editorial

For years the standard basic curriculum for our schools has been "readin’, ‘ritin’, and ‘rithmetic" – the proverbial three R’s. Throw in a little geography and some watered down and papered over American history and that’s mostly been it. Persons campaigning for political office or boards of education would pummel any schools systems which dared to depart too much from these staples. This kind of campaign proved to be advantageous to the campaigner time and time again.

With such blind subservience to an outmoded curriculum if we can call it such (and such is true in many places) we do a disservice to our children -- future leaders -- and by default, the future of our nation. Not that I would downgrade the three R’s, especially reading and writing. Rather it is crucial to elevate to equal rank a sound and scientifically based program in environmental education.

There are certain environmental facts of existence which are scientifically and/or historically beyond dispute. It is agreed by all that we need clean air to breathe and clean water to drink to maintain health. It is an historical fact that the biosphere has suffered from extraordinary degradation solely because of human activities.

There are other more complex environmental ideas which may still be in the realm of theory. These may be considered an "ecology" of ideas which merit scientific evaluation and testing by scientific means. Such is the notion that the accelerating increase in greenhouse gases will be a direct cause of global warming. This particular cause and effect supposition has been overwhelmingly accepted by those professionally qualified scientists who have been allowed to pursue truth without any attached strings. Those "scientists" who differ from this concept are in most cases paid by environmentally unfriendly industries to rig the facts so as to come to different conclusions.

This is what we might expect in a capitalistic system for which profits are sacrosanct. The minority conclusions of scientists on the payroll of large corporations are widely disseminated by the corporate conglomerate dominated mass media.

Since the existence of bioorganisms living on the planet is increasingly threatened, it is essential that we provide our future citizens with a sound basis for making economic, political, social and ecological decisions. All of our systems of education from K-12 and beyond, and our mass media are notoriously deficient in this crucial area. According to Ted Williams in an article in the Sept-Oct 2000 Audubon magazine:

"In 1994, the most recent year for which data is available, only 13 percent of secondary-education majors and 14 percent of elementary-education majors were required to take a course in environmental education. At last count only three states required it as part of teacher training. Today teacher and student examinations include few if any questions related to the environment. So frazzled educators--increasingly teaching to standardized math and reading tests--tend to ignore environmental education, treating it as one more distraction from the main business at hand."

The US government appropriated large funds for scientific education after the appearance of the Russian Sputnik in space. Our government considered this display of technological advancement on the part of the Russians to be a threat to our security, the redress of which would be crash programs in science and the vocations to empower our schools’ curricula.

Today we as a nation along with the whole world face a threat hundreds of times worse from human activities in a burgeoning environmental degradation leading inevitably unless checked to the ultimate Omega.

In ancient history it was said that the Roman Emperor, Nero, fiddled while Rome burned. The parallel situation is completely poignant here. In modern times, Reagan fit the bill as a modern Nero. His symbolic act of removing the solar collectors from the White House that Jimmy Carter had put there served as his signature for anti-environmentalism. It is now appropriate, however, to deem our whole nation the personification of a modern day Nero. The acceptance by the majority of the American people of the so-called "election" of George W Bush, an anti-environmental extremist if there ever was one, is confirmation of that fact.

In response to a clamor from below for environmental education, none of our "illustrious" leaders have stepped into the void, leaving that for the corporate world of profits and exploitation to fill. Insidiously, the exploiters have shoehorned in their brand of environmental education. This is a subtle method of presenting disinformation with the goal of indoctrinating youthful minds with the blinders necessary for a people to have to tolerate the current economic system in this country. It promotes a continuing system of the average citizen’s willingness to sacrifice and be subservient to the corporate philosophy of riches, power and elitism. It is completely undemocratic.

As environmental education is fed into the schools from these insidious "benefactors," along comes an environmental educator from Oregon who clearly sees the propaganda nature of such curriculum materials, eg. Project Learning Tree, and has extended himself as a very small David against a very large and powerful corporate Goliath. I am speaking of John F. Borowski whose articles may be found on various web sites.

Quoting Dr. Jackie Alan Giuliano in an article called "Marketing Environmental Destruction and Disease:"

"Educator John Borowski in an article for PR Watch, a group dedicated to exposing public relations scams, said education about the environment is being assaulted. Corporations are creating professionally produced, easy to use, and usually free curricula and lesson plans that are incredibly biased in favor of industry. Borowski says, ‘They were selling lies, and the teachers were buying - quickly filling their bags with curricula as corrosive as the pesticides that the Farm Bureau promotes.’"

It is high time that we who espouse a philosophy of conservation of our natural world begin to pay a lot more attention to cultivating a "people-oriented" program of instruction in environmental education to maximize our future citizen’s ability to make decisions for the common good rather than for the corporate good. It is high time that we conservationists enjoin our schools to develop objective science-based curriculum materials, and provide our communities with unbiased environmental outreach programs to counter the self-serving propaganda of the coal and logging industry.