Exploring a Sustainable Future with Kids

How a scavenger hunt can be empowering

My co-organizer’s daughter, holding up one of her drawings

Below a blue sky, surrounded by bustling Sunday afternoon activity, a mom stood with her two kids. She was looking at a piece of paper on a clipboard. One kid was bouncing around. The other was attempting to balance on a stone ledge surrounding a large planter.

I walked up to her and asked, “Can I help you with anything?”

“Nah, unless you have tranquilizer darts,” she joked.

As someone who also has high-energy kids, I laughed and said, “Yep, I get it! I have that same problem, especially at bedtime.”

With a grin, I continued on to see if anyone else needed assistance.

The event was an environmental scavenger hunt for families that I put together with Cheseapeake Climate Action Network.

Ever since writing my book, I’ve been interested in getting families involved in climate activism. Part of this is because parents are a major force that we can tap into for political action. Parents often get interested in taking action on climate change when they have kids. A recent survey showed that 81 percent of mothers are concerned about climate change.

The other part of the reason I’m interested in getting families involved is because kids are the ones who are the most affected by climate change. Unlike in the past, climate change isn’t an issue of “future generations.” It’s happening right now, everywhere. And it will continue getting worse. Our kids are going to have to deal with the consequences in the future. In activism, it’s important to center the people who are affected the most by an issue. In climate, a lot of those folks are youth - we need to include them.

Unfortunately, a lot of parents don’t know where or how to start. Having young kids is one of the periods in life that you have the least time and energy to do anything extra. Childcare is expensive and seeking it out takes a lot of time and emotional labor. Plus, talking about climate change with younger kids is scary. It’s easy to get caught up in the science or the doom and gloom.

The climate movement at large doesn’t help the situation. While there are commnunity-based environmental justice groups that provide childcare or are family-inclusive, the movement still defaults to involving people with the most time and privilege. That’s usually older, wealthy white folks. I was at a meeting with our county council to push for a building efficiency bill. I was both the only woman and only person under the age of 60. We have to do better.

I’ve made resources to support families - like the Family Climate Toolkit and the Climate Action Quiz and Toolkit for Tired People - and run booths at other people’s events. But I’ve wanted to do an in-person, stand-alone event for a long time. For my book, I attended the Play-In for Climate Action that Moms Clean Air Force put on the National Mall. It was a brilliant bit of joyful protest! So I reached out to CCAN to see what we could do together.

With the event, I wanted to focus on vision and action. It’s so easy to get caught up in explaining the science or focusing on the bad with climate change. Often, that path just leads to despair and mental paralysis. In addition, kids lose attention after about five minutes of explanation.

In contrast, our event embraced the philosophy of participatory hopepunk, a phrase my friend

Ashia Ray

introduced me to. It says that what we do matters and can make things better, but only if we actually get out and do it. It’s focused on looking ahead to what we want and working towards it.

We did provide a brief intro. My co-organizer talked briefly about CCAN’s Make Polluters Pay campaign by summarizing it with the perfectly kid-friendly metaphor that “if you make a mess, you clean it up.” I talked about how my older kid biked one of the nearby roads every day to school and noticed that one of the intersections was confusing for cyclists. At a meeting of the city’s bicycle advisory committee (which I’ve participated in for years), he recommended the city install a bike box (a painted area where bicyclists can stop at a traffic light). When the time came for the city to replace the road, they took our input into account and included a bike box!

For the activity, I wanted kids and parents to look at what we like in the city, what we could change, and how we could use our voices to change it.

Hence, the scavenger hunt. Harnessing kids’ natural love of finding stuff, we could help them find both good and bad things to highlight. Afterwards, we gathered together and drew pictures of what they wanted more of and what they wanted less of in letters to our mayor and city council. The kids got really into it, producing beautiful illustrations of all sorts of things. In fact, one of the things the kids liked was the “rainbow bike lane” on the same road as our bike box! The city had painted it to make it stand out and slow traffic. It was awesome to see the kids being thoughtful, knowing that people in power would see what they contributed. My co-organizer and I will be meeting with the mayor soon to present the pictures.

If we want people to take action - on climate or otherwise - we need to make it accessible and empowering. Not every type of activism can or should be easy, but we need entry points where people can step in. The more community and connection-based it is, the better. I hope the kids and parents who participated in our event walked away with a vision of the future they want to achieve and a few more ideas of how to do so.

The current assault on EPA by polluters and their allies in the White House and Congress is unprecedented. Mom’s Clean Air Force has directions on how to contact your members of Congress about this attack.