Youths And Science

Kids Science Projects make us confront a number of facts: we are acting as if the environment can absorb our discards, even highly toxic ones indefinitely; we seem to assume our resources are so vast, we can waste them; we let the dictates of short-term profit come ahead of long-term ecological costs.

Kids Science Projects also highlight the enormous cumulative impact of large numbers of tiny incremental effects.

Each of us contributes a trivial amount to the planet's load, but the sum total of consumption and waste by 5.3 billion of us is enormous.

The federal environment department's vaunted Green Plan did not set a target for reduction of greenhouse gases because we "only contribute two per cent of the total."

Yet the world's major contributor, the United States, could use the same justification since its contribution is "only" 23 per cent.

With less than 0.5 per cent of the world's population, our two-per-cent output makes Canada the most profligate of all industrial countries in production of greenhouse gas per capita.

Young people see with embarrassing clarity because they aren't blinded by fear, vested interests in a career or the allure of rampant consumerism.

And they have the most at stake in the future of the environment. All young people today have been exposed to chemicals and toxic environmental agents from conception on and each successive newborn will have higher exposure than any previous generation.

Today's youth will become adults in a world beset with enormous ecological problems that we bequeath to them by our inability to curb the shortsighted and the unsustainable pursuit of endless growth in the economy and consumption.

Their world will be radically diminished in the biological diversity we adults took for granted when we were children.

At the national conference of the Environmental Youth Alliance in Vancouver at the end of April, you could feel the delegates' belief that youth will make a difference. They haven't yet been paralysed by the vast inertia and complexity of society and I believe they CAN change the world. Youth speak with a power and clarity that only innocence confers and because we love them, adults HAVE to make changes in the way we live.

With its extraordinary commitment to individual teachers and classroom projects, it is an excellent example of how industry can support science education in this country. It is special because it allows Toyota to get involved with classroom education at the grassroots level.