Candace de Russy Hysteria, pronounced Freud, was the psychic disorder to which Victorians most readily succumbed, whereas narcissism, according to Christopher Lasch and others, is the one to which we twentieth-century dwellers are most vulnerable. New York and Hong Kong . It includes an illustration of the New York City skyline with the water level higher than the Statue of Liberty and most skyscrapers, except for the World Trade Center. Another classroom article, from Science Gazette , illustrates global warming with photographs of houses falling into the sea and a 1930s dust-bowl farm.
Environmental damage is made to seem irreparable, and the disasters ahead inevitable.
Employees, for example, of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club prepackage and distribute such E. E. materials to teachers and serve as guest presenters in classrooms nationwide. Their wares reach all the more students because the Office of Environmental Education, a branch of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, provides a powerful clearinghouse for them. Pamphleteering thus displaces the rigorous teaching of basic science and those principles that make for true environmental literacy. Needless to say, such one-dimensional content stymies complex reasoning and, one might add, avoids like the plague relevant, sound economic perspectives. E. E. unabashedly hectors students to join activist campaigns whose goals to many may be not only questionable, but morally objectionable.