Respect for nature has to start at home | Science Matters |
David Suzuki Foundation Photo: Respect for nature has to start
at home  Reconnecting our children with nature in their everyday
lives is the first step in an environmental education (Credit:
Jayson Lorenzen via Flickr).  By David Suzuki with Faisal Moola
One of the refrains I often hear is about how we have to educate
our kids in schools to be more environmentally responsible. It's
too late for us, they say. Adults are too set in their ways to
change. We've got to teach the children!  What a cop-out. So not
only are we leaving our children with a legacy of global warming
and other environmental challenges, but we'll leave it up to
them to fix the problems we created? Sorry, but that's
fundamentally unfair. It also sets us all up for failure.
Children do what we do, not what we say. If we don't change our
ways first, what incentive do children have to behave more
responsibly?  This isn't to say that we couldn't be doing a
better job with teaching the