I'm all for making kids more aware and morally sensitive about environmental stewardship, but green activism in Britain is creepy as hell. Excerpt from the Spiked Online article:
Turn Your Parents Green is just one instance of a broader campaign to turn our children green in order to increase pressure on adults. Kids are fed such alarmist horror stories about climate change through the popular media that, according to surveys, more than half of British children regularly lie awake at night feeling terrified. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is now distributed to all schools, despite its inaccuracies. Some British schoolteachers are apparently so desperate to win 'Eco School Gold Award-Green Flag' status that they have banned children from exchanging cards at Christmas.
And now, even the 'nasty corporations' that greens deride are getting in on the act.
npower has created a new website encouraging kids to become 'Climate Cops', giving away diaries to 'record climate crimes at home and in your community' and to 'encourage others to switch-off and conserve energy'. Children are instructed to email details of the 'biggest climate crime' to npower, which might send a team to 'help you bust' the perpetrators.
Kids should build up 'case files' and 'report back to your family to make sure they don't commit those crimes again (or else)!'. They are instructed to 'keep a watchful eye over [the climate criminals] by revisiting the case every week or two to make sure they don't slip back into any of their old habits'. After that, 'What about the homes of your uncles, aunts or friends from school?' Apparently, nowhere is safe from the new Green Guards.
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Spiked Online is the latest manifestation of what used to be Living Marxism magazine. Despite its former name, it's views are closer to what one Distributist of my (internet) acquaintance called "vulgar libertarianism" than to Marxism. That doesn't make the story untrue, of course, I mention it because I think one should always be aware of the biases of one's source when reading a story like this.
And when they become pimply, rebellious teen-agers and look for the most glaring case of adult spoon-feeding to rebel against, what's going to be their first target?
And when that happens, they'll probably throw out the entire message, not just the excesses. How productive will this end up being, long term?
I didn't read the article Rod liked to, but I don't think enlisting schoolchildren in whatever-cause-of-the-day is anything new. In the mid-1960s every child in my big-city public elementary school was sent home with envelopes from the American Cancer Society exhorting "Send A Mouse to College!" (for cancer research), with a graphic list of symptoms on one side of the envelope. (Never mind the few children, like me, who sensed that this wouldn't be good for the mouse.) After our parents had contributed (I can't remember how many did), we were also encouraged to persuade them to stop smoking, which of course they would compliantly do because their children had told them to. The instructions to get our parents to quit intensified as the 1960s went on, and a few years later there was almost as much of a fuss about littering (no one in my family ever littered, so I resented this). As I say, nothing very new.
Paul, seeking wisdom, if you really are seeking wisdom, you might want to google "Cryosphere Today". Then you might want to browse the archive of polar satellite images for 2008. (Look around. You'll find them.) Then you might want to reconsider posting such unmitigated horsesh#t as "This month you could take a freighter from Japan to London via the North Pole." Uh, no you can't. Not unless you pull the freaking boat with one huge mother of a dogsled team. Now, the Northwest Passage is indeed open, as it frequently is. Roald Amundsen navigated it successfully way back in the day. The Northwest Passage is hundreds of miles south of the Pole. You are speaking twaddle, sir, and darkening counsel.
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