Like many veteran environmental educators, my career


began as a response to events surrounding the first Earth Day in 1970. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, the Santa Barbara oil spill, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catching fire, phosphates in detergents, lead in smog — all this grabbed my attention and never let go. The phrase “environmental education” entered the lexicon at that time, for the first wave of concern for the environment was also the first wave of environmental education, halcyon days that many of us remember with misty eyes. The second wave of environmental concern erupted


around 1988 when medical waste began washing up on shorelines, hot summers shattered temperature records, severe drought gripped huge sections of North America, Yellowstone burned, and NASA scientist Jim Hansen told a U.S. Senate committee that the Earth was warming from the burning of fossil fuels. In 1988, instead of its usual Person of the Year, Time magazine named Earth the Planet of the Year. Al Gore penned Earth in the Balance, and the biggest selling environmental book of all time —50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth— was published, along with dozens of spinoffs and knock-offs. Riding that wave, I found myself, a naturalist by training, hosting a Philadelphia public radio environmental newsmagazine, where my guests were senators, Environmental Protection Agency chiefs, book authors like Gore, even an Amazon chieftain. But all good things must end, and this wave crested only


a couple of years later. My radio show was cancelled after a five-year run, replaced by a call-in show on money matters, and the dot-com bubble and Monica Lewinsky were much more interesting than any environmental issue of the moment. With the end of the second wave, there was little hope for an international accord on the Kyoto Protocol on climate change: major carbon emitters such as the United States and Canada were either opposed to signing the agreement or they signed and ratified it but did nothing to implement it.


The third wave


The first wave of public concern for the environment gave rise to environmental education, numerous nonprofit orga- nizations to deliver that education, and a raft of environ- mental legislation. The second wave created an outpouring of books, magazines like E in the United States and Earth- keeper in Canada, television specials, the Earth Summit, and a renewal of Earth Day. The third wave, gathering steam at this very moment, will be a tsunami — a popular out- pouring for environmental issues that will be much larger than the first two waves, because the issues are larger. As the four horsemen of the coming global apocalypse bear down upon us in the com- ing decade, the environmental landscape will be radically transformed. Climate change, species extinction, water scarcity and that long overdue but inexorably ticking population bomb will at some point converge — and all hell will break loose. Just as the 1970 wave needed endangered


eagles and an industrial fire on the Cuyahoga River, GREEN TEACHER 83


just as the 1990 wave needed beached dolphins washing up with used needles, there will at some point be a large, mediagenic event that will trigger the third wave: the calv- ing of a huge iceberg off Antarctica, perhaps, or the poach- ing of the last mountain gorilla or black rhino or orangutan, or a new Exxon Valdez, or a massive Amazonian wildfire aiming its plume at both global warming and species loss. And there will be a resurgent interest in not only environ- mentalism, but environmental education. When that third wave hits, as green teachers, where will


we be? Will we bob along and let it pass us by, or will we surf the coming green wave to a whole new place? If you’re a classroom teacher, how can you exploit the resurgence in environmental interest to cultivate environmental literacy while teaching better science, civics, math and social stud- ies? If you’re an NGO executive, how can your staff and board use the resurging interest in green issues to commu- nicate better information to larger numbers of people, even growing your membership base? If you manage a park or learning center, how can you and your center capitalize on public awareness to lure people to your site? And perhaps a more interesting question: preemptively, how can your environmental education work lay the foundation for the green wave to come even sooner? If you agree with the premise that a green tsunami is ris-


ing, and you’d like to surf the wave, here is the beginning of a list of actions you might consider taking to prepare yourself.


Seven habits of highly effective surfers 1. Embrace issues


Because environmental education deals with large-scale issues on which adults often disagree violently, EE has often been caught in political crossfire. When Ronald Reagan came to the White House in 1981, his very first act as U.S. president was removing Jimmy Carter’s solar panels; funding for environmental education vanished immediately there- after. When Pennsylvania began revising its standards for science education, environmental standards were mocked by right-wing demagogues who accused environmental educa- tors of teaching “pantheism” and “tree-hugging.” In Canada, the Fraser Institute launched similar tirades. Fearing politics, environmental educators often tiptoe


around issues like climate change and loss of biological diversity. During the second wave in the early 1990s, I remember being startled by the sudden popularity of teaching about the destruction of rainforests in the Amazon (sometimes to kids as young as five). Then it hit me: teaching about the


Amazon was politically safe. If the teacher taught about the forest down the street being bulldozed for a new housing development, the school would receive complaints from parents, school board members, the developer, the local city council. The Amazon — several thousand miles away — was simply a safer place about which to


teach. The cutting edge of environmental educa-


tion today is in communicating solid information about big, breaking issues that are in the news every day. Yes, we may be exposing ourselves to


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