Rather than encouraging school kids to guilt their parents into turning off the lights for a while to "celebrate" earth day ,my suggestion is for school teachers to assign an essay to their charges. The topic-why is North Korea dark and South Korea lighted as illustrated in this iconic image.
An alternative topic might be what would our lives be without electricity.
Here is an earlier earth day commentary offered as a counterpoint to the usual sanctimonious
earth day platitudes and indoctrination of youth with the secular religion of naive environmentalism with its rituals of turning off lights and mindless recycling.
Finally, here is an essay from the economist Steven E. Landsburg from his book "The Armchair Economist" in which he makes the distinction between the religion of environmentalism and the science of ecology and makes clear my choice of "mindless" to modify "recycling", putting forward the notion that recycling per se is not a moral issue and therefore always right (or wrong) but each case is an empirical one.
1 comment:
Here is a link for another way to "celebrate".It is a project called Human Achievement hour .http://cei.org/hah2011
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