Walks on the Trails: A Reflective Thought Towards Environmental Consciousness in the Context of Children and Childhood
By:
Daryl Niko L. Cempron
Early Childhood Instructor
Department of Professional Education
Central Mindanao University
University Town, Musuan, Maramag, 8714 Bukidnon, Philippines
f.darylniko.cempron@cmu.edu.ph
ORCID: 0000-0003-0956-9861
Web of Science ID: ABI-4415-2022
Truth, at times, elucidates multiple forms — the version of the one who sees from the outside, and the version of the one who dares to search on its inner. Nonetheless, the ears hear what the eyes only see. It’s not always what it seems. Sometimes the more you look, the less you see. I thought the roadmap toward clean energy is singularly magnified by the energy sectors or professionals behind the studies and practices of electricity, but I was wrong. I thought what has been done about climate action is already what it is and that the implementation of the programs is just the problem.
As I let myself submerge into the surface of understanding these subjects, it appears that I miscomprehended it all along. I have read the books they have read, they have written, and tasted the words they have said, but I had difficulty finding the answer. I have listened to their stories and put myself into their characters, but still, the answer was nowhere to be found. I have done the things they wanted me to try, and no answer was schemed out. It was like walking the trails with so many picturesque views that I couldn’t choose one. Then, as I contemplated the whispers of the wild wind in the climate of the time, I began to ask: What answer do I want to find out? What question am I trying to find an answer to? What kind of answer am I trying to search for? Endless critical questions, at least for me, as whatever outcomes I would hold in my hands by the end of this long-extended fleet would determine the endeavors I would devote my life to, all in the name of social reformations.
Indeed, for someone who has been writing some academic papers already, I forgot the word ’multi-dimensional’ . The universe must have had a sense of humor that hit me to a superlative degree. I often use such terms in my lectures, yet I overlooked that it is both thequestion and the solution to social reformations I always elucidate to my students, starting with transitioning to clean energy and thereby climate action. And so, I kept on envisioning, spending long hours of introspecting, feeling, and remembering, and there, in the deepest core of my mind where thoughts and reality meet in between and imaginations and pieces of truth were floating, waiting for someone’s fascination, I saw what I never thought my eyes would see — an unlikely answer that marveled every spectacle of my beliefs, views and the entirety of my persona: the children and childhood .
At the crossroads of my life as a hopeful academician, I am constantly looking for an answer; and in the pursuit of finding this answer, I begin to imagine what the answer would be, what it would look like or sound like resulting in creating an expectation, prediction or predetermination, tantamount to preparing myself for a battle in the realm of the intellectual aristocracy. Social responsibility to the environment vis-à-vis the use of clean and sustainable energy sources does not emerge the moment the child reaches adolescence, rather it must start the moment they start going to school and are formally educated. What if the is well structured that by the end of the day the characterization of simply taking good care of our planet is unseen and unspoken by the child. After over 9 years of insightful observations of how the giants in the academe work, some of them try to look for answers through readings, some thorough testing, and some through calculating the responses of people, with predetermined answers already framed in their great minds. But after careful assimilation to the learning materials that Reboot generously shared, I realized that sometimes the answer is an answer that a researcher never thinks would be the answer. The particular work that I want to do at this point in the arena of child development, is a work that edifies environmental education by integrating renewable energy transition to the children which seeks neither to prove or disprove as we have plenty of those already but to apply and create solutions. And though reality has never been universal but relative and is multiple, this work freely walks and accepts every piece of reality found along the way. The scientific community where I’m standing on the same ground may find this odd and perhaps unacceptable but in all that there was, in anything that there is, and in everything that will be, my basic axiom has always been naturalistic whether any scholars accepts or rejects.