Children and the Environment: Young People's Participation in Social Change.

Introduction THIS SPECIAL EDITION IS ABOUT INVOLVING CHILDREN IN ENVIRONMENTAL PLANning and change. Taking children seriously as self-determining social actors is not a new idea. Within the past few decades, there has been increasing acceptance of children's place in movements to shape the future. Since the 1970s, local government planning departments in Europe, and to a lesser degree in the U.S., have involved children in designing urban spaces and policies for environmental improvement. In South American countries, such as Ecuador and Brazil, national movements of street and working children are influencing policies on the allocation of public space (Hart, 1977). Young people are also involved in city planning throughout the Philippines. (1) Much of this work is conducted using participatory action research and is based on the late Paulo Freire's ideas about raising political consciousness through open dialogue (Freire, 1970). Though it has often been co-opted for other ends, participatory action research can be an effective tool for the cultivation of personal and social awareness, better equipping people to cope with their world and to change it (Rahnema, 1990). The production of serious and trustworthy knowledge with and for youth can help them engage in transforming power relations. Another area where participatory approaches have found support is public health. The participation of community members is now widely recognized as a critical factor in planning successful public programs (Green and Kreuter, 1991; Schwab et al., 1992). Simultaneously, new grass-roots constituents of the environmental movement have been arising to fend off toxic assaults to their communities' health. As a result, new participatory forms of research have emerged to challenge the autocracy of traditional boundaries. "Environment" is being redefined more democratically and more ecologically, to include more facets of our everyday lives, and whole communities are becoming involved in health projects that concern them--to prevent AIDS, to ban smoking in public places, to fight local water pollution, or to address the fear and violence that pervade our culture. It seems only natural that children and young people should be encouraged to participate in these kinds of practices, developing their own research and campaigns around issues that affect them. In January 1995, the California Wellness Foundation embarked on the planning of a $20 million initiative to improve children's environments. The editors of this volume were members of a planning group commissioned to perform relevant research and to develop the parameters of this five-year initiative. Our charge was to prepare an ecological model of a healthy environment for children and to select those elements to be addressed by the initiative. The process began with a series of workshops to discuss various approaches to conceptualizing the environment of the child. Some 70 people took part- community organizers, teachers, physicians, epidemiologists, sociologists, artists, psychologists, social workers, policy analysts, journalists, and city planners. The process was fraught with problems. First, what is a "child"? Or rather, who are "children"? We were challenged to examine our various assumptions. There are widely differing conceptions of childhood and of what children need and are capable of in different developmental periods. Most of the relevant literature on this topic ignores the cultural context in which children throughout the world are embedded. What sense can be made of the fact that children as young as 10 in Liberia, for example, are both victims and perpetrators of war (Whitman and Fleischman, 1994)? Clearly, it is not enough to fall back on age as childhood's defining feature; to say that a child is under 18, as does the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989), glosses over many distinctions, such as gender. …