Commentary

Last edition I got stuck in to Millennials and the ‘end of experience’ issues we may be having with many young people apparently not interested much in interacting with the natural world.

The got a lot of response, all from Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Ys. Many people rushed to the defence of younger generations commenting that their own children were actively committed to supporting environmental issues. They still complained, but more about their children’s tardiness in finding an occupational niche and their own place to live. This is not really a surprise in a working world with few really secure life-long jobs anymore, and with such a huge disparity now between wages and the average repayments on a house.

I did test a very young lady I go diving with, and she said she hadn’t read the article as it isn’t on-line. Not true, as she seemed to know some of the details, but a very good point. We can’t expect a new generation with a different style of communication to understand what we say when we don’t make it accessible. The other point I got from it was that Millennials are quite nice, even if you rib them. Argue with a Baby Boomer and he is likely to nail your cat to the front door. A Millennial smiles, avoids a confrontation and goes back to their device, quite probably thinking ‘old people are weird’. In our generation we gave our parents the middle finger and talked ridiculously about the revolution, or the ‘generation gap’. Your dad would have replied about the hardships of the war, kids have got it so easy now, before giving you a government and church-approved excessive dose of corporal punishment. Things have actually improved if you look at it in that way.

Many Millennials are not interested in the environment, but that is so like so many many Babyboomers and other older people. Also the vast majority of people I know have only a superficial interest based around saving cuddly iconic cute land animals when they are prominent in the news and not much else. They send a donation to Greenpeace once a year and then go back to drinking beer/wine in front of the TV. Activity levels are also plummeting in my generation as we age and get more insular. You would think all the obese disassociated people were born after 2000 the way we talk about it, but that is clearly not the case. When I hear someone talk about interacting with nature on a big walk or skydive, it’s a remembrance about something they did 20 years ago.

I also realised after my little rant, that it’s a lot to throw on to a generation who hadn’t really done much to cause the problem. If they retorted, ‘well who made the choices that built up the CO2 level in the atmosphere anyway’, the answer quite rightly would be the post-war commodities gulping Baby Boomers and others. Now we expect them to instantly fix something that we find so paralysing, and whose own measures were so tragically and laughably ineffective. It suggests something is seriously wrong with Mr and Mrs 40 plus who control the centre of politics. We need to remember that Tony Abbott, Donald Trump, et al are not millennials. We got tired of evidence-based politics and let them in. No-one else is to blame.

Whatever Millennials do they will find their own way to it. They will smile quietly when you suggest a days birdwatching with grandad, but quite happily sign an on-line petition to save birds in South Korea. They might even strike and picket parliament, and publish on-line snappy retorts that change people’s attitudes. Unless of course, they obey the angry demands of people born around 1950 that they go back to school, keep focussing on a career, and just do what they are told. A Millennial needs to become Prime Minister before we can really blame shift on to them. Now there is a novel idea!

Mike Jacques

“What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison

“We are school kids temporarily sacrificing our education in order to save our futures from dangerous climate change.” young protestors