Meet today’s typical college student. She’s academically motivated, having grown up in a society that stressed academic excellence and promoted the value of higher education. She’s well rounded, involved in as many extracurricular clubs and organizations as she can without having to temper her studying and social habits. She’s civically minded and volunteers at the local homeless shelter on the weekends. And she’s environmentally conscious; she recycles, uses compostable silverware in the dining halls and always turns off the lights when she leaves a room. But when she’s not busy with all of her activities, she can usually be found wired into her mp3 player, cell phone with Internet capabilities and the latest social networking site. She’s a consumer who has been marketed to her entire life. She’s part of the Millennial Generation, and she’s no exception. She’s one of many young adults born between 1982 and 2000 who comprise this generation. As Millennials grow older and struggle to find their place in American society they will also grapple with a greater challenge, learning to reconcile the burden of becoming a more sustainable society with their own desire to consume and produce waste that adds to the destruction of the environment.
Born into an increasingly technological world and introduced to the concept of mass consumption from an early age, Millennials have a unique position, dependent on such technology yet forced with the burden of decreasing their own consumption and finding a way for the world to stop its negative impact on the environment. As more world citizens are born every day and people continue to consume at alarming rates, Millennials have no choice in attempting to find a solution. As Al Gore, a leader in the fight against global warming, said in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the climate crisis is indeed a “true planetary emergency.” There are, however, many hurdles standing in the way of Millennials and their race to preserve the environment; the global nature of fighting a problem that affects not just one segment of society but all segments, the problem of how to govern other nations’ practices, and Millennials’ personal struggles against their need for consumerism and detachment from nature. Millennials possess the ability to help fight environmentally damaging practices and change society’s view of sustainability, but it’s their own drive toward consumption that stands in their way, making themselves their most formidable barrier.
Millennials, the largest generation with nearly 10 million children in the United States alone, are no strangers to the call for social action and their ability to help implement small grassroots campaigns is what will ultimately drive them to a sustainability crusade. Take, for example, the number of young entrepreneurs who have emerged from the Millennial Generation. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the social networking Web site Facebook, was just 19 when he created the site that now boasts more than 66 million active users. The site, which started as a networking took for Harvard University has grown to encompass anyone over the age of 13 and has an estimated worth of $15 billion, according to Forbes.com. Few Millennials today would argue that Facebook doesn’t affect the way youth communicate with one another, showing that social movements can start small and grow into something that changes the way a society functions. Part of the reason social movements such as Facebook have resonated among Millennials is because they have grown up accustomed to thinking about broad, sweeping social changes. The Web 2.0 movement, a term used to describe changing trends in World Wide Web technology that seeks to enhance creativity, communications and information sharing, has literally grown with Millennials and they have become the key users of the new technology. As a result of Facebook’s success, many other Web sites are using the Web 2.0 model to increase the way their information is accessed, writes New York Times blogger Saul Hansell. Though Web 2.0 is a relatively new concept for online communication, it is commonplace on the computers of Millennials and they see it as a normal part of their Internet experience. Millennials have examples of modern social movements, giving them a foundation to build off and examples to follow when they begin to formulate their own fights for change.
Though many might not realize it, Millennials have already acted as a part of a large grassroots movement, adding fodder to the argument that Millennials are up to the challenge of starting a movement of a similar nature on their own. This movement, the campaign for President-elect Barack Obama, showed that the number of Millennials and their determination to commit to a cause could make a difference. During the 2008 presidential election, 23 million youth over the age of 18 voted (CIRCLE). While 23 million makes up 53 percent of youth voters, it makes up only around 23 percent of all Millennials when one takes into account those Millennials not yet of age to vote, bringing the count of Millennials in America to around 100 million by 2018, when all will be of age to vote[1] (Leyden, 4). If this group was given so much importance during the 2008 elections with only 23 million voters, the importance of this voting group in future elections will be even greater. Their sheer numbers will allow Millennials to make a difference in igniting national, and even global, change. Given the expected size of the Millennial Generation in years to come, their ability to engender change through political methods such as propositions, laws and government agencies seems possible. One needs only to look at how the grassroots Students for Barack Obama organization started as a simple Facebook group in 2006 and turned into a sponsored group with 208,959 Facebook supporters. Millennials’ connectivity through advanced technology allows them to successfully garner support for a cause across the nation, as they did for the 2008 election. By altering the political atmosphere domestically, Millennials should be able to help grassroots social movements spread quickly and efficiently, thus affecting change on a global scale.
Today, more than ever before, the issue Millennials will need to combat through social change is that of global warming stimulated by the mass production of waste. In his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, journalist Thomas Friedman argues that by the end of the twentieth century, globalization put more people worldwide on the same economic playing field, thus “enabling more people than ever, from more places than ever to take part in the global economy – and, in the best of cases, to enter the middle class” (29). This entrance into the middle class, Friedman argues, allowed 200 million people to consume and produce more things, which uses more energy, natural resources, land and water than ever before (31). As more developing nations are elevated to the middle class, their people are able to afford basic luxury items such as televisions, cell phones and computers, eventually leading to more waste. Further, Friedman argues that advancement in computer technology, with items such as browsers and search tools that have made the Internet more user friendly, has “made the Internet accessible to everyone from five-year-olds to ninety-year-olds” (“Flat” 62). These technological advancements have helped open the Internet up to a wider demographic, meaning that even those in less affluent neighborhoods can access computers and learn how to use them. This type of connectivity, while it may have seemed revolutionary in the 1990s, is commonplace today. But affordability and convenience of using these items have spurred a massive growth in consumption over the last decade, meaning that as these tools wear out and are replaced, people are adding to already high levels of waste, which is directly harming the environment and bring about global warming.
Though the production of waste is nothing new, a different type of waste known as electronic waste, or e-waste, is increasingly causing concern. E-waste is often produced by electric currents used to operate and contain a hard-drive or other large electronic component and often contains hazardous substances such as lead or mercury. The increase in technological consumption and dependency has led to a greater amount of e-waste once these items break or become outdated and people toss them out. A Brisbane, Australia report shows that waste from electronic equipment is “becoming a significant component of the waste stream, increasing at a rate of 3-5% per annum, outstripping the general growth of the municipal waste stream” (“Conservation”). If e-waste could become the leading type of waste in Australia, there is not telling what it will become in world powers such as the United States. In October 2007 at one landfill in Richmond, Virginia, Supreme Asset Management and Recovery, one of the leading waste disposal services in the U.S., dumped 37 tons of e-waste (Elgin, Grow, Gibson). E-waste is dangerous to the environment because it can ignite when exposed to water and produce flammable methane gas, according to a Business Week article (Elgin, Grow, Gibson). The production of waste, specifically e-waste, has become the signature environmental problem that Millennials will have to face in the future. Thought it was their parents’ generation, the Baby Boomers, who created these problems and started the drive toward greater production of waste, Millennials will be left with cleanup.
But Millennials are their own worst enemy when it comes to fighting global warming as they are a generation known for their technological dependency, creating a dichotomy that it will not be easy for them to resolve among themselves. This generation relies heavily on computers, with 23 percent saying they cannot live without a computer (Howe and Strauss, “Rising” 273). These numbers show how much more important computer technology is to Millennials than previous generations. Millennials have been shaped by this ability to be constantly connected, or wired, and the need for immediacy the Internet has created. Unlike their parents, Kathryn C. Montgomery argues in her piece for The Future of Children, children in the Millennial Generation embrace the digital age and explore the Internet with fewer reservations (147). The introduction of digital media at such an early age makes youth more adept at using technology and more dependent on the services it provides than previous generations. They are truly children of the new Millennium and the reliance on technology it has created.
One would expect a group of people charged with the responsibility to help stop global warming and become a more sustainable society would have a deep connection with the environment, but Millennials have become increasingly detached from nature throughout their youth. An increase in consumerism and growing dependence on technology has affected Millennials’ connection with nature, and though they might have the right characteristics and drive to be the generation to fight the ravaging of the environment, this is nothing without a respect of the thing they are attempting to save. Richard Louv argues in his book The Last Child in the Woods that the Millennial generation played outside less frequently as children, calling into question their connection with nature. “Not that long ago, the sound track of a young person’s days and nights was composed largely of the notes of nature…Today, the life of the senses is, literally, electrified. One obvious contributor is electronics: television and computers” (Louv, 57). It is the lack of green space and parents’ fears, Louv says, that have caused this shift toward more playing indoors. One could make the connection that if Millennials have spent less time outside and are thus less connected to nature, then the need to protect nature and the environment might not be as strong. This does not take into account, however, that many Millennials were raised with constant reminders to protect the environment – recycle, conserve water and electricity, don’t litter. Louv counteracts his argument to some degree when he concedes that many college-aged Millennials “…have tasted just enough nature to intuitively understand what they have missed…” (Louv, 4). Hopefully the nostalgia for a childhood filled with nature will encourage Millennials to take on the role as heroes for the environment. Further, their understanding of social movements and their ability to start one at a grassroots level should help them create a more sustainable world. The growth in technology has undeniably impaced Millennials’ connection with nature, yet this does not change the fact that they have grown up saturated with expectations to make big changes.
While not as prominent as the challenges Millennials have created for themselves, they will face many other barriers in their work to stop global warming. Millennials simply might not comprehend the vast nature of the problem at hand. According to a study on climate change from the Pew Center on Climate Change, the United States is currently responsible for 25 percent of carbon gas emissions leading to global warming but gas emissions from developing countries are expected to more than double and surpass developed countries by the year 2018 (Pew, “Climate Change 101” 5). These figures show that it is not only the U.S. that is responsible for the world’s climate problems, but developing countries such as India and China are beginning to make equal contributions to pollution as their standards of living rise and they become part of the consumer masses. Pollution does not recognize state borders as people do and pollution is truly a world issue because it affects all countries, no matter how much they are contributing to the issue. Thus, it will take world mobilization to solve these problems. Friedman, however, argues that in a post 9/11 world, nations have closed themselves off and that “we as a nation [the United States] have put up more walls than ever and in the process owe have disconnected ourselves emotionally, if not physically, from many of our natural allies and our natural instincts to embrace the world” (“Hot” 8). The oldest of the Millennials would have been 19 years old on 9/11, thus, they have spent the better part of their early-adult life conforming to the new global rules the U.S. created for itself after the attacks. This does not bode well for Millennials being familiar with global means of diplomacy to solve such an all-encompassing problem. Completely revolutionizing the entire world’s consumer habits to make the world more sustainable is not something that only American Millennials can accomplish, this will need to be a battle fought from all corners of the globe in order to see progress. Millennials have certainly shown that they are capable of mobilizing to fight for causes they believe in, but they might not have the global wherewithal to become catalysts for change around the world. They will need to do more than change sustainability practices domestically to see the desired effect.
Despite the challenges Millennials have created for themselves, there is something almost heroic in the Millennials’ task to put right the world by fixing environmental problems faced today, and Millennials seem destined to play this role of the hero. Howe and Strauss note that a “hero generation,” one that performs great deeds, develops once every four generations and the Millennials possess many of the attributes that lead to such a group of individuals. Living through social upheaval such as 9/11, following the oft-considered disappointing Generation X, and constant promotion of its achievements all poise the Millennials at the edge of becoming a “hero generation.” (Howe and Strauss, “Rising” 376). Their ability to take on such a role also stems from the dissolution of the G.I. Generation, the last hero generation before the Millennials. Their potential to take on this role makes Millennials more than capable to battle important world issues and take a stand to fight for sustainability and a more “green” society. Howe and Strauss further make the claim that Millennials have a “rendezvous with destiny” in which “history will propel them to be and do what Boomers and Gen Xers were not and did not do” (Howe and Strauss, “Rising” 360). This juxtaposition between Millennials and their predecessors further places them in a position of unique importance because the Boomers have almost lost their opportunity to induce change and Gen Xers are simply not expected to. Thus all generations are turning to the Millennials to take their place and do what they could not.
Called the next “hero” generation since birth, Millennials have a big responsibility, fill the shoes of the dying G.I. Generation and take on the global environmental crisis that their parents have left them. As today’s youth grow up and begin to take on leadership positions in the government and corporations, they will soon grow into the charge that has been placed before them. Learning to place aside their need for technology and their wasteful habits will be the greatest struggle they face as they strive to make the society in which they live more sustainable and work to combat global warming. But on the way to reaching this goal, Millennials might be tested and humbled, reminding them that while their parents have called them special and coddled them throughout adolescence, they will have to sacrifice their own dependence on technology to effectively ignite a global sustainability movement. The world looks to Millennials to create a solution to this energy crisis, but they must learn to reconcile the contradictory nature of their generation and the role they must play in order for a successful social movement to emerge.
[1] These numbers assume that the Millennials Generation starts in 1978 and extends through 2000, which varies from the generational period Howe and Strauss use for Millennials from 1982 to 2000.
No comments:
Post a Comment