Children and sustainability

Whether growing up in minority or majority world nations most children engaging with concepts of sustainability in the twenty-first century will be living in urban environments. In this highly mechanized urban world where humans have positioned themselves as exceptional or exempt to impacts of human activities, there is a considerable amount of debate and discussion on the definition of sustainability and how it will address the issues facing humanity. Measuring the acceleration of human impact including climate change, biodiversity loss, extinct and endangered species, and toxic contamination of environments has been reported as evidence of the Anthropocene. The notion of the Anthropocene coined by Noble prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen compels us to consider humans as a new geological force, a new epoch in the history of the planet where humans have now irreversibly changed the planet. What this new epoch does is call "into question the sustainability of life on earth as we know it, including the survival of our own species" (Taylor and Pacini- Ketchbaw 2015: 509).