"Convivial environmentalism"

Bill McKibben wrote a great book called The Age of Missing Information several years ago. He talks about how we think we are living in the so-called "Age of Information", but that we have become so divorced from the natural world that most of us have completely lost or forgotten a great deal of basic information about nature and the natural world, and how to survive in it, that was commonplace knowledge to our ancestors.

My father is a Boy Scout leader, and one of the things he has always enjoyed doing with the Scouts is star study. He said that he pretty much gave up several years ago. Not only do kids today not grow up looking up at the night sky and becoming fascinated with the stars -- I wanted to be an astronomer when I was 7, which was common when I was growing up (or a paleontologist, which was also common) -- but they don't care. It doesn't occur to them that looking up at the night sky and learning about the stars is a worthwhile thing to do.

Of course, a lot of it has to do with the horrible light polution that dims the night sky in most populated areas now. But I think there is also something cultural. Kids today grow up with the idea that entertainment is something that is electronic and comes from a store, rather than something that involves getting in touch with the natural world. One of the reasons the return of Halley's Comet in 1986 was such a bust was that a generation raised on movie special effects couldn't muster much enthusiasm for a mere slow-moving comet in the sky. (It also wasn't as close to the earth as in 1910, but that's another issue.)

It seems so quaint to recall that, when I was a kid, my friends and I could pass a whole fun afternoon just looking at bugs. And think we were having a great time.

I read that in the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake, when the power went out, people looked up at the sky and started to call into the police and first responders, wanting to know whether they should worry about the "cloud" they saw stretching across the sky, and whether it was composed of deadly chemicals released from pipes broken in the earthquake.

What they were seeing was the Milky Way.

We have allowed our whole civilization to become divorced from the natural world around us, and as a result we have deprived ourselves and our children of what used to be humanity's birthright: knowledge of the natural world (including an unimpeded view of the night sky).>

Ward,

Ask yourself this. Just what would it take to convince you on global warming? Do you want proof? Then you're going to be waiting a long time. The only way to "prove" anything in science is to perform multiple controlled experiments to demonstrate repeatability. Since we don't have any spare planets to play with, that's just not going to happen.

While you're at it, tell me how a race car driver's opinion on climate science is somehow more worthwhile or profound than that of pretty much the entire community of climatologists.>

Ward--You ought to re-examine those memories you think you have about being "warned of an impending new ice age." Because that never happened.

There were no warnings of "global cooling" from climate scientists in the 1970s. That's just one of the big lies employed by the ideological anti-science, eco-denialist fringe.

Since there was never a belief in "global cooling," this non-existent belief cannot be used as reason to disregard today's near-unanimous consensus about the reality of global warming.

">http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/>