Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

One of the most remarkable experiences I’ve had in a quarter century of journalism was my journey with a rugged crew of climate and Arctic scientists to the sea ice around the warming North Pole. It was that 2003 assignment for The New York Times that inspired me to start writing about the environment for young as well as mature audiences. The pole story had layers of significance for people of all ages. The untouchable, forbidding Arctic of our imagination and lore was fast becoming history as thinning, retreating ice and humanity’s rising thirst for resources were opening this frozen frontier to exploitation. Then there was the simple narrative power of science on the edge—of men and women working in utterly brutal conditions to add another pixel point of understanding to the still fuzzy picture of human-driven climate change. They were trying to take the vital signs of the ocean cloaked by that sheath of ice—waters that descended more than 10 stacked Empire State Buildings beneath our feet. On a surreal icescape of shifting, cracking floes the size of city blocks but only six to eight feet thick, I wrote, photographed, and videotaped beneath the 24-hour sun for three days, sending text and images back to the newspaper by satellite phone. I even did one of our first crude live online forums, answering readers’ questions while sitting in a tent at a Russian base camp set up to accommodate batches of rich tourists flown in for champagne toasts and, in some cases, parachute drops. When I also decided to describe the pole visit in a book, I chose to write it mainly for young readers because climate change, which is evident in the Arctic more than anywhere else, is an issue that affects all generations. Choices made by today’s adults, according to a broad and deep body of research, are likely to influence the nature of nature for today’s young people and their successors for a very long time to come. My friend Carl Safina, the prize-winning marine biologist and author of a series of inspiring books on the oceans—including Nina Delmar: The Great Whale Rescue (Blue Ocean Institute & Manta, 2010), his first title for children—put it this way in an email exchange on the importance of writing for children: “They rely on adults for everything, even for their stories. And in how we are changing the world and changing their options, we are literally creating the story of their lives.” I’ve begun focusing on younger audiences for many reasons, one being a growing realization that many adults I’ve met in 20 years of covering global warming have been locked into rigid views of the world that distort how they absorb what scientists are saying—with some grown-ups seeing utter unfolding catastrophe and others aggressively rejecting any reason for concern or action. In most cases, those reactions were more a function of belief than data. In trying to understand this dynamic, I queried some sociologists and was pointed to study after study showing quite clearly that once someone has a deep-rooted stance, new information has little impact on it. So how could I justify another decade or two spent writing only for grown-ups if they were unlikely to be influenced by new information? Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’ve given up on adults. And I and the other environment writers I know who’ve focused increasingly on young audiences don’t have illusions that we can spark some kind of youth-led eco-revolution. After all, kids are also split into factions on environmental issues, often mirroring their parents—and, like adults, many are simply tuned out altogether. To me, communicating to young people simply raises the odds that information about the environment and humanity’s role in shaping it—for better or worse—gets to where it’s most likely to be put to good use. Lynne Cherry, the environmental author, illustrator, and now filmmaker, echoed that thought when I called her to get her views on the merits and challenges of informing children about these issues. She said that a key is to expose as many kids as possible to nature and scientists’ assessments of our impact on the environment, knowing that some young people will be inspired even as many aren’t. Cherry described how she has seen “thousands of kids just come alive” when exposed for the first time to nature’s gifts, even in something as modest as a rooftop garden at an inner-city school. “If you don’t introduce kids to it, no one is ever going to know if they have that inclination,” Cherry told me. Lighting that initial spark is vital but insufficient. Books have a special role in allowing children whose interest is piqued by a direct experience—even as simple as a zoo visit—to dig deeper and explore further. My love of the sea grew out of probing tide pools as a kid along the Rhode Island coast. But I also still remember the cover art from The Lady and the Sharks (1969) by the marine biologist Eugenie Clark and the photos from Jacques Cousteau’s World Without Sun (1965, both Harper & Row). The direct experience was the foundation, but books provided the planet-scale expansion of my appreciation for the importance of oceans and their inhabitants. Cherry and I agree that one concept, in particular, is important to make known to young people: that science is a process, not a set of facts. This is a reality that’s not necessarily absorbed in the classroom these days given the emphasis on teaching the basics to drive up test scores. One of Cherry’s most important contributions along these lines is the recent book How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate (Dawn, 2008), which she cowrote with photographer Gary Braasch. They effectively convey the challenge of turning a new idea into new knowledge by telling the stories of researchers in the field, including an ecologist charting climate-driven changes in the behaviors of migrating alpine butterflies and a glaciologist’s work on eroding ice sheets. The more people understand from an early age that science advances in stutter steps through testing, failure, and argument, the less likely they’ll be to interpret some of the persistent disputes over important facets of global warming to mean society can simply sit back and wait for a magical solution. Another environmental reality that’s important to get across to young people is that old ways of thinking about environmental problems will be less useful in this century. The 20th-century norm was that there was some bad actor, typically a big company, and the solution was to force cleanups through litigation and regulation. That approach worked wonders in many instances, resulting in cleaner air and water and more protections for forests and wildlife. But the most pressing problems on the planet now aren’t likely to respond to such tools. The global buildup of human-generated greenhouse gases is being driven by actions as varied as cutting down a forest in Indonesia, driving a cab in Chicago, and burning coal in a power plant in Beijing. Efforts to enact a global treaty with binding caps on gases have progressively faltered, and there’s no sign that a climate bill stringent enough to be “noticed” by the atmosphere is going to pass in Washington any time soon. This means that global warming, in reality, is more a technology problem than a pollution problem. More efficient cars and light bulbs matter, but without cheap new energy sources that don’t emit greenhouse gases, emissions will relentlessly rise in a world heading toward nine billion people seeking decent lives. This is a great story to tell young people, actually, because the world—and particularly the United States—has a remarkable record of coming up with game-changing innovations, particularly when there is excitement about science and engineering. When I visit a college or middle school to talk about the energy challenge underlying the climate challenge, I say we need to move past worn-out “woe is me, shame on you” rhetoric. It’s too easy to blame coal or oil companies for global warming. Who uses the electricity and the oil? We do. What I’ve seen in young people, over and over, is vast stores of potential energy waiting to burst free when they’re exposed to the right insight or observation or anecdote, whether conveyed in a book, video clip, blog exchange, or in a classroom or library. I was lucky last year to be able to write about Ben Gulak, then a 19-year-old freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the inventor of the Uno, an electric motorcycle that has its two wheels side by side instead of fore and aft. The bike balances using a computer and gyroscope and maneuvers with a shift of the rider’s body forward, backward, or sideways. He had been inspired to pursue the design two years earlier during a family trip to smog- and traffic-choked China. Battery power would avoid pollution, and the motorcycle’s small size would allow it to negotiate crowded streets. He’d retreated to the machine shop in his house, stuffed with gear he inherited from his grandfather, and, initially for a science fair, began assembling a prototype from conventional motorcycle parts. Popular Science magazine declared the resulting vehicle one of the top 10 inventions of 2009. An electric motorcycle is hardly a world changer, particularly as long as the electricity comes mainly from burning coal (still the fuel of choice for power plants in China and the United States). But to me, Gulak’s story is less about the vehicle and more about what can happen when someone turns inspiration and an idea into action. In writing about it, my hope was perhaps to inspire just one or two young innovators to focus on the keystone challenges—and opportunities—of this great moment on Earth. There are discrete, important stories like Gulak’s, and then there’s the really big story that also must be told but is only evident when you step back, say, a few hundred thousand miles and appraise what Carl Sagan called this “pale blue dot” that we inhabit. It’s the story of humanity’s coming of age, as we’ve gone from one billion to nearly seven billion people in the space of two centuries, with the prospect of a stabilized and more prosperous human population later in the century—if we work at cutting our impacts on the planet and the inequities that divide the world. That’s a tougher story to tell, because it’s about events on a grand, nearly incomprehensible scale. To get a sense of the scale, consider one fact: there were one billion people altogether in 1800. Today there are one billion teenagers on the planet. I’m convinced it’s a story that can resonate well with young people because, as I’ve written on Dot Earth, The New York Times science blog, the human species is essentially going through the same kind of growth spurt that we all experienced as teenagers. Substitute fossil fuels for testosterone and you get the picture. When I left full-time journalism in December to join Pace University as its first senior fellow for environmental understanding, I did so largely to start engaging students in this story through a course I’ll be creating on comprehending global environmental change. One goal is to develop a tool box, much of it online, aimed not so much at teaching young people a set of facts about the relationship between the human species and its home planet, but helping them develop ways to think and learn—and communicate—on their own. I’m convinced it’s an exciting story, full of drama and adventure and surprise. And the ending, of course, is for young people to write.

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Andrew C. Revkin is senior fellow for environmental understanding at Pace University’s Academy for Applied Environmental Studies in New York and the author of three books on the environment, including one for young adults, The North Pole Was Here (Kingfisher, 2006).