As many of you old people will recall, this country’s news media goes in a 10 year cycle of lavishing attention to the destruction of Planet Earth, and then just as quickly forgets about it.
We are now in a brief period when the major news media suddenly … “cares” … and now we have the requisite 10 year old recycled stories carrying the moniker of …
“50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Planet.”
Stories recycled straight from the same stale stories written in 1977, 1987 and 1997.
Stories destined to go down the memory hole just as fast as they did in 1977, 1987, and 1997.
The one Simple Thing you can do to save the Planet is to become scientifically literate.
To be scientifically literate about Planet Earth you must, as a basic element, understand Plate Tectonics. It’s been proven since the 1960s. That’s 40 years.
Think about it. If most Americans are not aware of or understand Plate Tectonics 40 years after its acceptance by geologists, when will Americans understand it? 100 years from now? 200? 300?
This is troubling, since Plate Tectonics has been part of the basic high school science curriculum in the United States since the 1970s and yet only a tiny fraction of Americans are even familiar with the term.
Okay … how about Continental Drift ? I remember Dr. Chet Raymo, astronomy professor at Stonehill College in Easton, Mass. giving us 5th graders in Easton a lecture on Continental Drift back in 1975. He showed us how the coastlines of eastern South America and western Africa curiously fit together, especially if you included the continental shelves. Then he explained Plate Tectonics. We, as 5th graders, understood it. Why is this type of basic scientific literacy not passing up through to U.S. adults 30 years later ?
As a journalist, I am an inveterate student and observer of journalism. I see the trends come and go. The “environmental” trend in newspapers petered out in the late 1990s and now is suddenly “coming back.”
Why? It’s not as if the massive environmental problems documented in the late 1990s went away. In fact, they have become worse and worse and worse from 2000 to today. So why has the news media walked? And why are the news media only now suddenly “rediscovering” the importance of clean air and clean water?
People and animals did not stop needing clean air and water between 1996 and today any more than newspapers stopped needing advertising revenue between 1996 and today.
So when you read in the next few weeks a story about the “planetary crisis” in the big, expensive press, ask yourself at what point between 1997 and 2007 did people and animals stop needing clean air and water to live.
Do you really need the big media to inform you that clean air and water are important to you and your kids? And if you do, what does that say about your intelligence?
Better yet, talk about all this with your kids. It is their future and their planet that is now being flushed down the toilet. As Woody Guthrie said, it is our kids land.
Right now the leading “media” are very deliberately refusing to tell us the truth about what our land will look like in 30 years, when our young, hapless and tooth-losing kids will be our age and sitting in our chairs and talking to their hapless, tooth-losing kids.
