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 avoid plastic water bottle waste by purchasing “racks” of glass bottles and returning them to be reused[1]. My father-in-law jokes good-naturedly about how Germans have a “sickness” for cleanliness, and brags about how 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.? Who knows, but I’m for it. The point of this example is that educating young people about these concepts has much greater leverage in the long term than educating adults. As an old dog, I can – indeed – confirm that I am loathe to learn new tricks.
Observing this, it’s tempting to advance the environmental agenda on all fronts using the leverage provided by early childhood education on environmental issues. However, there is a famous Thomas Sowell quote that will give you pause when considering this strategy: “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? By asking our children to do the heavy lifting to tackle our challenges, we risk breaking their backs with an unrealistic and counterproductive view of the world that makes them believe people are a blight on the earth. Of course, this is a very extreme view of the issue, but sometimes it helps to push an idea to the extreme to spell out the edges of the range of potential problems.
It is clear to me that my teenage kids have accrued some amount of environmental guilt from the gentle nudging that we have given them to be environmentally conscious. 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 where they are not overly concerned with the environmental impact of every activity or product that might enrich their life.
I don’t believe we have struck the right balance yet 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 progress in the last 120 years or so with 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 more depressed, or captivated by a subconscious, anti-industrial sentiment engendered by extreme 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 for humanity.
Patience is a virtue, and like many people I suffer from a proclivity to make big changes quickly rather than small incremental ones if something is going wrong. If European Christians 1000 years ago were willing to start cathedral projects that would take 400 years to complete, we should be willing now to have the patience and fortitude to affect slow, deliberate, steady change to our environmental problems. It seems likely that catastrophizing about the urgency of radical environmental action now is less likely to yield positive results over the long term than thoughtful, steady progress. Too many people start lifting weights with an ambitious goal to “get shredded” quickly and end up hurting a shoulder by bench pressing too much weight, or too much volume, too fast. These people would be better off slowly ramping up while their body adapts to the new stimulus. Too many people find out that investing in individual stocks or indexes can make them wealthy, and then take a big haircut when they push everything they have into the stock market before a huge dip. These people would be better off getting rich slowly by investing a set amount automatically every month using dollar cost averaging. The same applies to effective environmental solutions. It is an unfortunate reality that catastrophic depictions of Miami being underwater in 10 years gets more people to radically change their carbon footprint right now, because the sustainability and long-term viability of such a change is questionable. Perhaps more importantly, 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. After all, if we hypothetically decided as a species to no longer exist, the earth would heal itself from all human impacts in very short order. Would it not be better if we allowed it to do that while humans were still thriving in this world, happy and free?
[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/