School started yesterday, and with it came a whole new crop of students in my environmental sustainability class. Although I wish the summer was longer, and getting back into the routine is hard (falling…asleep…now), I love the first few days of the semester, when I first start to see kids reaction to the idea of sustainability.

Teens, by nature, don’t have a ton of impulse control. Parents of teens are thinking to themselves, "Well, duh." But seriously, many lack the frontal lobe development to fully consider how their actions impact others. It’s why many make stupid choices.

However, this doesn’t prevent them from grasping the notion that how most Americans live might not be the best way to live. I started our first full day by having the class go through the Earth Day Foundation’s online eco-footprint calculator. This simple test asks participants questions involving such subjects as the size of their home, their eating habits, and their transportation habits. Though far from comprehensive, it’s quick enough that I can get a whole class through, working in small groups, in enough time to tabulate the class average, and the results, though probably not 100% precise, give students a rough idea of the magnitude of how they live.

Not only does the quiz give students a score of approximately how many acres of resources they use, but it roughly calculates "how many planets" it would take to sustain humanity if everyone lived like them. After each student finished the quiz, they came up to the SmartBoard, where I had an Excel file with everyone’s name, and entered their scores, then calculated a class average. On average, if everyone lived like my class, we would need 3.5 planets to sustain us. When I explained what this number meant, the class guiltily looked at each other, particularly those who had high numbers.

"Why is that number a big deal?" I asked.

"There aren’t 3.5 planets," a student volunteered. "Well, there are, but we can only use one. So…" he sheepishly trailed off. The class laughed.

I asked the kids what questions from the quiz surprised them. Remember, most of them are coming in with little prior knowledge of sustainability other than "recycling=good; global warming=bad." The number one concept they didn’t expect was questions about their diet. Why does it matter how much meat I eat? Why does it matter where my food comes from? I explained the them that a lot of resources go into food production, like water and fossil fuels.

"Wait, so it basically takes gas to make our food?" one student asked cautiously. I smiled slyly because I love watching the synapses fire!

"If it’s Twinkies, there might be actual petroleum in your food itself," I countered.

"So what are we gonna do?" another student asked panickedly.

"Well, that’s what this class is about. Getting the number down to one," I said Like a television show, the bell rang.