As a teenager who follows social and political issues, I am always hearing about the ever-nearing doom of the climate crisis, how humans are destroying the environment, and how we are the “super-generation” who need to save it all.
How weird is it, then, that in the classroom we study virtually nothing about the environment? How can we work towards climate justice if we’re not even learning about it?
The few times that climate change has been discussed in my 11 years of schooling, it’s been restricted to science or technology classes where the teachers simply lecture about crises. No real study of the people facing natural disasters, nor any real focus on solution. Just: worry. What is even more jarring is that I am lucky to get that much. In other classrooms across the country, environmental issues are censored from textbooks and curricula. Moreover, because most educators have neither the resources nor the correct training to teach about the environment, environmental issues are often ignored or diminished in classrooms.
I asked a peer at another high school if she faced the same thing. Kria Lakshmi Vaishnavi Turimella, a high school sophomore from Frisco, Texas was a little bitter about it. “There’s a gap between what’s said and what’s actually done. Schools talk about sustainability, but we still have massive amounts of food waste and barely any clear recycling initiatives. It’s frustrating because the potential is there, but the follow-through isn’t,” she said. She takes matters into her own hands, sitting in on webinars from organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists, then trying to “bring those discussions back” to her school district, to address “sustainable habits within the school system.”
Students I reached out to from across the world reported the same lack of education and integration when it comes to the climate.
“There is a lack of structured conversations and hands-on engagement,” said high school student Oraina Ali from Bangladesh. “At my previous institutions, sustainability was often briefly mentioned in coursework but not explored in depth.”
While it feels like schools are doing little to emphasize the importance of climate education, it is still crucial, and youth across the world agree. “Good conversations can make a difference, especially in regard to education. Knowledge is power, and having access to it is a privilege in itself,” said Turimella about the importance of ecological literacy.
Climate Representation
I live and go to school in the border city of El Paso, Texas, and have extended family in Pakistan. The climate crisis has battered both places. In 2022, my extended family in Pakistan faced deadly floods that devastated my mother’s childhood neighborhood. And since the start of 2025, my community here on the Frontera has dealt with dust storms and zero-vision alerts almost every other day, often forcing us to stay inside even during school hours.
Like me, every person has their own story and connection to the environment. In turn, teaching about climate issues through the lens of paralleling individual experiences with larger issues becomes so important, especially for students.
For anyone to work towards a cause, they need to resonate with it. The most efficient way to encourage youth is through local initiatives and allowing us to learn about the climate on a scale where we feel like we can make a difference.
Leia Lowery, the Executive Director of The Climate Initiative, an organization that works to include students in climate solutions, told me that high school students often feel depressed around environmental conversations and that the way to combat this negative stigma is to connect students with their direct environment and circumstances.
“It was like this huge global issue that they had zero control over… What we sought to do was to take this global issue and bring it down to the local context, where they could understand it, the land beneath their feet. So that they had tangible ways to understand it, but also ways to interact with it and have power,” she said. “A lot of these students that are coming from fishing communities understand how much that cultural connection to these industries matters, and when those industries start to fail, how much that matters in the conversation, you can’t just not talk about that part.”
Climate education must cover not just the problems, but also the people facing them — their histories, identities, and circumstances. Three years ago when the devastating Pakistani floods filled my TV screen and kept my mother’s phone buzzing with calls back home, I realized that most other people saw the ecological disaster as just an occurrence. They wouldn’t realize, as I did because of my family connection and sense of the dynamics between global north and south, that the people who suffered the destruction of these floods weren’t the ones whose carbon emissions created them. Nor would they put the pieces together that decades of colonization, pillaging, and looting of the South Asian continent had also stripped the Pakistani people of the resources necessary to uplift their communities in times of crisis.
Bridging the gap between climate injustices and the experiences of people who are suffering from them is necessary not only to increase empathy among young people but also to frame sustainability as a responsibility rather than a choice.
“Young people want a livable future. I think that it needs to center marginalized voices,” said Cedar Barg, Climate Network Manager at The Wild Center, a nonprofit that works with students in climate justice and leads yearly Youth Climate Summits.
Expanding on this, Ali, the student from Bangladesh, added that “climate change is not just an environmental issue — it affects health, gender equality, economic stability, and social justice. In Bangladesh, rising temperatures, extreme floods, and waterborne diseases disproportionately impact vulnerable communities.”
In recent years, the media cliché has been to portray teenagers like me as the ‘heroes’ of combating climate change, with young people framed as the hope for a better future. This flattery strikes me as ingenuous and harmful in how it lets older people off the hook, perpetuating a bystander effect on a massive scale. Intergenerational conversations and advocacy are necessary for youth to feel supported and empowered. We should not be forced into this fight alone.
Lowery told me that the birth of The Climate Initiative came through conversations between youth and adults. “We really got them [students] talking to people in the community, intergenerational conversations, people who’ve lived here for a really long time, people who were stakeholders, people who were leaders in the community, and they [students] started to come up with action projects.”
This initiative encapsulates the importance of not placing all of the burden on future generations and navigating climate education through community-building.
Eco-education must also expand in the classroom. We shouldn’t just memorize natural disasters in our environmental science classes, but draw them in art, write about them in English, research them in history, connect with nature in PE, and learn about them in every class in between. Humanities and science curricula must be intertwined to discuss all facets of climate issues and solutions. Most importantly, all educators should have the appropriate training to be able to discuss the climate confidently and correctly.
Students crave this interdisciplinary approach. “It needs to be less about memorizing facts and more about real-world action. Instead of just learning that climate change exists, we should be discussing policies, sustainable habits, and ways to create change at a community level. It’s hard to take climate education seriously when the school itself isn’t doing anything sustainable,” said Turimella.
We, the students, have spoken: the time for climate justice is now, and the only way to achieve this is through climate education. We want better curricula, support, representation, and avenues for community involvement. We want pathways to combat this issue that we hear about all the time, but feel so helpless in. We can make a difference; all we need is a foundation.
This Earth Week, I urge all educators to lay a path for a greener tomorrow.
Image: Happy Earth Day by Booker Smith, licensed under CC 2.0.
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