Bulletin

Issue: May 2005

News

Kids and the post scarcity cultural condition

Listen guys! You may not know it but you’re living in ‘the affluence of the post scarcity cultural condition’.

And what is more, it could be affecting your environmental ethics and politics.
In other words, because there is no shortage of goods and services, as there was when your grandparents were young, you are not as conscious of ‘green’ or ‘conservation’ issues as you might be.

This is one of the main findings of a La Trobe University research project entitled: Green families and intergenerational environmental ethics and politics.

The ‘post scarcity cultural condition’ is how Dr Phillip Payne of the School of Education describes the current era in which today’s youngsters are being raised amid a plethora of consumer goods, entertainment and ample services.

Dr Payne said it was worrying that Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show household concern for the environment has declined from 75 per cent of people in 1992 to 62 per cent in 2000. Other studies reveal youth feel ‘powerless’ about the prospects for the environment.

‘Because of this decline and sense of disengagement, I wanted to ascertain how the family household acts as a site of environmental education,’ Dr Payne explained.

He said there had been allegations that environmental education in schools had not lived up to expectations, partially because there is a lack of knowledge about the influence of the family and home on the ‘baggage’ children bring to school.

Dr Payne conducted two parallel investigations, the first into the intergenerational environmental ethics and politics of 30 ‘normal’ (non-Green) families in Bendigo and the second, a comparative study of six Bendigo and six inner city Melbourne ‘Green’ families.

They aimed to describe the environmental interests and actions of family members and whether parents negotiate their environmental commitments with their children.

Because Dr Payne also investigated how the current ‘Green’ parents developed their active concern for the environment, he examined three generations to ascertain how an environmental ethic and eco-politic are ‘socially constructed’ via intergenerational processes.

The data obtained from the survey and in-depth interviewing of the members of six inner Melbourne families has been analysed.

Each of the six data sets included at least one child between the age of eight and 16 and both parents where at least one was a member of the Greens or voted Green.

The findings show intergenerational continuity across three generations although the type of environmental ethic and politic has changed according to prevailing social circumstances, educational opportunities and cultural conditions.

For example, current parents’ environmental ethics and eco-politics are more domestically focused, following strong involvements in environmental issues in the 1980s which evolved from participation in social justice causes in the 1970s, when most parents attended university.

Parents reflected fondly on the social and political changes that came about through their involvements in the Vietnam War, feminism, and early practices of environmentalism.

Dr Payne found that the parents of today’s youngsters are legacies of their own parents’ scarcity conditions caused by the Depression of the 1930s and World War 11.

Most parents were highly educated and many deliberately earned far less than their potential earning capacity. Their children had fewer opportunities for these rebellious ‘rites of passage’ or sense of support by the current educational, social and political climate.

Household frugality and parents’ anti-consumerism and anti-materialism views are under pressure with their children due to a combination of the culture of children’s rights, consumer/entertainment, and ‘post material’ imperatives that seem to limit the possibility of social alternatives.

However, some children expressed pride in their parents’ environmental commitments and actively resisted the peer group pressures they felt at school.

Dr Payne, a member of the international editorial boards of Environmental Education Research and The Journal of Environmental Education, believes his study could serve as a template for other studies into persistent social, political and educational concerns about children’s citizenship, health, indigenous and ethnicity issues, social relations, and globalization.

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