Study: Young people not so 'green' after all

When she attended Rutgers University in the 1980s, she said it was unusual to find a fellow student who hadn’t hiked and spent time in the woods.

“Now a lot of these students have very little experience with the unpaved world,” Christensen said.

So one of her goals is to get her students out into marshes and onto beaches—and even coral reefs in Australia—to help them connect with a natural world many have only seen on television.

Some of her students also volunteer with a group that cleans up trash in the bays that surround the island—one of many examples of young people who are taking environmental issues seriously.

At Babson College in Massachusetts, for instance, there is student housing called the “Green Tower,” where residents focus on conserving resources. It is a growing housing trend on many college campuses.

At Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, students are running a biodiesel plant on campus and building “permaculture,” or indefinitely sustainable, gardens in their back yards.

They’re less likely to write a letter to their member of Congress or to try to change things on a global level, said Richard Niesenbaum, a biology professor at Muhlenberg. They also don’t like to label themselves as “environmentalists.”

“In a lot of ways, they’re more pragmatic,” he said, roughly dividing his student body this way:

• 5 to 10 percent “committed environmentalists.”

• 5 percent “anti-environment.” (These are the students who purposely avoid putting their trash in campus recycling bins, for instance.)

• 85 to 90 percent “open to protecting the environment and natural resources, but not leaders and not interested in being seriously inconvenienced or paying a cost to do so.”

“The last group is obviously the environmental educators’ potential gold mine,” said Niesenbaum, who directs the college’s sustainability studies program.

Twenge, the study’s lead author, is sometimes pegged as a critic of this generation because of her work about them. But the numbers speak for themselves, she said.

“I hope that young people see these findings as a challenge rather than a criticism,” she said, adding that the lack of interest in environmental issues isn’t exclusive to young people.

“This is a change in overall culture,” she said, “and young people reflect the changes in culture.”

The analysis was based on two long-term surveys of the nation’s youth. The first, the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future project, is an annual survey of thousands of high school seniors, from which data from 1976 through 2008 was used.

Other data came from the American Freshman project, another large annual national survey, administered by the Higher Education Research Institute. Those responses came from thousands of first-year college students, from the years 1966 through 2009. Because of the large sample sizes, the margin of error was less than plus-or-minus half a percentage point.

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