Climate change classes missing a sense of wonder
In December 2023, Connecticut announced it would join New Jersey as one of two states to require climate change curriculum in K-12 classrooms. Since this requirement took effect in July, we’ve witnessed the legislation’s early effects, as well as efforts in several other states to establish similar measures. Such progress is promising: the new legislation has expanded early educational instruction on the growing threat of climate change and increasingly placed the problem in local, and even personal, contexts. But these educational requirements miss an essential component — an organic sense of wonder.
Americans increasingly recognize that climate change is happening— and with damaging consequences. Yet there remains discordance between this recognition and the perceived need to act. A Yale survey from 2021 reported that nationally 72% of adults believe global warming is happening. However, as of early 2023, only 37% of adults believed climate change should be a “top priority” for the president and Congress. Out of the 21 national issues surveyed, climate change ranked 17th overall, and for Republicans, it was second to last.
The environmental writer Richard Louv observed, “Today, kids are aware of the global threats to the environment — but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading.” In his seminal book, “Last Child in the Woods,” Louv laments our society’s withdrawal from nature and elaborates the numerous issues that have accompanied this trend. Among them, he recognizes a problem first identified by the environmental educator David Sobel: “ecophobia,” the fear of ecological decay.
As students increasingly understand the gravity of climate change, they’re also steadily losing the formerly ubiquitous experiences that imbued the natural world with personal attachment. Nature becomes a place of mainly “fear and apocalypse.”
Research indicates this. A study conducted by Lancet in
2021 surveyed 10,000 adolescents across the world: over 50 percent of respondents indicated feeling anxious or angry about climate change; a majority reported feeling powerless to stop it. In our attempts to save the dangerously decaying planet, we must be careful not to abstract that it is also the well-spring of wonder.
Rachel Carson was acutely aware of the need for this balance when, in 1962, she published “the classic that launched the environmental movement”—”Silent Spring.” In her book, Carson criticized the indiscriminate spraying of new “ecocidal” pesticides and indicted the culture of deference and apathy that had allowed its rise. She believed that by conveying the risks of these chemicals to the public while reminding them of nature’s splendor, she could galvanize a political movement. As she described a sterile world devoid of insects, she explained that it was also a world “ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight.” She constantly coupled nature’s leavened fragility and abiding inspiration.
Commenting on “Silent Spring,” the environmentalist and philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore explained that Carson “understood that a love of nature is a necessary condition for saving it.” Carson was certainly alarmed by the crisis she described. But attendant in every description of “the terrible truth,” she retained “the irresistible hope.”
How can we apply this lesson to new climate change curriculum? As Louv and Carson would attest, fostering a love of nature is foundational: Near the end of her life, Carson penned an essay entitled “The Sense of Wonder.” “Passion does not arrive on videotape or on a CD,” Louv reminds us. “Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young.”
The curricular standards on climate change in New Jersey and Connecticut “emphasize student data analysis and evidence-based argumentation.” These are important skills necessary for navigating scientific issues, and students will be tested on them in fifth, eighth and 11th grades. But more than being tested, students need to be inspired. With several other states considering similar legislation, we’re at an inflection point. Whether it’s inscribed explicitly in national curriculum or initiated through the efforts of individual teachers, adding this further dimension is critical. A walk in the wood, a blooming sunflower at the back of the class; a field trip to a local marsh — these may be the seeds of a movement we so desperately need.
If our goal is to shape lasting environmental stewards, then cultivating an attachment to nature’s sublimity is the first step. Recall William Wordsworth’s prophetic wisdom:
“One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.” Knowledge is important. But only knowledge with the conviction and direction to act is power.