literacy in society is hard to calculate, considering the broad scope the term encompasses. There is strong speculation that the percentage of functionally illiterate adults in Western society has increased in the last fifty years. If true, this would help explain a decline in civic concern and an increase in political apathy. Environmental education must foster functional literacy if it is to accomplish any measurable impact on environmental problems.
The barrage of information confronting us today is unparalleled in human history. We surf the Internet, watch record amounts of television, check e-mail, monitor an ever-expanding array of social networks, endlessly text-message each other, and chat on cellular phones, all the while plugged into our iPods. All this input ought to enrich us, but instead of being better informed, we are becoming more frustrated and confused by the sheer quantity of information there is to digest. This invokes Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and what Neil Postman summarized when he wrote, “The truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”11
As a result of information overload, we increasingly turn to blogs or television for synopses of current events and issues. On the surface, this seems like an efficient choice for a busy populace, but the media tends to play to an identified audience, and objective journalism tends to drop by the wayside. As Matthew Kerbel writes, “If it bleeds, it leads,” referring to the media's focus on stories that attract consumers.12 As a result, the gap between liberal and conservative widens, and our ability as citizens to reason and compromise diminishes. Meanwhile, we tend to abbreviate communication and summarize knowledge. These are trends that do not foster working together to solve environmental or any other problems.
The environmental problems we face have been exacerbated by the lack of definitive action on almost everyone's part. Where several decades ago one might have argued we didn't know any better, that argument simply doesn't hold much water anymore. There has been much disinformation and foot-dragging on the part of our industrial and government leaders, who have taken advantage of our shortened attention spans to prolong profiting from old technologies and squeezing the last drops out of diminishing resources. An educated and motivated citizenry would not have allowed this to happen so easily, if at all. Public education must accept some of the responsibility for failing to keep pace with the needs of an increasingly complex society.
Notwithstanding, much has been accomplished through the efforts of environmental educators, most of them working via self-organized, independent channels. The strides made in environmental education have had a massive impact on public awareness in a relatively short time frame and are an excellent example of grassroots success in the face of numerous obstacles, including sluggish institutions and political attacks. Without environmental education, we likely would not now have widespread recycling, environmental impact assessments, cleaner air and water in many communities, local decreases in pollution and urban runoff, and increased industrial accountability, to give just a few examples. But this is not enough. The successes of twenty years ago are not the successes needed today. As environmental education meets a social climate that is perhaps more open to its message, it must take healthy doses of self-evaluation and develop flexibility, as well as return to the grassroots mentality present at its birth and rebirth.
CHAPTER THREE
What Went Wrong
The Oxford American Dictionary defines denial as the refusal to accept that something unpleasant or distressing is true. In a generic sense, we of the industrialized nations of Earth are a populace in denial about impending environmental impacts to our collective well-being. We have blatantly ignored the bad news for decades, all the while refusing to acknowledge the unsustainable nature and long-term ramifications of our runaway, fossil-fuel-powered consumption. If only 30 percent of the scientific predictions about global warming and resource depletion come to pass, humanity will soon face profound changes in our surroundings, our security, and our standards of living. If the predictions are 80 percent right, humanity will face the new reality of an uncertain future characterized by an unprecedented population crash.
Denial and inaction on such a grand scale is not the fault of any one element. It is perhaps a side effect of how our societies regard themselves, a complex combination of factors that include our individual motivations, how our public policy is shaped, shortcomings in our educational institutions, and the profound effects of media. To say that environmental education, of and by itself, could have changed the situation in which we now find ourselves would be naive. To gain insight into how and where environmental education may fit in to a possible solution, we need to look not only at its design, implementation, and purpose but also outside its scope to understand some of the other potential causes of our collective denial.
In his prophetic, yet ill-received “crisis of confidence” speech to the nation in July of 1979, President Jimmy Carter pointed out that “human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”1 He went on to describe what he believed was the most pervasive threat to democracy, “the erosion of our confidence in the future.” Carter believed that Americans were losing their faith not only in government but also in education, news media, and other institutions of democracy. One manifestation of this, he said, was the fact that two-thirds of Americans didn't even bother to vote.
President Carter was speaking to a discontented nation saddled with inflation, high unemployment, and a major energy crisis. The crisis was the result of a panic triggered by increasing oil prices when supply was temporarily interrupted by the Iranian revolution and the fall of Shah Reza Pahlavi. This crisis followed on the heels of the 1973 oil crisis, which occurred during the Nixon administration when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed a politically motivated oil embargo that sparked massive increases in crude oil prices coupled with cuts in OPEC oil production and exports.
Interestingly, these energy crises stimulated legislation like the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act of 1974, which imposed mandatory conservation in the form of reduced national speed limits, and the Energy Policy Conservation Act of 1975, which, among other things, established fuel economy standards for automobiles. High gasoline prices stimulated public interest in subcompact and economy cars that were smaller and more fuel-efficient than their heavy, gas-guzzling predecessors. By the late 1970s, muscle cars like those of the 1950s and 1960s were all but gone from the American marketplace. Car-pooling, increased public transportation, and high-occupancy vehicle lanes burgeoned as a matter of need. The development of alternative energy sources like solar power was encouraged by government through subsidies and the opening, in 1977, of the Solar Energy Research Institute. It was a time when public environmental awareness was growing, at least at the grassroots level. It was a time, perhaps the last time, in which our leaders spoke openly and regularly of conservation and individual sacrifice for the common good. But it is worth asking ourselves why our society abandoned the roots of conservation mentality. We had it, but we lost it.
When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he did so on a platform that promised economic growth and prosperity coupled with reductions in government-imposed regulations as the answer to America's energy problems. Conservation, he said, was not the sole answer to America's energy needs.2 Under Reagan, the budget for solar energy development was slashed and tax credits for solar installations were allowed to lapse, thereby ending any significant governmental support for alternative energy development. Reagan went so far as to remove the solar panels that Carter had installed on the White House. The politicization of environmentalism took a sharp upward turn during the Reagan years, with the appointment of James G. Watt as secretary of the interior and Anne Gorsuch as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, both of whom were known for their antien-vironmentalist views and policies.
Oil prices began to decline in the 1980s as a result of a weakening of OPEC and the availability of oil from sources other than OPEC producers. U.S. energy consumption, which had decreased in the late 1970s, turned upward once again. Evidently, the message that Carter had hoped to impart in his speech had not taken hold. It seemed that Americans did not like to
