In grade 7 I had a homeroom teacher named Mrs. Sweeney.  She was a very involved teacher, and I have nothing but fond memories of her.  She was a very idealistic woman, and made an effort to teach us about environmental issues.  I guess the lessons must have been part of the curriculum, but you could tell that she was passionate about the issue.

I remember that she lead our class in putting on a performance of Dr. Seuss's  "The Lorax".  Environmental issues were considered pretty important even back then in the 80's when we weren't worried about global warming.

And environmental issues are important, and we should be teaching children about the challenges involved in understanding how the Earth works and finding solutions to these issues.  But I'm wondering if it needs to be done with a little more caution.

What I absorbed most from my lessons in environmentalism is a sense of anger and frustration that I developed, directed at big greedy companies.  I remember that year we took a field trip to a company that makes drink boxes, where they gave us a presentation on what they were doing to help the environment.

I had little dumbass fantasies before we went that I would not be taken in by their bullshit and ask angry questions that would force them into difficult corners.  Fortunately, in real life I had more sense than to raise any sort of fuss.  But my anger at these people was real, and it was devoid of any perspective which would highlight the other side of the story.

I assumed at the time that their explanations were pure rationalizations and weak excuses, but thinking back on it they actually had some interesting things to say.  They told us that they'd developed a method for recycling drink boxes and showed us a bench made out of the stuff.  They talked about how more product can be carried with less space wastage in drink boxes, which cuts down on the amount of gas needed to transport them.  These are things that add some needed perspective to the discussion, but I wasn't getting it out of my regular lessons.

I think that if we fail to talk about all the pros, cons, and uncertainties about environmental issues, we're giving people a very skewed perspective that can have a stranglehold on the public discussion. 

And I'm reminded of other examples of attempts to instill a sense of environmentalism in children.  There was the Canadian children's cartoon "The Smoggies" about a tribe of creatures that looked like human children called the "Sun Tots" who lived in complete harmony with nature but were constantly given trouble by the evil "Smoggies" who wanted to rape and pillage the environment and cover everything in oil and grease.

And let's not forget Captain Planet, where each villain represents an evil of the modern world.  Despicable characters who must be stopped at all cost because they pollute and rape the planet without remorse and can't be reasoned with.

This proclivity for portraying the issue as good versus evil seems to me to polarize the debate in such a way that many people are unwilling to accept any form of middle ground or acknowledge grey areas. 

But that's not to say that corporations and polluters are completely in the right.  At the moment we're in the midst of a huge environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and people are, justifiably, angry at British Petroleum.  But we should acknowledge that these are not evil people, just a bunch of idiots like the rest of us.  It highlights the need for strict regulations and competent enforcement, both of which appear to have been lacking in this case. 

They say that if you give a monkey a gun and the monkey shoots somebody, you don't blame the monkey.  Of course, that's a grand over-simplification of this issue, because I do believe that BP has a heaping load of blame rightly coming to it.  But it's foolish to expect that for-profit companies can simply be trusted on their word when the stakes are so high.  I view this issue as a legitimate environmental concern that needs careful attention, and shouldn't be looked at in black-and-white terms.

Even when the issue isn't portrayed as good versus evil, there is often a distortion to the way people understand environmental issues.  Most people want to blame evil loggers for the deforestation of the Amazon.  That's the impression that people have, but it's not what's actually going on.  The real problem is that poor families in the region need to cut down the forests in order to farm the land so that they can survive.  Solutions to this problem are much more complex, and don't have as clear of a villain, as the popular conception.

A couple years ago I read the young reader's novel "The Lightning Thief" by Rick Riordan. I enjoyed the book, now a major motion picture which I have yet to see.  Mr. Riordan is obviously concerned about the environment, but I think in a couple of scenes he gives a misleading impression of environmental problems.

In one scene, the main character Percy is at the bottom of a river (he's able to stay down there by magic), and he sees all sorts of trash and refuse flowing by.  But this is a very unrealistic depiction of water pollution.  If you were able to stand in such a position, you would be unlikely to see large amounts of discarded trash flowing by.  The kind of pollution we're worried about in these cases has more to do with industrial runoff and particulate matter... what you might call "water smog".

I don't think that environmental issues have to be dumbed down to this point in order to be understandable to children and the general public.  Certainly the science can be simplified, but it shouldn't be done in such a way that it gives an inaccurate perception of reality.  And while depictions of environmental issues as good versus evil may energize some people into action, I believe that on the whole it only damages our ability to make real progress and find real solutions.