Environmental education may well have been the most important movement this century in terms of the health of our home, the troubled planet earth. Listen to what our political leaders were saying in the United States a couple of decades ago at the beginning of that effort:

The Congress of the United States finds that the deterioration of the quality of the Nation's environment and of its ecological balance poses a serious threat to the strength and vitality of the people of the Nation and is in part due to poor understanding of the Nation's environment and of the need for ecological balance. . . . (Public Law 91-516)

It seems pretty clear in retrospect that what people were talking about in the sixties and early seventies was that the inhabitants of the earth did not understand how life functions here (the big picture ecological system); they did not grasp how their own lives were directly connected to and supported by those systems; and they did not understand how they were going to have to change their lifestyles in order to live more in harmony with those systems -- systems which governed all life on this small self-contained vessel they shared. In short, the earth was in trouble, and we were the problem.

So what happened to our original sense of mission and purpose? The call seemed loud and clear in the beginning, but somewhere along the way it faded into a vague, almost unrecognizable whisper. If you stop people on the street today and ask them what supports life here, they will probably be unable to comprehend what you are asking. It is likely that the most you will get is a response something to the effect that the people themselves support life, or even worse, that their city does. Isn't it tragic that most people can name a few of the trees we have planted along the streets but don't understand the flow of sunlight energy in our systems of life or the interconnectedness of all living things? We've focused on the pieces of life instead of its processes. We teach people the names of some of the parts of the earth, but fail to convey how it functions as a whole.

Most people simply do not understand how much trouble we are in here, nor why. For them, energy is oil, and the middle easterners and oil companies have teamed up to manufacture shortages in order to keep prices high. Cycles are Hondas or Yamahas, and diversity means tolerating your kooky neighbors. Thanks to the efforts of our mass media, people are aware of such problems as acid rain, ozone depletion, and toxic waste, but they usually don't see the connection between their own lives and the problems (and no one dares tell them). In one recent survey over 90% of people interviewed thought that the scientists would take care of our environmental problems. Already over twenty million people on the earth die of starvation each year, yet many of our fellow citizens still believe we will establish space colonies to solve our burgeoning population problems.

People don't understand even the simplest of environmental connections: between fast-food burgers and the destruction of the world's forests, between decorative lighting or frivolous appliances and the accelerating costs of nuclear-generated electricity, between our over-packaged and over-processed foodstuffs and our growing difficulty in maintaining clean drinking water . . . or the very direct personal effect that such situations have on their own lives. That's enough; you probably get the point. In environmental education we never did the job we set out to do.

After two decades, millions of dollars, and far more words, many of the environmental education publications and projects, training sessions and manuals designed to change people's behavior have all but disappeared. What happened? I think we blew it, and it just may have been our last best shot.

Continue... "Surveying The Supplementalists"

Earth Education... A New Beginning Copyright © 1990 The Institute for Earth Education. All Rights Reserved.