It sounds like these kids enjoy themselves, though, and learn some useful concepts. I like the part where there’s a good contingent of older kids involved in teaching and running the program. Kids pay attention to older kids a lot more than they pay attention to adults, and hopefully those older kids will join back in to activism on this kind of thing as they get older (especially when they have kids of their own).

The site is a little light on details of exactly what activities the kids do at the various stations, though. I’d like to see those. Maybe there are some good ideas I can adapt/steal to use.

When I was a kid in Boy Scouts (1963 - 1972) I did a LOT of camping in the Massachusetts and Maine woods. I had to learn to identify trees and other plants and various birds, snakes, insects, small mammals, etc., and I got the Fish and Wildlife Managment and Forestry merit badges. I also grew to understand a lot of the concepts working on Nature MB. But the words “environment” or “environmentalism” weren’t ones you heard a lot. I remember walking the 5 miles to school on the first Earth Day (1970), but the terms hadn’t worked their way into general discourse yet.

The camping methods then were invasive. It was not unheard of to ditch one’s tent, although we were cautioned to replace the sod when we were done. And cooking and boiling water for washing up were all done over wood fires; I spent a lot of time walking out into the woods with an axe to chop down and then chop up a small dead pine tree for fuel. It was also not unheard of to dig a latrine for everyone to use.

These days the BSA is much more on top of things. You still have to learn to build a fire, but most all your cooking and clean up is done using a propane or liquid fuel burner. Ditching one’s tent is forbidden (besides, tents have floors now). And the Environmental Science merit badge is required for Eagle (and there’s a bunch of links on that page); the practical effect of that is that just about every kid 12 or over who goes to summer camp earns it. The BSA also pushes Leave No Trace; no more chopping down a stack of dead trees to build a camp gateway, building a bunch of firerings, digging latrines, having a bunch of people camping in one spot, etc.

I must say that we don’t worry so much about the implications of environmental lessons based on the class/income/jobs of the parents of the kids involved. For one thing, I have no idea of what they might be unless the kid involved happens to be in my own unit. In fact, one of the explicit objectives of putting the kids in uniform (whether it’s the full blown BSA shirt and pants or just a camp T-shirt) is to deliberately mask income and other differences among the kids.

I have to wonder whether any of those kids go home and think, “Damn, Mom or Dad’s job involves screwing up the environment.” It’s certainly possible. But we are all Chicago suburbanites, and as such are more isolated from the effects of what we do on where we live than more rural kids might be. Plenty of these kid’s parents work for companies that might be doing such things, but they wouldn’t be doing it locally; the plants dumping pollutants in the river or the air are hundreds of miles from here. There are assembly facilities and shipping facilities nearby that could be generating hazardous waste, but that’s a bit harder to visualize; it would be trucked away and disposed of somewhere out of sight. Hm.

Yes, conservation is a series of tradeoffs. What are the costs of recovering recyclable material out of household waste vs. what it can be sold for (making new newspaper out of logs seems to be cheaper than recycling used newspaper, but collecting aluminum cans and reusing them is much more economic than mining and smelting bauxite)? What are the hazards/effects of extracting a mineral or other non-renewable resource from an area vs. it’s uses as a watershed, farming and recreational area? What are the costs of producing and recycling/disposing of the battery in a hybrid car vs. the fuel saved? What are the political (as well as environmental) consequences of using or saving that fuel?

We can’t live without making a mark on the planet. Neither can anything else, though; humans are not special in that regard. What’s makes us special is that we can make choices about how much of a mark we make and what kind of living standards we choose. I applaud your efforts to help kids understand that concept, and what our choices are.

Yeah, I push Scouting, but if their policies are too unacceptable to you there are other groups that you can get involved in. Get them out in the easy stuff first, the county/state park thing. But after a while, push them a bit. Go for something wilderness at least once intheir lives, somewhere around the 13 - 15 year old range.

And get them involved in a service project or two cleaning up someone else’s mess in the mountainsor on a lake or river. You can put kids of all economic classes together in this kind of thing, and they see how they are all affected. Plus, it’s fun playing inthe muck.

Unfortunately, the “rich” part of that description means that they can insulate themselves (or, we Americans as a whole can insulate ourselves) from the damage, perhaps until it’s too late. Wealth allows us to be blissfully ignorant.

So does poverty. So does a middle-income level. Blissful ignorance of the environment is a social problem across all spectrums of income. In fact, it has been my experience that those who are in lower income brackets tend to shield themselves more from environmental concerns than do others, and that conversely, wealthy individuals tend to donate both time and money to environmental concerns.

We tend to see ourselves as separate from the environment because we can — no matter what roots that particular blindspot comes from, we actively perpetuate it because that viewpoint serves us well. Current damages to the environment do not necessarily translate as hardships to the current generation; and that which we cannot accurately measure tends to go unobserved.

White needs to read his (or her) Bible again. The Bible certainly says that the Earth and everything on it is for mankind’s use. But there’s nothing in the Bible that says we are free to abuse it, and there’s a fair amount of talk on stewardship.

A chimera is an organism that has cells in it that have differing DNA makeup. The most common example you will see is a calico cat. The cells that express (e.g.) the orange tabby parts of it’s coat are different than the cells that express the white patches of it’s coat. They actually have a different set of DNA from each other. What is being described here is a hybrid, not a chimera.

Having a bunch of “hybrids” of that sort running around did little to motivate this country to act more morally–not towards the environment, of course, and especially not towards each other