With Purpose Success, part 40

Among friends, Ginsberg would bring up her concerns and get mostly disinterested nods. They thought she was turning into an insufferable tree hugger. "I was feeling very frustrated," Ginsberg says, and that's when she decided that, as a society, we need to start educating kids so that they grow up aware of environmental dangers-much as baby boomers grew up aware of the nuclear threat, in part owing to drills at school that instructed us on how to take cover. 

The first thing she did was investigate her own school district to see what was being done to teach kids, not just about environmental issues, which are generally acknowledged, but also about full-scale sustainable living. "There are all these issues with the world-scarcity issues, resource issues, human-health issues," Ginsberg says. They are interconnected and ultimately must be viewed as one. Say, for example, you're a company manufacturing environmentally safe detergents but your suppliers are clear-cutting the rain forest to get ingredients; the whole effort is worse than pointless-it's counterproductive. Yet the well-intentioned manufacturer may not even know the adverse impact of his efforts. 

Connecting the dots in this way, Ginsberg found, was a new concept in schools, and so she set her sights on educating school districts about how to integrate lessons on the economic and social impact of environmental problems and solutions into their core curriculums. There, she believed, lay the master solution. 

Ginsberg's school district welcomed her involvement. So she began attending conferences and researching the issues. That was in 2002, and within a year she and a small group of individuals with backgrounds in education, corporate environmental affairs, and environmental law had launched the Children's Environmental Literacy Foundation (www.celfoundation. org). Their stated mission: educate children about sustainable living practices by integrating the lessons into everyday subjects like math, English, and science. 

How does it work? In choosing a book to study, an English teacher might choose The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken or The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson or Collapse by Jared Diamond. These are modern classics dealing with the vulnerabilities of the natural world and human societies. A math teacher might cite algebraic equations based on carbon emissions and what it takes to offset them. Students might learn, for example, that in the United States the average citizen uses up about fifty-five acres of Earth in their lifetime, a devastating burn rate-but one that can be neutralized by changing certain consumption habits. Somewhere in all of that sits a whopper of a math problem! 

Ginsberg's organization is starting to get traction; the ideals that she champions are already being incorporated in about twenty-five school systems. She believes that through annual forums and classroom work her organization's programs have already reached some 15,000 students.