adults need “childish” thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity

How to Green Your ParentsNY Times: April 21, 2010 by Allison Arieff

Thursday is the 40th anniversary of the original Earth Day. Over the years, the impact of this once seminal day has lessened. Earth Day brings people together for nice gatherings and noble efforts but has, for the most part, made sustainable action more of an annual event than a daily habit. We’ve got to change that.

Here’s a move in the right direction: launching this Earth Day is Green My Parents, a nationwide effort to inspire and organize kids to lead their families in measuring and reducing environmental impact at home. Not just on Earth Day, but every day. GMP’s initial goal is to have its first 100 youth advocates train and educate 100 peers (who will then turn to 100 of their respective peers and so on), with the aim of saving families $100 million between now and April 2011.

How? By washing in cold water, walking or biking to school/work and kicking the bottled-water habit, for example. GMP’s founders suggest that by taking simple steps like those, the average family could save over $1,000 each year.

Green My Parents’ official launch is this Thursday morning, with the broadcast of a free online workshop for youth, adults and educators to learn about easy and effective ways to help save the planet. Led by 12-year-old Adora Svitak, a prolific writer, teacher and advocate for literacy and the environment, the broadcast will also be disseminated by book (via paper-saving print-on-demand), Web site and peer to peer interaction.

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Svitak, who despite her tender age is a frequent lecturer on the global environmental circuit, suggests in her presentations that we [adults] need “childish” thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and, especially, optimism. At this year’s TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, she told the crowd that “kids’ big dreams deserve high expectations, starting with grownups’ willingness to learn from children as much as to teach.” WATCH VIDEO

Kids still dream about perfection, says Svitak: “They don’t think about limitations, just good ideas.” GMP’s other student champions seem to prove this assertion. They include inspirational powerhouses like high school senior Jordan Howard, who has already shared a stage with Hillary Clinton and lectured on the dangers of plastics and other environmental dangers; 15-year-old Alec Loorz, who founded the advocacy site Kids-vs-Global-Warming.com at 13, the same year he became the youngest trained presenter of Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” talk; and 16-year-old Chloe Maxim, founder of The Lincoln Academy Climate Action Club, a school group dedicated to fighting global warming. READ MORE !