Part of my education came as a substitute teacher in public schools. I sat in for a middle school science teacher who had an emergency and left me no lesson plans.
Being a new sub in a room full of 14-year-olds is a little like being a lamb surrounded by hungry wolves. I had already been given a heads up on one particular student who would likely lead the pack.
“Today we’re going to take a different look at your study of the environment,” I said, after introducing myself. “We’re going to talk about what we’d have to do to survive if we had to seal off this room and its contents and make it the only world we have.
"We will have to recycle and reuse only the resources that are in this room right now. The water in the fish tank or in your backpack, whatever food or snacks you have, like that.”
"We going to recycle poop?” said the usual suspect.
"Yep.”
Someone said, “Eeeew!”
“Exactly,” I said. “So we’d better learn how to make the most of what we have and keep it clean enough to reuse it again and again.”
The discussion was, as they say in politics, candid and wide-ranging.
Over the next 45 minutes or so, those kids considered the challenges of limited resources in a relatively small space available for a short time in the midst of inevitable change. They tried on solutions both imaginative and just plain silly, but none were so silly as what our adult leaders are doing, which is ignoring the consequences of doing nothing.
Being young and idealistic, they were more focused on the issues of livability than on profits and losses. It was about sustainability of life. Job one.
I wonder if any of those kids are watching the news today and wondering how we got to the place where 20 percent of the air we breathe is in jeopardy because of greed and ignorance.
Because of an international lean to the nationalism of the Right, the Amazon is burning while a proverbial Nero fiddles.
Donald Trump will not support environmentally responsible policies because, quote, “I won’t give away that wealth for a dream.” Like-minded Brazilian politicians allowed farmers and lumber marketeers to burn off land in the Amazon, and the consequences are world changing. Threatening is not too strong a word.
But a few of our grandchildren might die rich.
There have been other signs, also ignored or explained away in the interest of commercial profit: Polluted oceans, full of plastic and chemicals and dying fish species. Disappearing animals from the forests and savannahs of what used to be the remote and unconnected hinterlands of a planet deemed immune to human stupidity. Floodwaters brought on by increasingly violent and destructive storms from the polar regions to the tropics.
The ice caps melt, and yet fresh water is becoming scarce.
Giraffes and elephants are close to being on the endangered list. Koala bears in Australia are now endangered. What Trump calls a dream — clean air and water and sustainable forests — has become the nightmare that scientists have warned about for years.
The bees are all but gone. Not even the butterflies are sacred.
I always thought butterflies were like the prayers of innocent children: Not around long, but brightening our lives with their colors and perseverance as part of a necessary evolution of life.
Anybody see a Monarch butterfly this year? Monday’s Times ran a story about the stress they’re under. Your government is lifting all the safeguards against exploitation of the habitats that butterflies and other animals need to keep a balance in the world. Only the checkbook balance counts to the people in charge now.
Dean Minnich retired from a career in journalism and served two terms as county commissioner. His column appears on Thursdays. Email may be sent to dminnichwestm@gmail.com.