \u2018Natural childhood\u2019, Louv cautions, is giving way to sedentary, protected, indoor childhoods. Nonetheless, if children themselves do not conform to a \u2018natural childhood\u2019, it is easy for them to become stock villains of the environmental movement, preferring to spend time on an X-box than learning to appreciate nature.<\/p>\n

This is not to deny the many problems of sedentary and unsustainable lifestyles for the health of both people and the planet, or the value of time spent outdoors. Yet instead of lamenting \u2018nature deficit disorder\u2019, perhaps we should be considering the reasons why some children do not spend much time outside. In many cities, the lack of green space is a frequent indicator of deprivation. <\/a>Moreover, where green spaces do exist, nature is not universally kind. In my research into children\u2019s everyday environmental concerns in India and England (Walker 2019<\/a>), children\u2019s stories of everyday life in India were populated by mosquitoes circulating around stagnant water, rabid dogs and deadly snakes hiding in trees and undergrowth. The limitations of romanticised understandings of both childhood and nature are discussed elsewhere in Affrica Taylor\u2019s book Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood<\/em>,<\/a> which analyses children\u2019s \u2018messy\u2019 encounters with nature using what Taylor and others term a \u2018common worlds\u2019 framework, <\/a>that sees worlds as shared between humans and other forms of life.\u00a0 An understanding of the messiness of human-environment relations is essential to avoid children becoming villains in what environmental philosopher Sheila Jasanoff terms<\/a> \u2018an impersonal, apolitical, and universal imaginary of climate change\u2019 that \u2018takes over from the subjective, situated and normative imaginations of human actors engaging with nature\u2019.<\/p>\n

So, beyond the stock figures of victim, villain or saviour, how can children contribute to moving humanity beyond the climate impasse? Reflecting on Greta\u2019s extraordinary (and highly exceptional) rise to fame, I argue that it is by reminding humans to use our imaginations to think beyond our tangible present. Political psychologist Molly Andrews argues<\/a> that the imagination underpins the everyday storytelling that helps us to make sense of the past, present and future.<\/p>\n

What Andrews terms \u2018the narrative imagination\u2019 can be used to prompt action. In Greta\u2019s speech at COP24, she imagines a scenario of telling her children and grandchildren in 2075 why leaders in 2018 did not act on climate change \u201cwhen there was still time\u201d. Talking to children about their environmental concerns in my research in India and England also generated a range of narratives of how climate change was and might further impact on their own and others\u2019 lives \u2014 from drought and flooding to species extinction, to speculating about going to live on the moon. Whilst these narratives often took place in times and places distant to their own lives, children demonstrated their imaginative capacities to make these times and places meaningful to themselves and their listeners. For example, one 12-year-old in London linked an abstract statistic to a familiar place in his present, saying \u2018there are only six hundred Bengal tigers left in the world. That\u2019s like double the number of people in my school.\u2019<\/p>\n

Of course, imagination is not the recourse of children alone. However, children\u2019s narratives teach us that we need to be more imaginative in how we think about, communicate and prompt action on climate scenarios. In a topsy-turvy world where adults\u2019 lack of serious action gives rise to serious protest by children, imagination is not an object of fantasy. Rather, it is perhaps the greatest tool to get beyond the current climate impasse.<\/p>\n

References<\/h2>\n