Industry's bottom line is, after all, to get the money, and money is the ultimate regulator.
In the last fifty years, our educational institutions have changed, becoming, as noted in chapter 2, more focused on test scores than on the quality of overall education, something not easy to quantify. However one defines education, we do a great disservice to future generations if we do not find a way to impart the skills necessary for living fruitful lives irrespective of career choice. Our schools attempt to teach job skills for economic success, but in the process they fail to teach aesthetics, reason, the importance of a sense of community, civics, morality, evaluation, and compromise-the fundamental building blocks on which free and sustainable societies will be constructed.
While increasing the quantity (and quality) of environmental curricula in our schools is necessary and important, such curricula cannot be effective unless they are relevant to the lives of those they are meant to affect. If they are not, this may even prevent the desired results. There is some speculation that overemphasizing environmental problems, especially for children in the early stages of development, may create a kind of disassociation.7
Creating environmentally aware students in a society that does not recognize the gravity of the environmental problems it faces is not likely to have much of an impact on those problems. There exists a fundamental disconnect between what we are taught in school and how we behave in our everyday lives, at least where environmental education is concerned. This is something little-studied and very difficult to measure, but overcoming this disconnect is vital. Doing so will require all the creativity, sensitivity, and flexibility we can muster. It will require the combined effort of people from all walks of society.
We, the authors, both live and work in California, where the regular curricula of some public school districts teach environmental science and awareness, even though California's science content standards don't include these topics. Some schools even offer outdoor programs. Some private schools we've worked with have comprehensive environmental outdoor education programs for students at all age levels. In working with students from our area, environmentally educated and aware as they often are, we have not found them particularly committed to changing their consumption habits or willing to sacrifice creature comforts for the benefit of the environment. This is not to say they do not know the material; they do, but it does not seem to foster significant action. Frequently, our impression has been that the more opportunities presented to students for what we think are “meaningful outdoor educational experiences,” the less interested they seem to be in participating. This has led us to the conclusion that what might seem meaningful to educators is not necessarily meaningful to students, because it fails to make a relevant connection to their personal experiences. This may seem obvious, especially given that students are not usually the ones choosing what they will be taught, but it takes on more significance when we consider the fact that we hope environmental education will change behavior and thereby offset environmental degradation.
Relevance may be the toughest hurdle environmental education faces in changing behavior. It is overly simplistic to think that, because we teach ecology, or citizenry, or any of the topics discussed in this book, students will realize their connection to their environment. Effecting changes in behavior that have positive, significant impact on the environment will take much more than just curricula. Somehow, we must stimulate some relationship to nature that makes sense, given our lifestyle and career choices. This applies not only to students but to all of us. We need to care about the things we are asking ourselves to preserve.
Unsupervised outdoor play is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, and children today are at risk of what author Richard Louv calls the “nature-deficit disorder.” In his book Last Child in the Woods, Louv eloquently illustrates how, as our urban societies progress and expand, our children are losing touch with where it is we all come from. While Louv's book deals mostly with childhood encounters with nature (unquestionably when our concepts of the world are formed), the loss of context he talks about is a problem we all face, at any age.
The majority of humanity now dwells in cities, where the closest we get to the sources of our food is our trip to the local supermarket. What open spaces remained within the confines of our cities have been systematically bulldozed into housing developments and industrial parks. Urban parks and greenbelts without economic potential are infrequent in urban planning. Even the stars of the night sky are hardly visible, obliterated by the glow emanating from millions of urban electric lightbulbs.
We work to survive, and in our spare time we play video games, watch television, work out at the local indoor gym, or surf the Internet. We spend our time in cyberspace frolicking with e-mail, text messaging, or logging into electronic social networks, where communication is abbreviated and quick. Even when we do get outside for some recreation, many of us plug into iPods to listen to our favorite tunes, thereby excluding the sounds of the world around us and insulating ourselves from face-to-face encounters with other humans. Unfortunately for the future of environmental conservation, these are the things our societies seem to care about.
No parent wants his or her child to grow up afraid. But fear has crept into much of what we do, undermining how we view the world. For parents, the world outside their influence may seem a hostile and foreboding place for children. Media bombards us with stories of kidnappings, sexual abuse, school violence, and drug addiction, leading us to mistrust anyone we don't know or who might appear different from us. We hear of wild animal attacks, threats from disease, and the presence of sleeping terrorist cells, all of which lead us to mistrust the space outside of what we perceive to be within our control. Overprotectiveness, motivated by simply wanting to protect the ones we love, may have a darker side, a societal undercurrent of fear and mistrust that it may inadvertently foster.
We long for safety and security, but our leaders and our media teach us to seek it through insulation, fortification, or avoidance. There are risks in the world, indeed, but learning to temper the exaggeration of fear with reality may help us become stronger, more compassionate and tolerant people. These are qualities that will permit a spirit of cooperation to develop and flourish, qualities that education can help develop.
Environmental education faces a difficult challenge: how to address what is clearly “the bad news” while simultaneously creating a capacity for action in our students, our citizens. There is no clear or easy solution to this, but we must do more than simply focus on scientific literacy. We must nurture the development of individual morality, a sense of poetry and literature, and a historical perspective, things that give context to our humanity. Without these, it is unlikely we will care enough to protect our collective future.
Much, however, has been accomplished in a relatively short time. Look at the vast array of environmental organizations; the segments of academia focused on environmental science, law, and public policy; and the spectrum of governmental agencies on the planet occupied with policy making and regulation of environmental laws. The very existence of these organizations and institutions is a credit to environmental awareness and the spread of information in our society. If we consider that it has been less than fifty years since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring which directed mainstream attention to the severity of human impacts on nature, the remarkable growth of the green movement is nothing short of extraordinary.8 Why then don't we see measurable reductions in the progression of environmental degradation? Has the “environmental community” lost some of its ability to bring about change? Questions like these probably don't have answers, but there are several related points worthy of discussion and thought.
Like the labor movement that preceded it, the environmental movement took shape in an atmosphere of adversity originating with the industrial sector, which has a long, sometimes bloody, history of fighting regulation. Regulation, to an industrialist, is an intrusion and is often perceived as government's meddling in the affairs of the free market. It represents unknown costs not easily controlled and is something to be resisted with vehemence and determination. As opulence often shares the bedroom with
