Young People and the Environment

A couple of comments:

Fortunately, “thousands” is off by several (probably five) orders of magnitude.  There are approximately 2.3 billion people on this planet between the ages of 15 and 30.  If 10% of them are “stepping up” in any real sense, that’s 230 million.

Primatologist Jane Goodall gives three reasons that she’s optimistic about Earth’s future, and one is the enthusiasm of young folks.

While I hesitate to challenge people of Goodall’s stature, it’s hard to know what fraction of young people are actually concerned about and getting involved in environmental stewardship. In the United States we have, to my shock and horror, an entire class of youngsters who will be my age in 50 years, who really don’t seem to care that, in half a century at the rate we’re going, this planet will be a hellish place to live.

What’s truly disgusting is the significant levels of support we see for Trump among young people.  These are folks who stand behind “drill baby drill” and other slogans of propaganda of Big Oil and the far right.