by Graham Averill

Let’s play make-believe for a minute. Picture an America where the CEO of an oil company is an avid recycler and composter who dedicates millions a year to researching alternative fuel technology. Picture an America where the president thinks environmentalism is a core value, not a political liability. An America where all its citizens are engrained with a sense of stewardship.

It sounds like a utopian dream from some lefty sci-fi book, but if Diane Wood and other environmental educators have their way, that utopian dream might not be too far off.

Wood is the executive director of the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation, an organization founded by Congress that's designed to encourage environmental education in grades K-12. “Our only mission is to change the way our society looks at the environment,” Wood says.

And what better way to change a society than influencing its youth? All across the country, private schools and progressive public schools are incorporating environmental studies into their core curriculum, and they’re putting most of their resources into elementary schools.

“The kids at that age are sponges,” says Bonnie Branch, the environmental studies instructor at Mill Mountain School in Roanoke, Va. “They’re aware, but they aren’t so busy with other things, so they can devote time and energy to activities like recycling.”

At the all-girl, private Mill Mountain School, the six-grade class picks up trash while walking to the art museum. They visit the local landfill. They take field trips to Explore Park to learn about water quality. In the same state, the public school Glenwood Elementary operates a sustainable greenhouse. And in North Carolina, public school kids in math class are analyzing the amount of food and products they consume during a week and comparing it to the amount a kid in Kenya consumes.

“Progressive teachers are taking environmental education out of the Earth Day box and infusing it into their core curriculum, linking environmental education to many of society’s core goals,” says Wood.

But can teaching a kid about water quality today really make a difference in the way our society looks at the environment tomorrow? Early childhood development specialists believe that a person’s morals and belief systems are learned at a very early age and that elementary school kids (ages 5 to 11) are particularly susceptible to outside influences. More importantly, what you learn at an early age is difficult to unlearn later on down the road. It’s why fundamentalist Christians are fighting so hard to get Harry Potter books taken out of the classroom and intelligent design put in. It’s why the Anti-Defamation League has developed an entire institute to combat racism in preschool and elementary school children. And it’s why environmentalists are finally pushing environmental education in elementary schools.

Until recently, environmental education wasn’t a consideration in public schools. Except for the one day a year when kids learned about recycling on Earth Day, the only environmental message most of us got as kids was from Smokey the Bear.

“I didn’t have any environmental education as a kid,” Branch says. “Most of us didn’t come across environmentalism until a later age.” And the result of this short-sighted education? A president who won’t admit global warming is a reality and a public that rates a candidate’s environmental record below his ability to bench press when they’re going to the polls.

According to Wood, if environmentalists want different results, they have to change the way our kids think about the world. “Our ultimate goal is to make thinking about the environment second nature with these kids. If my generation had gotten the education that my kids are getting,” Wood says, “I don’t think environmental stewardship would be the hard sell that it is today.”