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Facts Needed in Environmental Education Several years ago, my fourth-grade son came home with an assignment. "I'm supposed to write a CD manufacturer to protest the way its unnecessary packaging is hurting the environment," he said. "Why would a company increase its costs by paying for packaging that's truly unnecessary?" I asked. "Maybe the packaging makes CD's harder to shoplift, or easier to see on display racks. Did your teacher tell you to research this first, or ask for the company's side of story?" No," he said, with a surprised look. "I'm just supposed to tell it to stop." These days, facts frequently take a back seat in the environmental education our children receive at school. Too often, environmental instruction seems to aim -- not at a disinterested search for the truth -- but at convincing children that "the planet" is in imminent danger, and they must save it. Young people exposed to environmental education of this sort often view the future with consternation. One nine-year-old caught the sense of alarm in a letter to George Bush. "Mr. President," she wrote, "if you ignore this letter, we will all die of pollution and the ozone layer." Now parents who want to offer their children a more balanced perspective have a valuable new resource: "Facts Not Fear: A Parent's Guide to Teaching Children about the Environment," by Michael Sanera and Jane Shaw. In preparing their book, Sanera and Shaw reviewed 130 textbooks and 170 children's environmental books. They found that "most materials ... present only one side of an issue, select worst-case examples, or omit important information." By and large, children's books treat environmental issues not as "manageable problems," but as full-blown "crises." "Facts Not Fear" aims to present the scientific complexity that other books omit. It reviews the evidence on global warming, ozone depletion, species extinction and pesticide health hazards, and demonstrates that many supposed "crises" are greatly exaggerated, or have little basis in fact. The authors point out that dire predictions of the past -- like whole-sale resource depletion, or mass starvation by the 1970's -- have routinely failed to materialize. And they list the great environmental "success stories" of recent years, including cleaner air and water, more plentiful forests and wildlife, and longer and healthier lives than our ancestors could possibly have imagined. Why do environmental books for children routinely omit information of this kind? Sanera and Shaw suggest that most share "a few emotionally powerful ideas," which prompt them to treat environmental education as a morality play, rather than a scientific inquiry. The first idea is that "nature is good and people are bad" -- ditto for consumption, business and technology. The second is that only government can devise effective solutions to the environmental problems we face. Both these ideas are mistaken. If our children are to meet environmental challenges, they must move beyond thinking in terms of "good guys" -- Greenpeace and people who "care about trees" -- and "bad guys" -- General Motors and people who eat at McDonald's. In addition, they must understand that too much government intervention can be counterproductive. Contrary to what children's textbooks say, the best way to ensure a healthy environment is to foster a dynamic free market economy. Wasteful and inefficient use of resources is the number one cause of pollution. A vibrant economy -- especially one that has moved from the industrial to the "information" stage -- tends to use resources ever more efficiently, and to ensure a rapid turnover of older, less efficient equipment. In the 1960s, for example, it took 164 pounds of steel to produce 1000 soft drink cans; in 1990, 35 pounds of aluminum did the job. Water softeners used to cycle regularly, whether a home needed more soft water or not. Today's "smart" softeners save energy by cycling only when necessary. Only prosperous societies have both the will and the means to make environmental protection a top priority. As columnist Warren Brooks explained in 1991, "Eastern Europe is filthy today not because of too much technology, but entirely too little; not because of too much economic growth, but entirely too little; not because of too few controls, but far too many." Government clearly has a role to play in protecting the environment -- urban air pollution is a case in point. But over-regulation saps the economic dynamism vital to technological progress, and often does more harm than good:
Today, 30 states mandate environmental education, seeking to prepare young people for informed and responsible environmental decision-making. But as things stand now, students lack a central requirement of wise public policy-making -- the ability to weigh costs and benefits. Most fail to grasp that decisions generally involve trade-offs -- for example, when the government mandates lighter cars to enhance fuel efficiency, it increases the likelihood that those cars will be more dangerous in accidents than their heavier predecessors. Environmental education cannot live up to its promise so long as it resembles a morality play. If our children are to meet the challenges of citizenship in the 21st century, we must replace their "good guy-bad guy" mentality with a thorough grounding in science and economics. -- Katherine Kersten is chairman of Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis and a commentator for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." |