Читать книгу The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fix It) - Charles Saylan - Страница 9

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 be told they needed to give something up, something they believed was rightfully theirs. Never again did a mainstream politician suggest the public use less of something. Even today, in what seems superficially to be a kind of “green renaissance,” our leaders speak of developing sources of alternative and sustainable energy, but not of reducing demand and consumption. Perhaps the real lesson of the Carter era was the one learned by our politicians: if one wants to remain in office, it is best not to ask voters to sacrifice anything, ever.

As America forgot about the lean times of the 1970s, consumerism began to grow exponentially. There was a growing sense of entitlement that spurred an increased demand for larger, more powerful automobiles, cooler air-conditioning, hotter heat, bigger homes, and more of everything. High-powered muscle cars returned, followed by an invasion of sport utility vehicles, culminating in the popularity of oversize gas-guzzlers like the Cadillac Escalade and the consumer version of the military transport vehicle the Hummer.

American homes got bigger as average residential square footage more than doubled between 1950 and 2005. Where 34 percent of new homes built in 1970 had central air conditioning, in 2004 that number was 90 percent.³ The term McMansion has found its way into our modern vocabulary, used to describe the emerging trend in supersized middle-class homes. Oddly, trends show that household sizes have steadily decreased in America,⁴ so it seems we have convinced ourselves we need more living space for fewer people, instead of sensibly learning how to get more out of less.

The loss of confidence Carter warned America about has indeed happened. The Reagan era ushered in a prolonged period of prosperity, but neither confidence in government nor a unity of purpose has returned. Over the last half century, the American legislative process has undergone a metamorphosis, making law makers more likely to listen to lobbyists or special interest groups than the will of the people, further exacerbating our frustration and alienation. In allowing this to occur, Americans have abdicated their rights and responsibilities as citizens of an important experiment in free democracy. Today, the importance of participating in the process of government is not taught in a meaningful way in American schools.

As we retain less and less sense of community, we tend to focus more and more on our individual well-being. Procuring the outward manifestations of success has become more important to us than developing our place as integral members of society. The accumulation of wealth, and the trappings that go along with it, have taken precedence in our lives, and we do not feel complete without money and things. We no longer strive toward moderation, nor are we developing skills for determining how much is enough to live a good life. Our surroundings, our role models, our media, all reinforce in us the ever-present message that more is always better, that wealth and the power it commands are paramount. We live in a society that has trouble accepting itself, where any sense of belonging to a common effort is muddled or lost entirely in our collective rush toward affluence.

Perhaps this is a good time to reflect on the recent wave of financial Ponzi schemes,⁵ investment swindles that pay unusually high returns to investors, and whose payouts either come from the investor's original money or are funded with money from new investors. Ponzi schemes depend on continual growth to draw investors in, but they are doomed to eventual collapse. Collapsing financial Ponzi schemes offer a preview of what happens when the ecological Ponzi scheme, on which much of the industrialized world's consumer culture is based, collapses. An ecological Ponzi scheme is based on fossil-fueled economic growth that has increased the earth's population far beyond sustainable levels, made it commonplace to buy products from across oceans, and created needs for depletable raw materials. The ecological Ponzi scheme works as long as there is a new “developing” nation to exploit for cheap labor and undervalued raw materials. As long as globalized corporations can move from country to country, extracting materials and availing themselves of cheap labor pools, developed nations can continue to have their inexpensive products. The costs are deferred to future generations, who will have to deal with the consequences of pollution, atmospheric CO₂, and the collapse of local economies.

In a society like ours, which places such high value on the accumulation of wealth, any impediments to business or the free marketplace are often perceived as obstructive and are usually met with hostility or disbelief. Environmental protection, conservation, even energy frugality are seen as constraints to economic growth, especially when the ill effects of environmental degradation are not immediately detectable to the public at large. This situation is complicated by the fact that many of the scientific concepts explaining today's environmental problems are not easy to understand. Scientific and academic institutions have done little to ameliorate this problem-an excellent argument for including proficiency in communication skills in any study of science.

This chapter is not intended solely as a discussion of the United States' social and political climate, although the preceding examples are decidedly North American. These kinds of societal changes are found throughout the world, perhaps tied to the omnipresent nature of modern media. Open space on earth is shrinking; rural areas are becoming fewer and less populated as we globally gravitate toward urban centers.⁶ Where the United States was once the dominant capitalist industrial economy, India and China are acquiring a healthy share of the global market. So called developing nations now suffer the same environmental growing pains that America suffered, whether they choose to acknowledge and address it or not. In most countries, including in America, economic expansion still takes precedence over environmental protection.

The human state of denial exists globally. It is as though we have set aside any common sense in favor of short-term gain, and in doing so, we no longer consider or acknowledge our connection to the earth that sustains us. We think and teach that we are the masters of our own destinies, but this kind of thinking has serious flaws, which become increasingly obvious as we collectively move closer to destroying ourselves. This is one place where education can help us make some space in our thinking for the communal nature of the resources we depend on. Things like air, oceans, and freshwater belong to all life, not to a given nation, people, or species.

It is easier, perhaps even desirable, to look away when confronted by the magnitude and complexity of our current environmental dilemma. Believing that we, as individuals, can somehow bring about change, is probably somewhat simplistic. Local recycling is a nice idea, if everybody were to do it, but that's not happening. Environmental education must go beyond recycling programs and teach us how to achieve measurable and increasing impact by reducing our human footprint substantially in a lifelong endeavor. It must also show us that individual voices become louder in concert, and help us to appreciate that the problems we face are common to all of us, not subject to religious or political beliefs. Environmental education must clearly illustrate that there is only one earth, and we're all on it together.

If we look to history for examples, we find repeated instances where a motivated group triggered events that changed the course of history, frequently in the face of impossible odds. Environmental education has failed to teach us these lessons on a grand scale. Even though environmental advocates can talk the talk, the scope of real and measurable change is simply not broad enough. Awareness programs and schools do not currently teach flexibility or the critical importance of self-evaluation in the process of creating positive change. If one path seems like the sure way to proceed but fails to produce measurable impact on the problems it seeks to address, it must be modified or abandoned entirely in favor of something new. Diverse strategies must be applied simultaneously, and we can learn from both the successes and the failures of alternative approaches. Such a process of adaptive management must continue until concrete results are obtained. It is not enough to initiate legislation that bogs down or transmogrifies in the lawmaking process. Our leaders' habit of engaging in endless discussion and speculation, effectively pushing any real change far into the future, need not be tolerated. But how would we know this if we are not taught it? Educational institutions have not effectively taught us to exercise our collective buying power to stimulate immediate reductions in greenhouse gases, pollution, and overuse of resources by withholding our money from conglomerates who care little for our collective welfare and everything for their short-term profits. Withhold the cash and change will come quickly. 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 power, those promoting environmental reform were confronted with an unprecedented barrage of antagonism launched by industry and served up via elected officials, legislative process, and the media. Progress was difficult and slow, and opponents were many and well financed and organized.

In the face of such overwhelming resistance, is it possible that the environmental movement lost some objectivity in designing and implementing its approach to outreach? Environmental advocacy groups may have overlooked the importance of establishing some common ground with the more conservative factions of society. In failing, early on, to focus on the widening philosophical and political gaps in our society, the movement itself may have inadvertently fueled the unfair characterizations and contributed to its own isolation from the mainstream.

Some environmental ideals, however, have germinated in typically conservative strongholds of society. The organization Ducks Unlimited originated in the hunting and outdoor sports community, a faction not traditionally allied with the green movement. Now one of the world's largest wetlands and waterfowl conservation groups, it endorses efforts to reduce global emissions.⁹ Ducks Unlimited is an excellent example of how conservation awareness can grow out of individual circumstances or pursuits. Hunters need space and waterfowl for successful hunting, and the conservation of wetlands assures them future access to what they value and perceive as their heritage.

The establishment of marine protected areas, on the other hand, has met opposition by sportsmen and -women. One of the strongest and best organized sources of opposition is the sportfishing community, which does not want its access to fishing grounds to be regulated or restricted. But while it may be difficult to find a middle ground between those who want restrictions and those who don't, both sides undoubtedly have central and common concerns. Things like depletion of fish stocks and the potential for exceeding potential tipping points in the marine food chain will adversely affect the future of sportfishing.

Along similar lines, commercial fishers along the Pacific Coast of the United States have become increasingly aware of the adverse impacts to the salmon fishery (and their livelihoods) resulting from logging industry practices like clear-cutting, the effects of upstream pollution, and the diversion of freshwater from rivers and deltas for agricultural development.¹⁰ As the effects of the human assault on nature worsen, environmental allies will come from all walks of life, all cultures, all nationalities. This will present continuous new opportunities to build responsible stewardship and strengthen the foundation of environmental protection. Substantial and diverse educational efforts to accomplish this should already be well under way, but generally they are not. Perhaps, as the impacts become more visible, the environmental education community should work harder to find and build on these potential commonalities. Localizing education to highlight and build on such commonalities might help forge alliances for environmental protection, whereas disagreement and hostility between stakeholders was previously the status quo.

Any self-respecting “What Went Wrong” chapter wouldn't be complete without at least the mention of cooperation and sharing-and its lack-in the environmental, academic, and scientific communities. This topic warrants deeper discussion, and receives it in later chapters, but some cursory discussion is necessary here.

There is a decided lack of cooperation within the ranks of the green movement, as is common to many political coalitions. Territoriality is partly a reaction to the perception of threat, and perhaps because many environmental organizations grew up in an atmosphere of adversity and obstructionism, this fostered the rise of competition, protectiveness, and distrust. Perhaps this atmosphere is a result of diverse ideologies and methods of arriving at what is probably the common goal. Perhaps it arises from the perceived competition involved in securing private and public funding or finding and keeping influential board members. Differences of opinion will always exist in any human pursuit; they are a healthy occurrence and, in many cases, enable us to grow and learn. But with so much at stake, the environmental community cannot afford to waste time or hard-won resources on interorganizational or interagency quibbling.

Industry and special interests do not waver in their resistance to environmental regulation and change. They collectively avail themselves of all weapons in the arsenal to hold power and influence, including retaining expensive and influential lobbyists and funding large political campaign contributions, to name only two of their highly effective strategies. And they are winning the fight so far, by maintaining a unity of purpose that ought to serve as a methodological role model for the environmental community. Failure to work together effectively toward a common goal gives those opposed to change a significant advantage and pushes any possibility of success further into the future.