Miller-McCune is a new magazine whose tagline is "Turning Research into Solutions." On its website, it reports on a 30-year study of green attitudes among adolescents. The results are sobering.
"A research team led by Laura Wray-Lake of the Pennsylvania State University's Department of Human Development and Family Studies examined data from the 'Monitoring the Future' study, a sophisticated survey of the beliefs and behaviors of American secondary school students. The scholars mapped trends in a variety of environment-related areas, including conservation-conscious behaviors, feelings of responsibility for the environment and faith in technology. "'We found a precipitous decline in high school seniors' reports of conservation behaviors across the three decades,' they report. 'These trends clearly indicate that youth in the past two decades were not as willing to endorse conservation behaviors of cutting down on heat, electricity, driving and using bikes or mass transit as were young people in the 1970s.'"
After a blip of environmental consciousness in the 1970s, awareness crashed over the next 30 years.
"'Clearly, the average high school student across the past three decades has not viewed himself or herself as the first line of defense in protecting the environment,' the scholars conclude. "They add that the high school seniors surveyed 'tended to see government, and people in general, as more responsible for environmental problems than they themselves felt.'"
We have our work cut out for us.
Ah, kids these days....
It seems the key distinction here is between awareness and behavior. With Internet Age youths generally encountering more information in total, it follows that they are more "aware" of environmental issues. It may be that the barrage of information is, itself, partly to blame for the decline in "conservation-conscious behaviors".
My guess is that a higher proportion of adolescents now encounter conservationism through marketing channels than academic, government, or activist channels (if this is touched on in the details of the study, please pardon my oversight). The general tone of marketing in regards to the environment is that corporations have things figured out, and if we continue to support them, crisis will be averted. With the impression, then, that corporations are taking responsibility of conservation for them, adolescents have less motivation to change their own behavior. If they won't turn off the lights, let's hope they're ready to take responsibility for the corporations...