Children are the future? Power, generation and environmental practices

This chapter talks about how children are often responsibilised in environmental policy and media discourses in both India and the UK. Abstract evocations of future generations materialise in many areas of climate change policy, based on the ethical argument that, as those imagined to outlive current generations of adults, children have the most to gain from activities and policies seeking to sustain the environments of which they are a part. Yet the centring of children in discourses of climate change impact and response is not without practical and ethical problems. Positioning children as ‘undercover agents of change’ for the environmental movement is as much an abrogation of responsibility for what are essentially the damaging environmental practices of adults, as is offshoring environmental responsibility to the next generation of stewards of the earth.

Ways of understanding family practices across contexts

This chapter explores the situated, dynamic, and relational complexities, and of the ways in which space, place, and time intersect with meanings of environment in the everyday lives of children and families. It sets out to disrupt assumptions of Minority to Majority world learning, and homogenising notions of cross-national in/comparability, through a methodological approach designed to create an analytic conversation across diverse contexts within and between India and the UK. The chapter focuses on the relationality and materiality of everyday lives, devising a multi-method approach in order to capture the interconnectedness of family lives and practices. It uses a common world approach that seeks to avoid the unhelpful binarisations of big and small or ‘global’ and ‘local’ environments, which act as a barrier to understanding.

Negotiating environments in children’s and families’ everyday lives

This chapter demonstrates how, through in-depth qualitative research with 24 families who live in differing contexts in India and the UK, environmental practices are inextricably relational, and linked with dynamic family practices, childhood, and parenthood. Holistic understandings of environmental practices, and of children and families, benefit from juxtaposing Minority and Majority world understandings, and so challenging patronising (colonial) moral discourses of environmental concern that are rooted in Minority world understandings of the affluent ethical consumer practising care at a distance. This approach helps to build the new global perspective based on dialogue between childhoods in Majority and Minority worlds that the book advocates, and so to understand “other” lives, in context.

Environmental affordances and the work of everyday family lives

This chapter looks at the sort of environmental issues that families in India and the UK had to negotiate: sometimes routinely (for example, pollution and danger from road traffic) and sometimes unpredictably (for example, flooding and other extreme weather events). It addresses the complexity of the intermeshing of environmental concerns and practices by focusing on families who were so preoccupied with caring for their families and the daily grind of family maintenance that this superseded concern with climate change. Since families live in diverse material circumstances, environmental messages are likely to be received in different ways and to have varied impacts on different families and children.

Everyday engagement with climate change

This introductory chapter elaborates on the concept of climate change. It considers how families and the children within them think and feel about their local environments and how these ‘small’ environmental issues fit with ‘big’ environmental concerns about climate change in one country in the Majority world (India), and one in the Minority world (the UK). There is a great deal of evidence that, while most scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is a pressing issue and most people believe that climate change needs to be addressed, relatively few in countries that produce the most carbon emissions are prepared to make sacrifices to deal with it.

Environmental concerns, identities and practices

This chapter explains how narratives of environmental concern that derive from particular Minority world contexts are not truly global. Popular images of an apparently depopulated pristine nature, such as the earth from space or the solitary polar bear, are quite literally distant from the lives of the majority. Yet, they are considered by many as foundational to galvanising environmentalism into a purportedly ‘global’ movement. This kind of affluent Minority world imaginary is problematic in several respects. Images of depopulated pristine nature conceal the fallacy of nature culture dualism, rendering invisible the vast differences within and between countries in human nature interdependence, and how children and families understand, value, and are put at risk by their environments.