Our new class is going to focus on one area of sustainability–energy.  We’re going to look at energy resources, how consumer choices, public policy, and politics influence our energy consumption, how building construction interacts with energy, and how energy use can contribute to pollution.  Today, we just had a review.  It has been a year since a few of my kids had taken our intro class, so we wanted to see what they would remember.  Once we got going, it turns out they remembered a lot.  They were able to name several renewable and non-renewable resources, describe greenhouse gases and how they contribute to climate change, and talk about where we get most of our energy from.  They knew several of the plusses and minuses to each type of energy and where some of it comes from.

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Speaking at the Trails To Sustainability conference on environmental education near Calgary, Schindler said,

"By the time people who are six to 12 years old now are grown up, we're going to see a different political landscape and a different environmental one."

A world-renowned expert on climate change and fresh-water ecology, Schindler was the 2001 winner of the NSERC Gerhard Herzberg Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, Canada's highest scientific honor. Schindler also noted,

"We're all pretty set in our ways and I think looking at people who really don't get it - who leave their cars idling while they're in the grocery store for an hour in the winter and things like that - we're not going to reach those folks. We can reach their kids."

Schindler, who also teaches environmental decision making at the University of Alberta, also said that while today's generation and their elected leaders have refused to deal with looming water shortages and global warming issues, unavoidable change is coming.