Young Geographer of the Year
Published By: The Independent - 17 Jun 2007
Oliver Russell is scared. Very scared. He has looked into the future and does not like what he sees.
“I’m much more frightened than most of the people of my age. Most young people are quite lazy, in a way. They know what’s happening, but then they just think, ‘Oh, it’s not going to affect me’.”
Oliver, on the other hand, knows that it is. And how. He has just won Geographical magazine’s Young Geographer of the Year award with an essay on recycling which does not make comfortable reading for anyone, young or old.
“The world,” he wrote, “is at risk…on a diverse set of fronts.” And he goes on to enumerate them – climate change, population growth, resource depletion – and then to outline just how much action will be needed to confront them. Recycling will only very be, he concludes, a small part of this overall picture.
Oliver, 17, now hopes to do his bit. He is studying maths, physics, chemistry and geography at Endon High School, a boys’ private school in Wakefield, and would like to go to Cambridge to study geography, and then do something in conservation.
“Geography is the number one subject for the number one problem,” he says. “It’s all around you. You look up at the sky and it tells you how clouds form, and then you go into cities and it also tells you all about the problems of urbanisation. And I think geographers have a duty to try and make sure that the people with the power understand the issues properly. Politicians need to be made to think like geographers, and a take a whole view of things, and think about the long-term issues.”
Yet geography as an A level choice is plummeting in popularity, so what turned him such an enthusiast?
“I think it was probably the way we’ve been taught. Our teachers have always had all the lads out of the classroom. We’ve done field work in Wales, looking at rivers and erosion, and we’ve been out looking at urbanisation, and looking at suburbanisation in a village near here. It’s much better doing it that way than staring at dry textbooks in school.”
Explorer and television presenter Paul Rose agrees. “I was the most useless student at school,” he told those attending this year’s Young Geographer awards ceremony. “Thank heavens for the geography teacher who stepped away from the blackboard and took us out to have adventures in the hills, rivers and lakes of Britain.
“You have to be in the field to truly understand out planet. It’s one thing to see global warming stories on TV or in the press – quite another to ski across Greenland and see huge puddles of water, or fly over the Antarctic Peninsula and see ice shelves floating.”
Later he told The Independent, “Geography’s so exciting. It’s the core subject, a way of understanding the truth about our world and our people, the only way to make sense of what’s going on around us -- why our flowers are blooming early, and why the winters are getting more stormy. And it’s a great, transportable qualification. It’s a wonderful thing to have as a baseline.
“So I think geography teachers need to be really inspirational. They need to say ‘Let’s get out boots on, we’re going out to get some bits of geography!’ Or they need to go out and find an Inuit, and drag him into the classroom and say, ‘Look. Here’s an Inuit come to talk to you about Greenland!”
Peter Smith, who as one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Education was the national specialist for geography and is now president of the National Association of Field Studies officers and a council member of the Royal Geographical Society, agrees, but points out many are already doing this. “We went through a period of risk aversion, where people were maybe avoiding running field trips, but we’ve been through that now, and the majority of good teachers don’t let it stop them.”
It’s the same with the curriculum, he says. “With the latest revisions to Key Stage 3 teachers can really do anything they like as long as they’ve got the confidence to do it their own way. But often they have false fears about people breathing over their shoulders.”
Even so, geography remains in trouble – so much so that last year the Government had to announce a £2m action plan to boost the subject in schools, which included the setting up of a ‘geography ambassadors’ scheme, and sending a free copy of Michael Palin’s book Himalaya to every secondary school.
Meanwhile, events like the Young Geographer competition work to keep the subject in the public eye. Younger students were asked to design a magazine cover, and 10-year-old Jessica Hudson’s winning entry graphically depicted a world being poured through an egg timer. She won a Raleigh bike.
In the 13 to 15 category, Miles Smith, 14, from Endon High School, a comprehensive school in Stoke-on-Trent, wrote a hard-hitting essay looking at a bleak future for mankind. “We had to do it for homework,” he said. “Our teacher discussed it with us first, and then we were mainly left to our own devices. My line was to follow the Gaia argument, which is that earth is a self-regulating system and that there are many ways in which it balances itself out.
“I won a trip to Africa, to Nambia, but I can’t go on that. It’s difficult. I’m starting coursework and there’s exams and all that, so I’m giving it to the person who came second.”
Oliver Russell, on the other hand, will be taking up his prize and heading for the Amazon Basin where he will be undertaking a month of fieldwork and exploration in the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, the largest tropical rainforest reserve in Peru, with the British Schools Exploring Society (BSES) – an amazing opportunity for a boy who only entered the competition because he was in W.H. Smiths, flicking through magazines, and happened to catch sight of it.
“It’s slightly daunting,” he says, “because everyone else who is going has already met each other, but it’s also a fantastic opportunity.”
Extract from Oliver Russell’s winning entry
“I express and share with others a wonder about the planet around us through the subject of geography. With the bulk of my lifetime ahead of me, nothing would please me more than to think that our planet is safe. Nothing would relax me more than to think that its safety could be secured by a single simple solution – “recycling”.
But …the reality is that the world is at risk simultaneously on a diverse set of fronts and a wide range of protections and solutions is required – not just ‘recycling”. As geographers we must support and promote recycling. But much more importantly, we should use the knowledge we have of our subject to ensure that the simplistic idea that “recycling can save the world” does not lull mankind into a false sense of security…..For posterity, as professional geographers, we must know for ourselves that we took steps to tell people realistically about how to protect the world…“Recycling” can be part of our vital efforts to delay and eventually reverse some of the threats we see happening in our world…But this generation of geographers needs to shut about everything else that needs doing as well. This includes: promoting public awareness and creating political pressure; changing our craving for the consumption of consumer goods; managing our rates of population growth; investing in recycling science and technology; re-using goods or making sure that what we buy has previously been recycled; and making people realise that their consciences can drive much more environmental change in the world than just “recycling”.
Extract from Miles Smith’s winning entry
“Recycling, as the advert says, ‘The Possibilities are Endless’…..But where does our carefully recycled rubbish really end up; as a car body, a drinks can, a newspaper, even a new rubbish bin or…creating devastating and life threatening pollution at a recycling plant in a poor third world county. Much (about 75%) of the global recycled waste is not reprocessed in its country of origin but shipped half way around the world to places like China where poverty-stricken locals are exploited by unscrupulous bosses to sort and process waste from the West. Why? Economics – it’s cheaper and you don’t have to suffer the ignominies of having piles of your own rubbish in your own back yard….
“With such pros and cons to recycling should we perhaps be looking at other ways of saving the world? What with global warming, rainforest and habitat destruction, aids, bird flu pandemics, terrorism, war, famine, pestilence and disease, not to mention the volatile state of many world economies should recycling really be the main issue here? Let’s be honest, the human race is doomed unless we can begin to cooperate with one another; become less greedy and materialistic; tolerate each others religious beliefs, conserve energy, reduce pollution and generally begin to treat Mother Earth with a little more respect. Then again what’s the point because, as the Gaia hypothesis states, the Earth is self-regulating. It won’t be long before, like most other species that have gone before us, something will come along and wipe us off the face of the planet and the status quo will be restored.”