Is there an environmental generational divide?
The notion that there exists a generational divide on the issue of the environment is highly contested. Yet at the same time, whatever the studies show, it becomes just another reason for environmentalists to double down on their regressive vision of the future.
We are told that, ‘there is a clear generational divide in attitudes to climate change’ [1] and that, ‘younger generations tend to feel more strongly about the issue of climate change than their older counterparts’ [2].
Environmental activists of all stripes remain convinced [3], when studies show that the idea of a generational divide is highly questionable. But even those who highlight this disparity nevertheless couch it within a pro-environmentalist/activist framework [4, 5, 6]. Whether there is or isn’t seems to be beside the point. Despite what studies show, environmentalists – from the United Nations to local green groups – always arrive at the same conclusion: more apocalyptic pronouncements are required to legitimise ever more stringent ‘sustainable’ policy demands.
Alternatively, how might we approach this question? In particular, in relation to educational institutions in Scotland? If there is a generational divide, how might we explain it and how should we respond? Should we conclude that young people have a deeper and keener understanding of ‘climate science’? Or do young people simply care more than older generations about society or the future of the planet? Are ‘baby boomers’ so satisfied with their lot that they care not a jot about their children and grandchildren, never mind the planet? Maybe we might consider that Scots under 40 have been schooled in climate catastrophism through the eco capture of schools, the media and cultural institutions throughout their lifetime? Or that the ‘emotional engagement’ (read fear) identified in young people around the issue of the ‘climate emergency’ is being wilfully rebranded as political insight [7, 8, 9].
Whatever the case may be, even if an eco-generational divide was a demonstrable truth, it is not something that should be weaponised and utilised for political capital. Nor would it be a time for adults to ‘leave the room’. Young people expressing fear and anxiety about the coming ‘apocalypse’ is not the result of a healthy political discourse or a sign of democratic political engagement. There is no advantage in such a state of affairs; it can encourage only a debilitating moral and emotional detachment from political, cultural and social life.
In one of too many hagiographic interviews with Greta Thunberg, Jonathan Watts in the Guardian [10] fed us with a narrative that Ms Thunberg protested alone one day and, soon after, was at the forefront of a ‘global movement’. But what is unwittingly revealed in this interview, and the Thunberg phenomena more broadly, is that the 15-year-old (and her enablers) was kicking at an open door. Were it not for the fact that the ideology of environmentalism had been decades in the making among the Western elites, Ms Thunberg’s solo climate protest may have remained just that.
As Watts noted, ‘One after another, veteran campaigners and grizzled scientists have described her as the best news for the climate movement in decades. She has been lauded at the UN, met the French president, Emmanuel Macron, shared a podium with the European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and has been endorsed by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel’.
Far from a ‘youth-led environmental movement’, what we are witnessing is the ramping up of climate catastrophism by the eco elites, who are, paradoxically, using young people as a source of political authority in an attempt to justify their own no-growth economic agenda [11].
Venerating the likes of Thunberg and the ‘wisdom of youth’ more broadly doesn’t threaten the elites’ grip on power, however slender and politically degenerate it may be, but in the short term at least it can obfuscate and legitimise their eco-austerity programmes and policies.
It is no great leap of faith to believe that most right-thinking people would agree that young people are not political pawns to be used and abused by political ideologues – and shame on those who treat them so.
The problem with the use and abuse of the so-called generational divide is illustrative of a deep-rooted and elite-driven social and political malaise, an existential loss of faith in a transformative political and social project. It is problematic on multiple levels. It speaks to elites that have given up on social, moral and material development; instead, they foster a culture of fear while encouraging antagonism between generations.
The best the new elites have to offer is a future of limitations on material and social development. Their agenda needs a compliant public, and their best hope for that is a generation that has imbibed a culture of a ‘sustainability’.
Furthermore, the promotion of this sustainable, eco-austerity agenda in schools is not about educating students but indoctrinating them, inculcating them into a narrow elitist worldview. It would be a folly to find comfort in the belief that it might not have such a profound effect on the next generation, because we can be certain that it is not going to inspire young people into adulthood with a sense of optimism about the future. Nothing good can come from a cynical and fatalistic outlook.
This is why, however difficult it may prove to be, it is necessary to highlight and problematise the introduction of ideologically motivated ‘educational’ frameworks. We need to find ways to counter their impact, if not dismantle the systems used by doctrinaire activists who are infecting the next generation through our schools. In Scotland, a good place to start would be to challenge the use of third-party organisations who are neither non-partisan nor good-faith actors but have their own explicit, politically driven agendas, and who are taking the place of subject-driven educators. Another would be to challenge the introduction of Learning for Sustainability (LfS) in Scottish schools. LfS is to be embedded in every subject and will encourage the acceptance of a culture of limits [12].
LfS is an elitist political ideology that will infuse every subject at all levels. It is arguably the most far-reaching and coercive systematic change in education in modern history. This alone should have made it a national conversation, but as is becoming increasingly clear, it has been introduced by stealth. The post–Second World War social contract between parents and our educational institutions is being ripped up and recast without parents having a say.
The role of education is to inspire the next generation to be independent thinkers who have been schooled in as wide a variety of opinion and thinking, on any given subject, as is possible. Dogmatism has no place in public life, and certainly not in schools.
Alex Cameron (September 2023) Originally published by scottishunionforeducation.substack.com
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