From: pauld@cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis)
Subject: Re: save the earth - ridiculous!
Organization: Precipitating Pendulums Postal Party Poopers
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 93 23:00:31 GMT

In article <1ig9ntINN1rv@smurf.sti.com> alaric@sti.com (Alaric Tekiahyn) writes:
>In article <1993Jan6.194324.13459@beaver.cs.washington.edu>, pauld@cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis) writes:
>] I say that the phrase "Save the Earth" is the worst thing to hit
>] environmentalism and green politics since the Industrial Revolution.

>Despite all its faults, "Save the Earth" does have the virtues of
>being short, to the point, and a lot more comprehensible to the man
>in the street than "Save the biosphere" or "Preserve our ecological
>diversity".  If someone doesn't understand your rallying cry without
>your having to explain it to him, you've lost him right there, because
>if all he hears is gibberish he's not going to wait for explanations.
>He's just going to leave.

At the same time, if all that environmental politics can offer up as
slogans are things that are manifestly simplistic to the point of
being meaningless (just how many sentences does it take to explain
what "Save the Earth" is *supposed* to mean ?), then it stands little
chance of making much progress.

Of course, active Greens do much more than sloganize, a lot more, and
I'm proud of that. But what is our rallying cry ? We have a complex
platform, reflecting what we believe are the complexities of the world
in which we live. We need, therefore, new and better strategies for
presenting this platform than most current political parties. If we
offer simplicities to people in an attempt to get them to support us,
they will be even more let down, more unsympathetic, and more
reactionary when we finally tell them just how complex we actually
think everything is.

Instead of harping, I should make some suggestions.

1) Education. 
	Instead of believing that slogans to convince people to modify
 	their behaviour because of claimed threats or problems caused
	by current practices, we need to help people understand much more
	instinctively how the problems arise. This is very difficult
	in a world where the carbon cycle is alien to most people.
	Talking about complex systems science or ecology to "the
	person in the street" is probably going to fail. We therefore
	need to find ways to teach more children about basic ecology
	in a way that will leave this information with them in a
	state that will last. I was taught ecology in high school, and
	most of it just went in one ear and out the other.

	We don't need "indoctrination", we don't need to teach kids
	about the environmental agenda; we merely need to make sure
	they can do some basic math, understand the major cycles
	of ecosystems, co-evolution, food chains and so forth.

	Without this information, trying to convince adults of the
	Green agenda is pointless. I find it hard enough as an adult
	already convinced of the rightness of this stuff to keep
	all the ecology in mind. What this is like for someone who
	has never really read any basic ecology I can't even imagine.	

--paul
-- 
hybrid rather than pure; compromising rather than clean;    | Militant Agnostic
distorted rather than straightforward; ambiguous rather than| I Don't Know
articulated; both-and rather than either-or; the difficult  |   and You Don't
unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. |   Know Either