The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fix It). Charles Saylan
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people need in order to mitigate or circumvent the grave environmental problems our societies now face.
Has environmental education really failed? Imagine a graph on which the horizontal axis represents all the effort and resources expended toward making the public aware of the degradation of the environment, and the vertical axis represents the progress of the degradation itself. It would be great if efforts tended to decrease degradation, such that the line on the graph sloped down and to the right. We do not believe that is happening. This is not to say that there has not been tremendous public awareness derived from the efforts to date. Without environmental education, the planet would likely be in an even bigger, more incomprehensible mess. Even so, we believe environmental education is simply not effective enough or sufficiently available to change individual and collective behavior enough to affect the problems at hand. And we are firmly convinced that time is running out.
The problems with education are systemic, and we aim to offer a new perspective and synthesis to people at all levels of the educational process: teachers, parents, students, administrators, and those who make public policy. We hope that the “people in the trenches”—the educators our societies rely on to teach responsible stewardship—will find our ideas useful in shaping their own approach to an uncertain future. They make up a talented, passionate, and committed group of people, many of whom have been the groundbreakers for helping to establish the levels of public awareness that make a book like this one possible.
In writing this book we wished to put forth a positive and proactive message. There is increasing sentiment both within and outside the environmental-education community that taking a “doom and gloom” approach turns people off to any message that actions can make positive impacts on the world around us. Perhaps there is some truth to that, and we attempt herein to frame our argument in terms we hope will inspire thought and action, rather than leaving readers feeling helpless and overwhelmed.
There are, however, some emerging discoveries and data about the problems we are likely to face in the near future that warrant elucidation. They are neither pleasant nor positive. Yet they set the context in which we write this book, and we believe that readers must understand what the world may look like if humanity continues its business as usual. This realization should help readers understand why we believe environmental education, as it presently stands, does not serve the purposes for which it is intended, and that this is a most urgent matter worthy of collective attention.
There is little doubt our planet is getting warmer. In its most recent report, released in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wrote that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” and, quite notably, that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concen-trations.”1 Greenhouse gasses are not new, but the biophysical and geochemical cycles that regulate them have been affected by how energy has been used since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon from the earth into the atmosphere, and the sum total of these anthropogenic sources is heating the earth's atmosphere. How much? How fast? That is what the IPCC seeks to understand.
The IPCC is an organization made up of contributors from 130 countries that work under strict consensus. This means that any country has veto power over statements and conclusions made in the final report. Stop and think about that for a moment. Take, for example, a major industrial country that doesn't like an interpretation of the rate at which polar sea ice is melting because it might contribute to actions that spark national unemployment if profitable but “dirty” industries are cleaned up, or are cleaned up too quickly. Or, consider a rapidly developing country that views the prediction of sea level rise tied directly to greenhouse gas emissions as a threat to the development that is helping reduce poverty and disease and increase longevity within its borders. Either, or both, of these countries’ IPCC representatives might veto a strong environmental statement in favor of a statement of milder predictions that will have less of an economic impact in its respective country. Practically speaking, that means the IPCC consensus report is a very conservative estimate of the likely consequences of rising atmospheric greenhouse gasses. And even in its “watered down” consensus form, it's a truly frightening read.
In the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, former U.S. vice president Al Gore explained the mechanics of greenhouse gas emissions for a popular audience. It became the fourth-highest-grossing U.S. documentary film of all time. The film helped lift the veil of misinformation surrounding global warming issues perpetrated on the public by political naysayers and special interest lobbyists. It also brought new acceptance and discussion of the problems associated with climate change into the international limelight.
Another important milestone was the publication in 2006 of The Economics of Climate Change by the eminent British economist Lord Nicholas Stern. The report focused on the assessment of future impacts of global warming on world economies. Essentially, the report states that the benefits of concise and early action, on the part of world governments, to reduce the effects of global warming far outweigh the costs. Lord Stern went on to say that an immediate and continued investment of 1 percent per annum of the global gross domestic product (GDP) is necessary to offset the worst effects of climate change, which include a “major disruption of economic and social activities” on a scale that could rival the effects of both world wars or the Great Depression.2 In 2008, Stern emended his recommendation to a 2 percent investment of GDP, based on data that showed global warming trends were increasing at levels greater than previously estimated.3
As a result of increasing media coverage, we all know that carbon dioxide emissions are a major cause of climate change. We also know that these emissions, despite years of negotiations and discussion by the world's nations about how to reduce their release, are still increasing, not decreasing. Although there is still a good amount of debate and discussion as to how much is too much and whether and where the tipping points—that is, the atmospheric CO2 levels beyond which there will be massive and irreversible changes in the global temperature—might be, considerable effort is being expended to find new sources of sustainable energy, ways to reduce automobile and industrial emissions, and scenarios by which carbon emissions can be capped and traded commercially. These are positive steps, but because they are based on a consensus view that is intrinsically biased toward underestimating the severity of the problem, they are just not enough.
Indeed, if one believes the political rhetoric and mainstream media, it might seem we have turned the corner on global warming and are taking the necessary steps to mitigate its effects. This is especially true if one holds an unshakeable faith in human ingenuity or subscribes to the “humanity can fix anything with technology” school. Despite increased public awareness, most people still believe the effects of climate change will appear sometime in the vague future, when in actuality the effects are visible today. It seems when things deteriorate gradually, people tend not to notice them. The image of shifting baselines is a compelling one: a little change here, a little change there, and it all starts to seem normal. Thus, people do not see the potential for catastrophe unless something dramatic and immediate occurs. In the time frame of global warming issues, it would probably be too late to do much about the effects or causes of such an event.
The major public focus has been on industrial carbon emissions and sources of efficient energy, but some other serious issues associated with climate change require attention as well. Scientists are learning more every day, and some of what we have been reading in the primary scientific literature indicates potential negative impacts of a magnitude far greater than previously thought.
There has been widespread discussion of melting polar ice and what effects it might have on our world. The effects discussed range from the loss of polar bear habitats to potential economic benefits of new, less costly shipping routes, but there is more. In May 2008, researchers from the University of California at Riverside and Flinders University in Australia published findings revealing a relatively sudden release of methane, a greenhouse gas some twenty-three times more potent than CO2. This release occurred 635 million years ago, causing an abrupt shift in planetary climate from the stable “snowball” ice age to a much warmer, stable state, with little time in between.4The study shows how methane