As Earth Day approaches, a new report indicates that knowledge about the environment lags far behind the sense of its importance amongst youth worldwide. The report, "Green at Fifteen? How 15-year-olds perform in environmental science and geoscience in PISA 2006" was released this week by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The study tested more than 400,000 15-year-old students in 57 countries, to assess their knowledge and attitudes.
In a press release, the OECD said:
Many teenagers in OECD countries lack environmental science grounding, study shows
31/03/2009 - Teenagers in OECD countries are mostly well aware of environmental issues but often know little about their causes, raising questions about how well societies will be equipped to tackle such challenges in the future, according to a new OECD publication.
According to data published in "Green at Fifteen?", the latest OECD report on findings from its PISA study, more than 90% of an extensive sample of 15-year-old school students were familiar, for example, with issues relating to air pollution, nuclear waste and water shortages.
However, almost half were unable to identify a single source of acid rain, such as factory or automobile emissions. The best score came from Finland, where three out of four were able to give an answer. In Turkey, by contrast, only one in four students could respond.
Overall, the PISA tests showed widespread awareness among teenagers about environmental issues, coupled with a sense of responsibility and optimism. But the results also showed variations in competence in environmental science from one country to another and a lack of realistic appreciation on the part of students doing poorly in this area of the effort and time needed to address environmental problems
American students generally performed in the middle of the pack, not a very good showing, considering the how many countries in the developing world were included. This is the sort of knowledge and understanding that will only become more and more important as we face increasingly difficult environmental challenges in the years ahead, not just from global warming, but from increasing stresses on renewable resources as basic as running water.
Are you ready for the Every Third Bite diet? Like many weight loss strategies, it relies on portion control. But the Every Third Bite diet -- unlike any other diet I know of -- won't require any will power on your part. It works by simply eliminating one third of our nation's food supply.
The secret to its success? Crop failure, brought to you courtesy of colony collapse disorder (CCD). Basically, the bees are bailing on us. And without their powers of pollination, a wide range of crops, from almonds to zucchinis, could be about to vanish from our lives, along with the bees.
"Oh, no, that would be terrible!," as a delightfully dorky, gap-toothed kid declares in the opening moments of Every Third Bite, the short but sweet documentary on our embattled honeybees that premiered last week at the Media That Matters film festival. Every Third Bite delivers a stinging truth: at the end of the day, our hyper-industrialized system of agriculture can't wing it without these fuzzy little farm workers, who get schlepped from state to state like mini migrants to pollinate about $15 billion dollars worth of fruit, nut and vegetable crops each season.
Häagen-Dazs, faced with a meltdown over the loss of key ingredients for nearly half its ice cream flavors, has launched a campaign to help save the honeybees, donating $250,000 to help fund research on the cause of CCD. Scientists are still puzzling over whether this new malady is caused by pesticides, viruses, mites, a fungus, or some combination thereof. Stress and poor nutrition may be weakening the bees' immune systems, too.
This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders had a death wish, and whose members at large mostly didn't.
To me, "sustainability" means a situation in which your descendants are able to confront their own problems, rather than the ones you exported to them. If people a hundred years from now are soberly engaged with phenomena we have no nouns and verbs for, I think that's a victory condition.
On the other hand, if they're thumbing through 1960s Small World paperbacks and saying "thank goodness we've finally managed to pare our lives back exclusively to soybeans and bamboo," well, that's not the end of the world, but it's about as appealing as a future global takeover by the Amish. Give me the computronium problems; at least I can get out of bed and not have to mimic every move my grandpa made. - Bruce Sterling
I am not going to survive in any apocalyptic dystopia. My vision's good, but my knees are dodgy and I can't function without coffee and a high protein diet. (Maybe I could move to Costa Rica and grow chickens in exchange for the sweet, sweet arabica ... Hmmm, if I get out before the travel costs become prohibitive ... What!? Sorry. Ahem.) You can see how this would make me not only opposed to immanentizing the eschaton, but to sailing on to a post/pre-industrial civilization of the sort envisioned by mid-last-century back to the land movements or perhaps, the creators of Mad Max.
(And yes, I'll grant you, there were entirely too many hyphens in that last paragraph. Just wait, though.)
So on that note, you can be certain that when I talk about preserving the environment, I have a deep, parallel interest in preserving civilization somewhat-as-we-know-it. Consider that I'm a big fan of the intertubes, artificial lighting and indoor plumbing, just for starters. Don't get me started on refrigeration. Though civilization just-as-we-know-it, sorry to break it to you, but it has to go. At once. Couldn't be soon enough, really. And go it will, whether we want it to or not.
What a lot of people think is that there are three choices. Just, as I wrote here in the comments, it's that these are our choices:
This is the origin story of a species whose leaders had a death wish, and whose members at large mostly didn't.
What exactly is efficiency? You probably think about it in terms of hours worked to work product generated. In any science class, it usually means how much energy as applied to a system does useful work, as opposed to what's lost as heat. In biology, that general science definition gets applied to living things and what powers them, their food.
In every stage of food consumption, called a trophic level, about 90 percent of the energy consumed is lost.
At the first level, there are organisms like plants, also called primary producers, which take energy from the sun as food and harness that power to transform carbon dioxide gas into energy-rich sugars; the carbohydrates that are the base fuel for all other organic reactions. Primary producers are chemical factories that supply the base total amount of energy available to all the other chemical reactions needed to sustain life. At every successive level, animals who eat plants, then animals who eat animals who eat plants, about 90% of the remaining energy is lost. This doubtless seems very inefficient.
Unfortunately, everything you know about efficiency is based on a lie. It's a long story. Maybe it will help if you think of living things for the duration as machines powered by volatile chemicals, but here's why what we think we understand about efficiency is wrong, and dangerously so.
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