“What can I do to help?”
That was the question posed by our young son, full of earnestness, care, and hopeful curiosity. He wanted to know how he could help care for our Earth.
We try not to overburden our children with the heaviness of living on a warming planet. But they can hear, see, and smell the siren call of nature. They live through headlines of wildfire haze, record heat, and poor air quality.
They can sense our alarm, and they can see these patterns repeat themselves, season to season, location to location. One month it’s Colorado, the next it’s California, then Michigan, then New York, and so on.
At the same time — and this is what is so confounding about living during this moment — they experience nature’s goodness and abundance. They spy spring’s early flowers poking through the soil, they eat tomatoes and zucchini grown in our backyard, they climb small boulders on a mountainous hike, they feel the summer grass underneath their toes. Nature is beautiful.
And so, our son asks, from a place of love and care, “what can I do to help?”
Our kids are too young to carry this burden. And so we tell him: go outside and fall in love with nature. Get to know the trees, spot the birds, dig in healthy soils, and recognize the beauty all around.
Because if our kids grow up loving and respecting nature, then they will be ready to care for our planet as they mature. They will become the environmental leaders of a new generation.
While our kids forge a deeper way of being with nature, we grownups can collectively take action. Although none of us can do everything, all of us can do something. To name just a few steps, we can:
Plant new trees or tend a small garden;
Reduce what we consume, reuse what we love, and recycle what we must;
Break our reliance upon fossil fuels and seek out clean energy solutions;
Drive less and bike more;
Support local farmers;
Compost our organic waste;
Pass on single-use plastics; and
Vote for the environment.
At times, our environmental crises may seem insurmountable. We may be tempted to fall into fatalism or despair. But the truth is: we can all contribute something.
In the words of the Lorax, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
So, to answer every child wondering what they can to help, we say: just care a whole awful lot.