For you readers anxious or worried about the changing climate, human-environment challenges or our presently unsustainable practices on this planet, let me tell you about something that may be heartening. This past week, I visited fifth graders at Crest View Elementary School in North Boulder as they worked on an editorial writing assignment. These 10- and 11-year-old students have been prompted to consider how “people see things in different ways” and to “write an editorial for your local newspaper about an environment issue you feel strongly about.” As they’ve embarked on their five-paragraph assignment, they’ve been instructed to open with a good hook, have a clear argument/thesis, include supporting details and finish with a powerful conclusion. I was told by their teachers that this is part of the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) “Standard 3” for fifth graders across the state, to use writing to examine a topic, convey ideas clearly and consider how to persuade a variety of audiences. Essentially, this is an exercise to strengthen critical thinking skills: evaluating and integrating information and ideas to analyze and solve problems, make decisions and understand as well as appreciate different points of view.

I don’t know about you, but even though I went to Aldo Leopold Elementary where we occasionally read passages from Sand County Almanac as a class, I don’t think I was asked to mobilize my critical faculties to convey my views on environmental issues at this age. I shared briefly some opinion pieces I have written over the years — including some here at the Daily Camera — and then provided some “tips” about considering your audience, writing on topics you care about, getting your facts right and being creative. While it is hard to read the whole room of 83 students, the ideas they shared and the questions they asked were truly uplifting. Some shared what they were planning to write about, from mountain pine beetle kill impacts in our nearby mountains to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch out in the middle of the ocean.

They asked impressive questions about how I got interested in researching, teaching and writing about environmental issues, what jobs I had in the past and how I picked what environmental topics to write about. While young people (and adults alike) more frequently experience ecological grief or climate anxiety these days, this Crest View group appeared to be fighting it back with creative communication.

That kind of creativity to combat anxiety fits with convergent scientific research findings too. For example, Harvard sociologist Martha Beck recently observed that “anxiety and creativity have an inverse relationship. Turn one on and the other turns off.” She elaborated that “instead of saying ‘what can I do now?’ ask yourself ‘what can I make now?’ That shift takes you into curiosity … and that opens you up, where anxiety closes you down.”

One can argue that grief, anxiety and worry serve purposes in today’s world: Maybe they help young people (and us all) cope, provide alerts to danger or even motivation at times to solve human-environment problems. But they can also be connected with stress, and challenge our mental and physical health over time. Let’s face it, young people have valid apprehensions about various environmental challenges we adults — and recent generations before us — have contributed to, and it may leave them melancholy, grief-stricken or even angry.

Creativity — essentially applied imagination — may not be meant to necessarily erase these feelings, but it can help manage them as it opens up young people (and us all) through curiosity about each other and the world around us rather than shutting ourselves down.

So CDE Standard 3 focusing on environmental issues may provide pathways for productive hope — especially in the ways I observed these students seeking out ways to express themselves — was something buoying I took from a winter afternoon this week in BVSD. There’s certainly much more work to do, but I’ll take this heartening lesson forward into the challenging year ahead. I share it with you in hopes that you do too. And as a subset of the wider environment and sustainability issues, Peter Kalmus observed, “Global warming is the result of the greatest failure of imagination the world has ever seen.”

This is a biweekly sustainability and environment column authored by Max Boykoff. Email: mboykoff@gmail.com.