Tag Archives: millennials

In honor of Earth Day, I thought I’d burst a bubble. We’ve all heard how “green” this younger generation is, and they are in many respects. But Network member Connie Flanagan and her graduate students have been studying this generation’s attitudes toward conservation, and they found some rather surprising news. (Or maybe it’s not so surprising to parents out there–Governor Schwarenengger knows what I’m talking about).

It turns out that this generation of young people are a tad wasteful, at least compared with their peers in the past.  They’re taking longer showers, leaving the lights on all over the place, and driving around in gas guzzlers much more often. In fact, my generation (teens in the 1970s) can stand up a little taller today (making up for the disco embarrassment perhaps). We were bigger conservationists than this latest gen.

Young people’s habits of conserving energy by using fewer resources hit its high point in the mid-1970s  and then took a nosedive. Declines were steep in the 1980s, but the numbers reporting they turned the thermostat down or drove less sunk even further in the 1990s and early 2000s. They were also less and less concerned about scarce resources. They didn’t see much reason to conserve, in other words, because they just didn’t think that water, gas, and other natural resources were in short supply. Part of this is a hangover from the rampant materialism that took off in the Gordon Gekko 1980s, but the hangover lasted quite a long time (through 2003 at least).

In addition to not turning off the lights and avoiding the subway or bus, young people grew more likely to think it was other people’s problem, or the government’s responsibility to take care of the environment, not their own personal doing. There’s a couple of caveats here, one of which has to do with technology. As faith in technology rises, so does a sense of personal responsibility for the environment. Not sure where that’s coming from, but interesting nevertheless.

And finally, pollution. For those of us who grew up in the early 1970s, we will never forget that American Indian standing by the polluted, trash-dump of a river with a single tear rolling down his cheek. We also won’t forget rivers bursting into flames. Pollution was serious business back then, when people were still allowed to throw their Henry’s Hamburgers out the car window with no guilt whatsoever and big business dumped tons of crap into the rivers and oceans.  But then there was a cultural shift, and we were all shamed into being better housekeepers, and we did. Things got cleaned up.

But memory is short, and before you know it, young people growing up in the 1990s and 2000s didn’t think pollution was a big deal anymore. The world looked pretty clean from their vantage point– and compared to the 1970s, it most certainly was. But relax just a little bit and before you know it, we’re talking about “clean coal,” and other efforts that I personally think just sound a little too good to be true.

So here we are 40 years later from the first Earth Day (in 1970), and young people are taking the reins of the environmental movement. Hopefully in the last five or six years since the study I’m talking about was done, attitudes have shifted, but I suspect not. The media tends to focus on the cream of the crop in all those stories we read of this uber-green generation. By and large, though, there’s a lot of young people who, like many of the rest of us, are lackadaisical when it comes to being stewards of the environment. Convenience wins out. Me: guilty as charged. I confess here and for all 36 of my readers that I don’t recycle.

So I’ll do my part and young adults, do yours. Turn the lights off, get a bus pass, run your dishwasher at midnight, and take a shorter shower.