Environmental Issue (or really just a complaint)

In the movie Good Will Hunting, the main character, Will Hunting, criticizes students matriculating at Harvard University for spending copious amounts of money on an education that he received by spending a few dollars in late fees from the local library.  The annoying frat boy that Will says this to is then suitably ashamed and Will gets the girl and life is great, but that's another story. The connection I'm attempting to make is that I never knew to be ashamed of my lack of education until now. Scholars has been fantastic about showing me what I never thought to learn--I never knew how much I had in common with the privileged frat boy.

As a recent graduate from a small town school, I knew that I was poorly educated in many regards--I knew that my math classes were a joke (as in I held study sessions where I would teach students the material because the teacher did nothing), my science classes were a joke, my music training was joke...I could go on, but the point is that I am painfully aware of how little I know the longer I am at Wartburg. But I never considered my lack of personal knowledge on the subject of the environment to be one of my shortcomings until we started Scholars.

While our country's education system is something that I could have long-winded, passionate discourse on until I ran out of listeners, until recently I never would have thought to clump environmental issues into the pile of things that are going wrong with education. I'm starting to realize how important environmental education is, and I'm also starting to realize how few of the people from my hometown have knowledge on the subject.  We have a rudimentary recycling program--and in class, if you recall, I shared the story of how our recycling program in my hometown is apparently just another storage container that goes into the trash pile--we have a biology club that is freshman run and does nothing, and we have a lot of cars that have bumper stickers proclaiming things like "Corn Fed Hick" and "Proud to be Corn Fed." And we were content.

My grandpa owns cattle. He's proud to feed them corn, he likes the flavor and tenderness of his beef, and there is next to no chance of him changing his ways. I understand that most of the older generation of my community will not change. But I like to think that my generation would. I would like to see change implemented in my community. I don't need drastic; baby steps are encouraged. I want to see the students of my old school learning about recycling before they get to college. I think it's reasonable to ask that the local restaurants buy produce locally, especially with the surplus of farmers that we seem to have in our community. The baby steps add up. Before we know it, we're running.

I think that part of this was addressed in An Inconvenient Truth. Many people don't know the facts, don't know what they can do to help, and don't know what things that they are doing that are contributing to the problem.  In that regard, I think that An Inconvenient Truth had good information. However, I am very aware of how ineffective that particular mode of education would be on my hometown. I am even more aware of how ineffective that particular mode of education was on me--paying attention to Al Gore as he gives a lecture for over an hour, when it isn't even live, is perhaps too much to ask out of anybody, but most especially of ten college freshmen crammed into a small, hot room.