subject: Why Environmental Awareness Is So Important For Young People [print this page] Our young people are the future of the country, the theory might be as old as time but it will always be the truth because they are the people who can carry on legacies and implement changes when the previous generation are old and grey. This is undoubtedly the theory behind graduate employment programmes and apprenticeship schemes such as the Future Jobs Fund, with companies and businesses in the public and private sectors seeing the importance of investing in the younger generation and the future of their company.
This investment is just one example of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) which is essentially the idea that businesses must maximise the positive impact and influence they have on the environment, the economy and on society and minimise the negative impacts they may have on these.
For the younger generation, instilling a new sense of environmental awareness in the older generation is a pretty tall order because old habits die hard. Until recently the environment wasnt really considered in many government decisions or individual lifestyle choices and as a result, the huge turnaround that has happened in recent years can be hard to get across to those who have always lived according to different principles. As such, many companies quite rightly concentrate on educating children and creating a keen sense of environmental awareness from a very young age, because its a lot easier to create routines and lifestyle choices from scratch than to try and alter them later on in life.
There are a lot of fun ways that companies can raise awareness of environmental issues in children: from including it in lessons at school, creating after school clubs, initiating recycling schemes in school and explaining the impact they have, to rewarding children for encouraging their parents to walk them to school rather than drive them and explaining where their food comes from and how the farming of crops and vegetables and the rearing of animals impacts the environment.
Children love to learn and as long as their minds are kept stimulated and interested, theyll soak up information like a sponge and what theyre taught will become second nature just as long as the processes are in place for them to be able to. In other words, its all very well telling children to recycle and so on but if when theyre old enough to take this on for themselves there are limited resources to do so then the hard work is for nothing and thats why its important that the older generation play their part too.
