On a Nation That Needs to Go Back to School
On A Nation That Needs to Go Back To School: I asked my seven year old granddaughter what her school was teaching her about climate change and the environment. She told me that she was learning that if the bugs kill the trees, we won’t be able to breath. I don’t know about you, but there were no environmental classes when I went to school. I realized that there is a huge gap in just basic knowledge about our environment and climate issues between generations. Where there isn’t broad knowledge about an issue, it becomes a devil’s playground.

The devils are in high gear when it comes to our climate change debate. Most of the media coverage and political attention the mere mortals of the public audience see, tend to focus on the job’s vs environment framing of the issue. While both sides of this debate have armed up with their defenses, you rarely see or hear from someone who has a good grasp of the climate debate from all perspectives. It’s either “we’re going to all die if we don’t shut down all carbon-emitting human activity by 2050” or “you aren’t taking my job, go figure out some other way to make things go on”. That approach to climate change has us at each other’s throats. I firmly believe we DO need to address climate change. I also have come to believe that an invisible few really have a rounded understanding of the issue and mostly we are talking past each other.

One side is steeped in the environmental science that tells us we’re killing our planet, and carbon-emissions are the culprit. The deniers of these truths are becoming dinosaurs as storms, floods, fires and other climate events increasingly disrupt our lives. Yet the “shut it all down” folks ignore the fact that a “green” future has to include industry and manufacturing. That side of the debate is woefully ignorant of how we have begun to “green” our productive activities and what can be done to make essential production work with efforts at sustainability. Without a fully informed knowledge base, the solutions will evade us. The result will be a world that goes on a fire drill of emergency, and poorly planned responses to the punishment our planet has in store for us.

All of us need to go back to school. Climate school, to be precise. Those focused on the physical evidence of earth’s increasing in habitability, need to bone up on the reality of what human activity needs to continue and the technology necessary to sustain that. Those whose jobs and livelihoods are under attack need to know more about the science, and face up to the end game. I’m talking about an educational effort like none ever attempted in history. Classes for those in school, for political and media leadership, on the job, in retirement homes, embedded in our entertainment, fashion and offered on street corners. Only when we see the problem from all sides, can we have a productive conversation that might just get us all behind a win-win strategy.

Okay, we aren’t listening to each other much these days. Yes, we will have big fights over what is taught and who does the teaching. True, that there are some who will keep their heads in their particular sand until they die. For sure, the media and political worlds will continue to exploit our fears and self-interests. The money people will protect their investments. So just the effort to get to a common set of truths and a solid base of options will be fraught with its own difficulties. But our choice is to figure out how to work from an agreed set of facts or use half-knowledge to make half-ass decisions. Doing the latter means losing the opportunity to fashion nothing less than the fate of the human race.

Ihg 10-10-2021

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