My wife spent most of her childhood in Germany, and I’ve always enjoyed comparing notes with her on the cultural differences that are apparent between Germans and Americans. Of course, these conversations are chocked full of generalizations that don’t apply to every person or place, but one can draw certain distinct conclusions about the way we rear children differently. German kids are taught never to litter, and to take responsibility for systematically recycling and reusing many things that are typically one-time use items in the US. For example, Germans used to avoid plastic water bottle waste by purchasing “racks” of glass bottles and returning them to be reused. My father-in-law jokes good-naturedly about how Germans have a “sickness” for cleanliness; he said they have bins for different colors of glass to be recycled. This adorable form of indoctrination means that German streets tend to be much cleaner than streets in the U.S. Should we adopt this practice of indoctrination in the U.S.? I’m for it, and so are the people that brought you the slogan “Don’t Mess with Texas.” The point of the German example is that educating young people about these concepts has much greater leverage in the long term than educating adults.
Observing this, it’s tempting to advance the environmental agenda on all fronts using the leverage provided by early childhood education on environmental issues. Thomas Sowell said “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs; and you try to get the best trade-off you can get, that’s all you can hope for.” So, what’s the trade-off here? If we catastrophize about environmental impacts, we risk their psychological health, and make them more receptive to the destructive idea that humans are a “virus” or a “cancer” on the earth.
It is clear to me that my teenage kids have accrued at least a little bit of environmental guilt from the gentle nudging that society – and their parents – have done to help them become conscious of environmental stewardship. My sense is that the best path forward is a moderate balance between two competing needs: (1) The need to make a new generation of responsible people; and (2) The need to empower those people to live in a way that is happy and free, pursuing a dynamic and powerful future that does not avoid environmental impacts at the cost of human flourishing.
I think the U.S. is slowly moving towards more balance on this issue. In my opinion, too many young people are making less-than-ideal choices because they are worried about their environmental impact. I say that looking back on my 39 years and realizing that I was too often foregoing good things because I was worried about the environment. And I see young people making similar choices not to travel, to have fewer children than they otherwise would, or to seek more “low-carbon” electronic entertainment in lieu of real, tactile experiences. As a species, we have been making truly RADICAL technological progress with some of our biggest problems. We have been lifting large swathes of humanity out of poverty, evolving cleaner and more efficient technologies, and generally reducing the causes of human suffering due to war, famine, and disease. We risk decelerating these positive changes if the next generation is captivated by a subconscious, anti-industrial sentiment created by overzealous environmentalism. It seems clear that we will solve and adapt to more and more of the world’s problems if we can continue to create generations of happy, energetic people, who want to do important work and manufacture the best possible future.
European Christians 1,000 years ago were willing to start cathedral projects that would take 400 years to complete. We should be willing now to affect slow, deliberate change to our environmental problems. Catastrophic depictions of Miami being underwater in 10 years gets more people to radically change their carbon footprint right now. However, the shock to the system and the quick radical change is likely to have lots of unforeseen negative consequences.
For a parent, the brightness of their child’s future takes primacy over almost anything else. Considering the power of small, steady, incremental change, and the rampant environmental pessimism that is observable in many young people today, perhaps we should consider cooling the environmental education off a little. That could mean that we spend less time and energy on environmental education. Or it could mean that we do the same things while reinforcing the positive truth that we are affecting productive change now, and we’re on our way to winning big with environmental challenges.
[1] Sidenote: there is an interesting and hilarious theory on the internet that Germans continue to disapprove of tap water, despite its generally high quality in Germany, because the word for tap water sounds very unappealing. The word is “leitungswasser” (literally plumbing water). https://language101.com/german/about-germany/why-germans-dont-drink-tap-water/