600,000 boys and girls between the ages of six and 14 from 95 countries submitted paintings on the theme of “Biodiversity — connecting with nature” for a United Nations drawing competition to inspire conservation and promote biodiversity.
Environmental education is important. Competitions like this help inspire conservation in children. These children can act as conservation ambassadors in their communities, and they will eventually grow up to be adults with a greater appreciation of nature and for the need for conservation.
Earlier this year, Friend’s of the Environment’s Rare Pride campaign on Abaco Island to protect the spiny lobster population featured a science fair and competition to teach children about conservation. The students learned about local lobster poluations, their life cycles and size limits.
But this education extends beyond just children. These children will keep this knowledge of the environment and conservation with them for the rest of their lives. They will also be able to educate their parents and communities about the environment.
Children routinely present unabashed creativity and inspiring passion for conservation, but as Sir Ken Robinson said in one of the most popular TED talks ever, “in our society we don’t grow into creativity rather, we grow out of creativity” and correspondingly our childhood passion for biodiversity and the planet’s wildlife can dimmish if we don’t include the environment in our education.
Lauren St. John talked about how it was a teacher long ago that taught her the importance of conservation:
Not surprisingly, my background instilled in me an abiding love of animals, but it took a junior schoolteacher to teach me the importance of conservation. Mr Mitchley was an earnest, bespectacled man who drummed into us the rules of the wild: take nothing but pictures; leave nothing but footprints. He also saw that all our school projects were about conservation. We studied soil erosion, monitored rainfall, heard about the healing properties of plants, and the importance of saving, appreciating and conserving threatened species in the wild. As a consequence, those things are now as natural to me as breathing.
St. John is concerned that children aren’t being taught about conservation in schools. She considers it an essential life skill:
“With one in four mammals facing extinction and a world population of 6.7 billion and counting, it concerns him that essential life skills aren’t taught in the classroom. “We don’t teach kids how to be good citizens. It’s all very well learning about acid rain, but we don’t teach them what to do about it. We disastrously equip kids for the challenges they’re going to face in the future. There’s one planet, one global ecosystem, and it’s a question of what can we do about it and how fast we can learn to do it.”
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