For schools, publishers and organisations that want to do more with environmental education and aren’t quite sure how, a way to build it into what is already being taught.
“Imagine being eight years old and being told that the planet is getting hotter, species are disappearing, forests are being destroyed, there’s plastic in the ocean and it’s all getting worse,” says Harry Waters. “Right. Maths next.”
“That’s a lot to leave sitting in someone’s head,” he adds. The weight he describes has been measured in older students. When researchers surveyed 10,000 people aged 16 to 25 in ten countries for a study published in The Lancet Planetary Health in 2021, 59% said they were very or extremely worried about climate change, and more than 45% said their feelings about it negatively affected their daily life.
Harry is careful with the claim. “I’m not sure I’d say most environmental education leaves children more anxious,” he says, “but I do think that can happen when we give children enormous problems without giving them any sense of what they can actually do about them.”
Giving them that sense is his work. Harry has been teaching for around nineteen years. He is the founder of Renewable English, which began in 2020 as free live English lessons and teaching materials based around environmental and social issues, and he now works as an author, teacher trainer and environmental education consultant with teachers, schools, publishers and organisations. What he offers them is a way to go further than, in his words, “simply putting a page about climate change into a coursebook or having an ‘Environment Week’.” As he puts it: “Environmental education can be embedded into what we’re already teaching.”
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Engage, Empower, (En)Act
Harry calls his approach Engage, Empower, (En)Act, and he describes it in that order. “First, Engage,” he says. “Make environmental issues relevant to children’s lives. Start with something they can see, understand, question and connect with, not an enormous abstract problem happening somewhere else in the world.”
Then Empower. “Don’t just show them what’s going wrong. Show them what’s working. Show them solutions, positive environmental news and, importantly, other young people who are already making a difference.”
The third step is (En)Act: “Give them an opportunity to actually do something.” He sets a limit on it straight away. “It doesn’t have to be enormous. In fact, it probably shouldn’t be.”
His example is a litter pick. “Children can walk into an area, see a problem, do something about it and twenty minutes later physically see that the place is better because they were there,” he says. “Along the way they’re asking questions about what they’re finding, where it came from and what happens to it next.”
“They haven’t solved plastic pollution. That’s not their job. But they’ve experienced themselves as somebody capable of making a difference.”
Harry Waters, Founder, Renewable English
“For me, that’s what good environmental education should do,” he says. He applies the same thinking to a grammar point.
A Reason to Use the Grammar
Asked what combining language teaching with climate education has taught him, Harry starts with the language. “Probably that sometimes the best language learning happens when everyone temporarily forgets they’re in a language lesson,” he says. What he has seen “again and again” is that “students communicate better when they actually have something they want to communicate.”
“Environmental issues give language a reason to exist,” he says. “Instead of learning the second conditional because it’s on page 47, you’re asking, ‘What would happen if bees disappeared?’ Instead of writing a persuasive letter because you need to practise formal writing, you’re writing to somebody because there’s something you genuinely want them to change.” Nothing on the syllabus is dropped. “The grammar and vocabulary are still there. The learning outcomes are still there. But now there’s a reason for using them.”
Teaching has also given him a question of his own. “Someone with an incredible knowledge of climate science understandably has a huge amount of information they want people to know,” he says. “A teacher has to ask another question as well: what is this information going to do to the person sitting in front of me?”
His answer is not to soften the facts. “Children need honesty. I’m absolutely not suggesting we tell them everything is fine, give them a colouring sheet of a smiling planet and move swiftly on,” he says. “But they also need possibility.”
That question is what he takes to schools and publishers.
Beyond Environment Week
The readers Harry most wants are “schools, publishers and organisations that want to do more with environmental education but aren’t quite sure how to do it.” Teachers have said something similar about themselves. In a 2021 survey of 58,000 teachers by UNESCO and Education International, 95% said climate change was important or very important to teach, and fewer than 40% were confident teaching about its severity.
Harry’s work with them takes several forms. He has written materials, consulted on coursebooks, trained teachers, spoken at conferences and worked directly with students and teachers internationally. The organisations and publishers he names include Macmillan, National Geographic Learning, Kids Against Plastic and Picker Pals. “I’d love to build more partnerships like those,” he says.
He has also written that a course of his, Environmental Sustainability in Language Teaching, was accepted by NILE, the Norwich Institute for Language Education. All of it began as something much smaller.
How Renewable English Started
Renewable English started in 2020, when Harry decided to bring together English language teaching and the environment. “Initially, it was very practical,” he says. “I created free live English lessons and teaching materials based around environmental and social issues.” He remembers the starting point as “me basically thinking, ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s see if anybody turns up.’ Which they did.”
Publishers followed. With their backing, he says, the live lessons “could suddenly reach people on a completely different scale,” and some of them reached more than 20,000 students. The work widened into materials writing, consultancy, teacher training, conference speaking and work with schools and organisations around the world. He gave a TEDx talk in Barcelona on, as he wrote afterwards, “the pivotal role of adults in helping young minds deal with the complex emotions brought about by our ever changing planet.”
One result took a decade. His father, he has written, has given him plenty of “helpful” suggestions over the years. “Constructing a dog toilet was one of the more unlikely ones that remains, let’s say, in the pipeline.” Another, made in 2013 when Harry was “a fledgling teacher trainer,” was to aim for publication in IATEFL’s Voices. His article “Understanding Big Climate Emotions and Harnessing Eco-Anxiety to Empower Our Students” was chosen as the keynote for its first edition of 2024.
The original live lessons are not running now, and Harry says so himself. “But strangely, Renewable English became much bigger once it stopped being just that,” he says. “So, I wouldn’t really describe Renewable English as a platform anymore.”
“Renewable English isn’t really a product I’m trying to grow. It’s become the starting point and philosophy behind a much wider body of work, with plenty of potential for the original idea to come back to life too.”
Harry, Founder, Renewable English
He is clear about who shaped that philosophy.
“OK, But What Can We Do?”
Asked for the person who shaped his work, Harry says he is going to cheat. He names his wife, “who has supported me throughout everything,” and then the children he has taught.
“Adults are incredibly talented at making environmental issues complicated. We create frameworks, targets, strategies and enormous documents. A child will listen to all of that and ask: ‘OK, but what can we do?’”
Harry, Founder, Renewable English
“That question has probably shaped my work more than anything else,” he says. “It’s also considerably harder to waffle your way out of a question when an eight-year-old is staring directly at you.”
The classroom has changed how he handles what he doesn’t know. “If you’ve ever taught children, you’ll know that a lesson you’ve planned meticulously for three hours can sometimes survive approximately eleven seconds in the classroom,” he says. He used to feel that, as the teacher, he should always know the answer. “Now I’d much rather say, ‘I don’t know. Let’s find out.’ Suddenly we’re investigating something together. And quite often that ends up being far more interesting than whatever I’d carefully planned in the first place.”
Asked for his exact title, he sent this: “Founder of Renewable English, author, teacher trainer, environmental education consultant, vegan, bike-riding, hippy wannabe.” He has recently added one more.
Where Harry Is Now
Most recently, Harry has become UK and International School Liaison at Picker Pals, which gets primary school children involved in litter picking. The role is part-time. “It’s a very new role,” he says, “but it feels like a natural continuation of what I’ve been working towards for years: moving children from learning about environmental problems to actually doing something about them.” When he announced it, he wrote that he had worked with Picker Pals for “the best part of five years,” that the programme was already reaching over 83% of Irish primary schools, and that classrooms were taking part in the UK, Portugal, France and St Vincent and the Grenadines.
The job suits a habit. “I pick up rubbish. Constantly,” he says. “I once did a 24-hour litter pick, so at this point I’m probably beyond pretending it’s a normal hobby. And now Picker Pals have actually given me a job involving litter picking, which means years of questionable behaviour have finally received professional validation.”
He is also Chair of the Board of Trustees at Kids Against Plastic, and the rest of his work continues: teacher training, writing, speaking, consultancy and workshops. He would like to bring the free Renewable English lessons and resources back as well. “The main things missing are time and funding,” he says. “Unfortunately, enthusiasm still isn’t accepted as a currency.” The invitation is open: “If anyone wants to jump onboard, I’d be more than happy to welcome them with open arms.”
He wants to hear from schools, publishers and organisations that would like to build partnerships, and from primary schools in Europe interested in Picker Pals. “So, if somebody reads the article and thinks, ‘We should get Harry involved in this’, that would be a pretty good result,” he says. What comes next, in his words: “More countries, more classrooms, more partnerships and hopefully more opportunities to create free resources again, all with the same aim: helping young people understand environmental problems without feeling powerless in the face of them.”
Outside work, which he admits tends to become work, he is outdoors: walking, riding his bike, playing football with his daughter, going to the cinema with his wife, and litter picking. “There’s something strangely therapeutic about it because environmental problems can feel enormous and abstract, whereas litter picking is completely immediate,” he says.
“That piece of rubbish was there. Now it isn’t. I did that.”
Five Lines from Harry’s Diary
- “Environmental issues give language a reason to exist.”
- “Don’t just show them what’s going wrong. Show them what’s working.”
- “It doesn’t have to be enormous. In fact, it probably shouldn’t be.”
- “I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
- “Don’t just teach children about environmental problems. Give them opportunities to experience themselves as part of the solution.”
From the Diary of Harry Waters
Harry Waters is a Spain-based author, teacher trainer and environmental education consultant and the Founder of Renewable English.
| Role | Founder, Renewable English. UK and International School Liaison, Picker Pals |
| Based in | Spain |
| Previously | ELT Consultant, Pearson (2019 to 2020) |
| Also | Chair of the Board of Trustees, Kids Against Plastic |
“Engage. Empower. (En)Act.”
Editor’s Note
Executives Diary features Harry Waters because he answers a question schools and publishers are asking: how to teach environmental problems without leaving children with nothing to do about them. What convinces the editors is how little he overstates. He will not say that most environmental education makes children anxious, he says himself that his original live lessons are not running, and he describes Renewable English as a philosophy and not a product. The approach he offers fits inside a lesson that already exists.
Executives Diary, Editorial
