<\/a>
\nThose crazy people at Your Daily Awesome have turned up this amazingly depressing essay on koalas<\/a> 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):<\/p>\n

\nI shouldn\u2019t do shit. I don\u2019t care about them they all could die and it won\u2019t affect my life. I know a lot about them but I don\u2019t need to think about them. They\u2019re just a waste of time koalas are stupid they don\u2019t 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\u2019s why I don\u2019t like koalas.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Thanks to deepwarren for the cool photo<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “You know we were all thinking the same thing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-environment"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p90sy-9J","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":686,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2007\/11\/13\/a-genie-unlikely-to-ever-return-to-its-bottle\/","url_meta":{"origin":603,"position":0},"title":"A genie unlikely to ever return to its bottle","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"13 Nov 07","format":false,"excerpt":"I was pottering in the kitchen (probably making tea or some such) while WeatherGirl was listening to a comedy program on the radio in the sitting room. I'm half hearing the words as they gently waft my direction, when a woman on the program says \"shit\" quite clearly and plainly.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Computing"","block_context":{"text":"Computing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/computing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":367,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2006\/08\/07\/dont-you-go-there\/","url_meta":{"origin":603,"position":1},"title":"Don’t you go there!","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"7 Aug 06","format":false,"excerpt":"OK, you have been warned. You're a busy person with much better things to do than read an endless series of things overheard in New York. As an intelligent person, you'd be too depressed by things like It's a Trap! Buy the Schopenhauer! Guy: Hey, I'm lookin' for a book.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Mildly amusing"","block_context":{"text":"Mildly amusing","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/mildly-amusing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1542,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2011\/08\/13\/education-is-about-interaction-not-content\/","url_meta":{"origin":603,"position":2},"title":"Education is about interaction, not content","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"13 Aug 11","format":false,"excerpt":"The scarcity of content through much of human history (remember when they used to chain books to shelves in libraries?) has allowed us to collectively confuse education with the delivery of content. It was about the lecture, in which rare and wondrous knowledge was imparted to eager young minds, not\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/category\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}