Want to know a great way to delay action?
Promote education, especially of kids.
I’m not saying don’t educate kids. Just don’t kid yourself into thinking it’s action. A passage in Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource 2 a couple weeks ago clarified the point. I quote a few parts below, but here’s the gist: The book came out in 1996, thirty years ago. As he notes, people were plenty educated about our environmental situation then. He described education of youth then, as well as going back another quarter century before it. They were plenty educated a quarter century before too.
The adults of his time weren’t acting despite having been educated. The kids educated then are adults not acting today. The problem isn’t a lack of education, nor scientific knowledge, research into the environment, media coverage, lecturing, or telling people what to do.
We lack leadership. I’m working on it, but the resistance, especially from environmentalists practicing the opposite of leadership, is overwhelming. If you’re violating your values, such as an environmentalist flying to climate conferences, you are undermining your credibility and integrity. You can’t lead others to live values you are violating, nor can you lead without integrity or credibility.
If you are explaining why you have to do things, that’s a sign you are violating your values. You don’t need to explain why you breathe air or drink water. Those activities don’t violate your values. You explain why you have to fly because it violates your values.
Anyway, check out how much we’ve been educating people and kids for generations:
A couple of decades ago, parents and schools began to present children with material like this from Golden Stamp Book of Earth and Ecology [published 1970].
Our Dirty Air—The sea of air in which we live—our sky—is no longer sparkling clean. Once the smoke from chimneys was whisked away by winds and soon became lost in a clear sky. Then we believed that the sky could hold all the wastes we could pour into it. By some sort of miracle, we thought, the sky kept itself clean.
Now there are too many chimneys pouring smoke, ashes, and poisonous fumes into our sky. Where the land has been scoured of grass and forests and there are no crops planted to hold the soil, the slightest breeze whips up choking clouds of dust that spill the dirt into the air. Hour after hour, fumes from millions of automobiles’ exhausts are spewed into the air….
In many large cities, there are no clear days at all now. Over portions of the earth, there is a haze, darkest where the population is greatest. Each year air pollution becomes worse as we dump greater loads into the sky.
Yet, this is the air we must breathe to live. You can survive for days or even weeks without food, but without air, you will die in only a few minutes. Right now you are probably breathing polluted air. It is air containing poisons. Some of these poisons are kinds that do not kill immediately. They take their toll over the years, and more and more people are becoming victims of respiratory ailments….
No more Clean Waters—Once the United States was a land of pure, sparkling waters…. But in the few hundred years since America’s discovery, its waters have been almost totally spoiled by pollution. The greatest damage has come in very recent years.
Still, the people in many cities must drink the water from these lakes and rivers. They make it drinkable by loading it with purifying chemicals. But the chemicals make the water taste bad. There is also a point at which the chemicals used to purify water become poisonous to people, too.
Streams in the United States have indeed become open sewers carrying away wastes from industries and dwellings. The wastes are really only moved downstream to the next town or city, where more wastes are added, until the one-pure stream becomes little more than a sluggish stench.
Now Lake Erie is dead—killed by pollution.
Lake Michigan may be the next of the Great Lakes to be killed by man. Even sooner, a much larger body of water appears to be doomed—the giant Gulf of Mexico!
By now we have reached the stage that 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do To Save the Earth has sold almost a million copies (this book retails meaningless and false information to kids—for example, instructing them to use water-based instead of oil-based paint) ; This Planet is Mine is another best-seller in this genre. It is a sign of the times that “More Pennsylvania high school students are taking environmental education classes than physics.”
The schools’ teachings are having a powerful effect. The consensus view of an informal Fortune survey of high-schoolers on this “issue on which almost everyone agreed” was: “If we continue at the pace we’re going at now, the environment is going to be destroyed completely.” A 1992 poll found that 47 percent of a sample of 6-17 year olds said that “Environment” is among the “biggest problems in our country these days”; 12 percent mentioned “Economy” as a far-distant runner-up. Compare the almost opposite results for their parents: 13 percent “Environment” versus 56 percent “Economy.”
also
A 1988 survey found that “eight in ten Americans (81%) were convinced that `the environment today is less healthful than the environment in which my parents lived.'” In 1990, 64 percent said that pollution increased in the past 10 years, and 13 percent said it decreased. Another 1990 poll found that when asked “Compared to twenty years ago, do you think the air you breathe is cleaner today, or more polluted…?” 6 percent said cleaner, and 75 percent said “more polluted”. With respect to the “water in the lakes, rivers, and streams”, 8 percent said “cleaner” and 80 percent said “more polluted”, but these polls were taken in the midst of the Earth Day publicity. In 1991, 66 percent of Americans responded “Worse” to “Overall, do you feel the environment has gotten better, gotten worse, or stayed the same over the past 20 years?”, and only 20 percent said “better.”
and
In Harris polls a) the proportion who said that air pollution by vehicles was “very serious” rose from 33 percent in 1982 to 59 percent in 1990; b) the proportion who said that “Air pollution from acid rain, caused by sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants” was “very serious” rose from 42 percent in 1986 to 64 percent in 1990; c) there was an increase from 30 percent in 1986 to 49 percent in 1990 saying “very serious” for “Air pollution by coal-burning electric power plants.”
and
the proportion of the population that named it one of the three most important governmental problems rose from 17 percent in 1965 to 53 percent in 1970