do nothing whatever to prepare Americans of the future to think imaginatively
about the problem. Continued unthinking allegiance to the idea of progress in
our textbooks can only be a deterrent, blinding students to the need for change,
thus making change that much more difficult. David Donald characterizes the
“incurable optimism” of American history courses as “not merely irrelevant
but dangerous.”^33 In this sense, our environmental crisis is an educational
problem to which American history courses contribute.
Edward O. Wilson divides those who write on environmental issues intotwo camps: environmentalists and exceptionalists.^34 Most scholars and
writers, including Wilson, are of the former persuasion. On the other side stand
a relative handful of political scientists, economists, and natural scientists,
several associated with right-wing think tanks, who have mounted important
counter-arguments to the doomsaying environmentalists. In 1994 I pointed to
Julian Simon, Herman Kahn, and some others who compared their world to the
world of our ancestors and argued that although modern societies have more
power to harm the planet, they also have more power to set the environment
right. After all, environmental damage has been undone on occasion. Some
American rivers that were deemed hopelessly polluted forty years ago are now
fit for fish and human swimmers. Human activity has reforested South Korea.^35
Hence, the exceptionalists claimed, modern technology may exempt us from
environmental pressures. They noted that recovery time after natural disasters
such as earthquakes or man-made disasters such as World War II has become
much shorter today than in the nineteenth century, owing in part to the ability of
our large bureaucratic organizations to mobilize information and coordinate
enormous undertakings. Human life expectancy, one measure of the quality of
life, continues to lengthen. Herbert London, who titled his book Why Are They
Lying to Our Children? because he believes that teachers and textbooks
overemphasize the perils of economic growth, pointed out that more food was
available in 1990 than twenty years earlier.^36 Simon pointed out how most
short-term predictions of shortages in everything from whale oil in the last
century to silver in the 1990s have been confuted by new technological
developments.^37 To be sure, higher prices will eventually make it profitable to
use extraordinary measures—steam pressure and the like—to extract more oil.
In 1994 I faulted textbooks for not supplying students with either side of this
debate and then encouraging them to think about it. Not only did the books
ignore the looming problems, they also did not present the adaptive capacities