Severson Dells

This from Canada: Global trends indicate a looming environmental catastrophe, and engaging high school students through Internet social networks around the world may be the only hope.

High schoolers changing the world with Facebook, something most adults would have to ask, “What is Facebook?”

Social networking sites are powerful forces that are shaping students, our future leaders. Online communities are tying together millions of ordinary people, who will have to mobilize to lead government and industry down the paths of sustainability if it is to happen.

As trends show global consumption of seafood, steel, aluminum and other resources continuing to break records, the only real hope for a sustainable planet is for a grassroots global citizens’ movement unlike anything ever seen on the face of the Earth, according to a story by Stephen Leahy — Can Networking Teenagers Save the World?

Steve Chase, director of the Environmental Advocacy Program at Antioch University in New Hampshire, trains activists. Chase tells Leahy that students were a major force in civil rights and social justice movements. They will be a major force in creating a sustainable planet.

“High school students are my hope. They could save the world — after all they will inherit this world,” Chase said.

Governments at all levels along with individuals need to attack this problem with energy and determination, Chase says. But little will change without a global citizens’ movement, sparked in large part by teenagers deeply worried about the world they will inherit.

“We have just a few years left to do something about this,” he said.

Chase argues that social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace could be the vehicles that drive society away from consumerism, that it can help them overcome the $600 billion influence of advertising and its effect on popular culture that equates more and more stuff with good.

We hope Chase is right. We agree that today’s students will have to live the greenest lives of any modern generation as global economies compete for for limited resources.

And we hope that part of their coping is learning about nature to understand the plants, animals and ecosystems that sustain life on the planet.

How do we do that? Sengalese environmentalist and poet Baba Dioum gave us the formula in 1968, when he said:

“In the end we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand what we are taught.”

We’re teachers at Severson Dells. Nature is both the subject that the most pressing issue of the 21st century.

Learn about it.

Teach someone else what you know.

Share the love.

Get active.

Click here to become a Severson Dells Facebook friend.