It’s 10:40 a.m., and another school field trip comes to a close at The State Botanical Gardens of Georgia. The sun is shining on the plants and trees that surround the facility, and children are laughing and playing as they finally funnel into their school bus to head back to the classroom.
Audrey Mitchell, who helped orchestrate the field trip, is seen chatting with the children’s parents, smiling and laughing like they’re family. Her shoes are worn and dirty from the numerous tours conducted throughout the gardens.
Mitchell, who graduated from the University of Georgia in 2015, helps coordinate and run field trips and educational seminars for grades K-12 at the gardens.
As a staff mentor for the Environmental Educational Team at Learning by Leading, she is tasked with teaching university students how to lead these educational programs. Learning by Leading, a service-learning program at UGA, was started by the University of California. It provides students with leadership skills and real-world experience to address important environmental issues.
One environmental issue that seems to be negatively affecting younger generations is climate change. According to a study in 2021, which evaluated 10,000 people between 16-25 years old, more than half of the sample said that they were extremely worried about climate change.
Mitchell helps run a yearly summer camp that goes in-depth on various environmental concepts. One concept, called environmental archaeology, is being severely harmed due to coastal line changes and environmental degradation Mitchell said. She brought in a guest speaker from New South Associates, a cultural resource management service, to discuss the subject.
Mitchell said that she tries to teach students to be a positive force in the environment.
“But in my mind, and when I try to teach students and kind of pass on is that you know, even if it is too late, do you really want to add to the badness,” she said.
One of her team leaders, MaKenzie Leatherwood, was introduced to the program after working as a summer camp counselor at the gardens. When it comes to teaching children about climate change, she said that offering them small solutions will ease their anxiety.
“So like when we’re out, like say during summer camp, we have snack, and the kids want to just throw their trash on the ground, like if it’s a paper box or something and I have to remind them like, ‘Oh no, like we’re still gonna recycle that’ because there’s a proper way to do it and teaching them about how, you know, why it’s important that we look for critters so we can tell like how the environment is changing,” Leatherwood said.
Mitchell said one of the lessons she teaches kids is how the overcollection of medicinal plants is harmful to the ecosystem at the gardens. She hopes that through the field trips she organizes, she can further educate students about how just one individual can have a dramatic effect on the ecosystem.
“So like, if you come on a field trip,” Mitchell said, “and you learn like, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize that I can’t just go pick things from the botanical garden,’ and then maybe that will carry on to deepen their knowledge as they go along.”
Mitchell said a possible reason climate anxiety is occurring in younger generations is due to easily accessible online information. She said when someone hears about corporations getting around laws to save money, they can affect the environment in negative ways.
Mitchell said that climate anxiety is a fear that can be used to be a driving force for change.
“If we didn’t know, we had these issues, and we weren’t worried about them, then what would be our motivation to do anything about it,” Mitchell said.