Those crazy people at Your Daily Awesome have turned up this amazingly depressing essay on koalas which was apparently written by an 8th grader three years ago. The assignment was to write about an endangered species (which was presumably assigned), and this individual (who might be eligible to vote in the 2008 election!) clearly wasn’t having it. Their opening paragraph pretty much says it all (although I assure you that they went on to say more in essentially the same vein):
I shouldn’t do shit. I don’t care about them they all could die and it won’t affect my life. I know a lot about them but I don’t need to think about them. They’re just a waste of time koalas are stupid they don’t help me with shit so why should I help them. If they all die there will be more room for the panthers and all the other hard animals. Koalas are weak a pit will get rid of their whole fucking family. That’s why I don’t like koalas.
Sadly, while this is a pretty extreme (and brutally honest) example, I suspect this is depressingly representative of much of the general public’s attitude to the larger environmental issues that we are desperately struggling with. No one used this sort of language on TV regarding the spotted owl, but you know that in the living rooms and bars it was a whole ‘nother story.
Our budding author is also pretty confused in thinking that we can somehow trade koala-space for panther-space, which suggests a pretty weak grasp of some basic biology, ecology, and geography.
All of which leaves us with the tricky question of how we educate upcoming generations to see themselves as an integral part of our environment instead of some invincible dominant force unaffected by Mother Nature. Sure, at some level koalas don’t matter, but they larger system they’re part of (and representative of) matters enormously.
Thanks to deepwarren for the cool photo.
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