Across the country, schoolchildren are recycling, reducing energy consumption and growing their own food. And these pint-sized eco-warriors are hoping their parents will act more responsibly on environmental matters, too. Kim Dungey looks at the kids who are turning their families green.
It's Friday and the kids of Opoho School are in their organic vegetable garden.
Not only can they name the plants they are growing - broccoli, silverbeet, parsley, potatoes and rhubarb - they can also talk confidently about the benefits of their compost heap and worm farm.
Kate Denys (10), says that even though the seaweed they put on the beds "stinks", gardening is good fun.
"Because you get to eat the food," adds Tim Horton (9), with a mischievous grin.
"And because you miss out on school work."
Later, the kids point out the yellow fish they painted on the concrete to remind them that anything going into the stormwater drains will end up in the sea.
According to Theo Molteno (7), it takes only a few plastic bags to kill a whale.
Environmental awareness among youngsters has never been higher.
At a school near you, children are planting native gardens, counting chip packets, cleaning out streams, calculating carbon footprints and thinking about food miles.
And at the end of the day, they take the green message home, educating their parents about the perils of plastic bags, conventional light bulbs and leaving the tap running while brushing teeth.
Like many youngsters, Opoho pupils are no strangers to lobbying.
Last year, they experimented with different lunch options, passing the best ideas on to the PTA as healthy alternatives to its winter sausage sizzle.
They also made non-toxic cleaners, later meeting the school cleaners and gaining an assurance they already used environmentally-friendly products.
The school is one of more than 600 in the Enviroschools programme, a government-funded scheme that sees pupils carry out environmental projects, then apply for coveted bronze, silver or green-gold awards.
Every classroom has compost and paper recycling bins, and two are responsible for the school's worm farm.
Pupils maintain nearby Dundas Bush and take turns to work in the edible garden, sometimes cooking and sharing the produce.
They sponsor dolphins, design eco buildings on computers and stock bird feeders they have built and placed around the school.
There are also walking buses and "wheels days" for bikes and scooters, both designed to promote exercise and fewer cars on the road.
And while children have been making dens for years, a new "eco-hut challenge" encourages them to build ones that enhance their school eco-system.
It's all a far cry from 30 years ago when nature studies involved drawing plants and "tidy kiwi" posters.
Back then, hardly anyone talked about the "environment", let alone sustainability.
The biggest change, Enviroschools representatives say, is that today's children don't just learn about the environment; they do something about it.
Pupils are encouraged to take action through locally relevant projects, first identifying the current situation and exploring alternatives and later reflecting on the changes they have brought about.
And the programme encompasses not just the natural world but the economic, political, social, cultural and built environment.
"It's not just about recycling, like lots of people think," says Dunedin "education for sustainability adviser" Tania McLean.
"It's much wider than that."
While most would welcome increased environmental awareness, some ask if it is fair to burden children with so much at an early age.
A survey of 1150 UK youngsters aged between seven and 11 found half were anxious about the effects of global warming, often losing sleep because of their concern.
And even at Opoho School, children admit to sometimes worrying about the environment - especially the destruction of forests.
Another concern raised overseas is about harnessing children's "pester power" to increase pressure on adults.
In How to Turn Your Parents Green, English author James Russell encourages children to "nag, pester, bug, torment and punish the people who are merrily wrecking our world" - grown-ups or "Groans" - who spend their time "slumped in front of the TV" or "salivating over a holiday brochure".
He says kids should patrol for poisons, put time limits on showers, start "griping for organic carrots", have their parents sign a "Glorious Green Charter" and collect fines for transgressions: "Only you can make the Groans behave because only you can make their lives a misery if they don't".
And British electricity supplier npower encourages kids to become "climate cops", recording climate crimes like family members leaving the TV on standby, using the tumble drier on a sunny day, putting hot food in a fridge, or taking a bath when they could have had a shower.
That campaign prompted one person to suggest other helpful carbon-cutting hints like removing the fuses from children's TVs and phone chargers, refusing to drive them to anything fun, serving cold, locally-sourced food (such as lots of broccoli), sending them to a local camp while the rest of the family flies away on a holiday and making them wash the dishes and their clothes by hand.
Others claim it is charming to hear children say we should forgive Third World debt - "just because" - or that we should avoid air travel because it kills penguins, but children don't have the capacity to understand all the issues.
Not surprisingly, those involved in environmental education see kids influencing their parents as positive and a way to achieve change in the community.
"That's the wonderful thing about it," says Macandrew Bay School teacher Therese Sharma.
"They have such persuasive skills."
Mrs Sharma has heard of school families having to have compost bins or vegetable gardens at home "because the kids have demanded it".
"They're right into it," she says, adding pupils recently decided they were "slacking on their care code" so made a checklist they could monitor.
Now, Envirogroup representatives from each class check if the lights are off at lunchtime, if the right rubbish is going in the right bins, if taps are turned off in the washrooms and doors are closed on cold days.
The class with the most ticks each week wins a prize, like produce from the vegetable patch, extra swimming time or a session in the garden.
Tania McLean says the move to sustainability is being driven by local communities who consider it important and want it included in their school curriculums.
"Older people are going, `hallelujah'. They knew about edible gardens and `waste not, want not' and now they can see old-fashioned values are starting to be valued by the kids."
Sure, young children can be simplistic in their thinking, she says, adding one boy told her sustainability was "the stain you get on your clothes and can't get off".
"But as adults, we often think we know everything and actually we don't ...
"There's a lot children can teach us."
And she says the UK study showing children worry about the environment is a classic example of what happens when we teach children the "what", without giving them strategies to change things or the idea that each little thing they do can make a difference.
Enviroschools national director Heidi Mardon sees the programme as a positive response to the doom and gloom surrounding environmental matters.
Sustainability will be the most important issue today's children will have to deal with and it is "only fair" to provide them with the confidence, skills and experience to do so.
As for the argument teachers should be focusing on literacy, not lunchbox packaging, Enviroschools representatives say the programme is often linked to subjects such as English, maths and science as pupils write about their projects, measure up for gardens, or use chemistry skills to make cleaners.
Fitting environmental education into high schools is more difficult because timetables are less flexible, pupils are focused on exams and there are so many other cultural activities and sports going on.
But Otago Girls High School teacher Douglas Black says pupils of that age are happy to take a leadership role and deal with the practical business of how to change things.
Recently, senior pupils heard environmentalist Bill McKibben talking about the need to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, and now they are keen to take that message to the Government.
"It's not so much political lobbying.
"What the girls are doing is looking at the science which is out there and trying to draw politicians' attention to what science is telling us needs to happen."
Purakanui School principal Lynne Allen says going out in the school garden on Fridays is such a normal thing for her pupils to do, that they will probably take it with them into their adult lives.
But many other children think corn comes from a can and milk from a carton: "Kids haven't got their eyes open.
They're not aware of the bigger world around them and how everything is connected."
In his book, Last Child in the Woods: saving our children from nature-deficit disorder, American child advocate Richard Louv links the absence of nature in children's lives to the rise in obesity, attention disorders and depression.
Louv quotes a fourth-grader who told him "I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are".
But he says it is not only television, computers and video games that are keeping youngsters inside.
It is also their parents' fear of strangers, traffic and viruses; structured timetables and lack of access to natural areas.
"Today kids are aware of the global threats to the environment - but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading."
Heidi Mardon says children in the Enviroschools programme learn a range of skills, "just through being empowered to take part in real-life projects".
These include research and communication skills, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making.
But there have also been unexpected outcomes, like reduced bullying and vandalism.
If anyone fits the image of an eco-warrior, it would have to be Rosina Scott-Fyfe, a 16-year-old Otago Girls pupil who helped organise an Enviroschools meeting and recent clean-up on Quarantine Island.
The offspring of ardently green parents, she says whenever she does anything, she tries to think about its impact on the environment.
She wraps her lunch in paper, persuades her friends to do the same, and refuses to buy things she doesn't need.
Last year, through her marine biologist father, she got to travel with scientists to the Auckland Islands.
Every year, as part of her school's study of the invasive seaweed, undaria, she enjoys snorkelling in the "freezing cold" waters of Otago Harbour and surveying aquatic plants.
While Rosina feels Dunedin's youth are often not taken seriously - "We're going to be the ones who grow up and inherit this city and we want some say in how it's going to turn out" - she does feel young people can change things.
Even when solutions are obvious, adults often "look for what all the bad things are" and fail to do anything, she claims.
"Young people are so important in environmental issues because they've got so much creativity.
"And they take action, whereas adults just talk about it."
Enviroschools
A total of 666 schools and early childhood centres - almost a quarter of all those in New Zealand - are part of the Enviroschools programme.
This includes 43 schools in Otago.
The aim is to integrate sustainability into every aspect of school life.
Schools get a kit and a trained facilitator to work with them.
Pupils then design and carry out environmental projects, sometimes working with other groups in the community.
The programme, which started in Hamilton in 1993, costs about $4 million a year to run.
The national support organisation is primarily funded by the Ministry of Education, with additional funding from the Ministry for the Environment and Department of Conservation.
Regional facilitators are usually employed by regional, district or city councils.
For more information, see www.enviroschools.org.nz
In practice
At Warrington School, pupils sell homemade calendula cream and make reusable wraps for their sandwiches by lining pieces of fabric with wipeable plastic bags.
Inspired by the story of The Little Red Hen, Purakanui School pupils recently grew, harvested and ground wheat, finally using their flour to make bread.
At Waitati School, pupils collect eggs from their henhouse, cook homegrown produce in the former dental clinic and plan to make biofuel with vegetable oil left over from the school fair.
A couple of years ago, sales of their garden produce raised enough money to buy goats for highland villages in Papua New Guinea.
