The reading on individualization brings back memories from my youth when my elementary school class in Redmond spent a day planting trees and learning about Earth Day. While it brought awareness to our class such an activity really didn’t make any sort of difference in our ecological footprint or that of our community. A few years before that our entire school had observed Earth Day by having every student release a helium-filled balloon with a notecard attached, the idea being that the balloons would fly off and come back to the ground far away and people could mail back the notecards, letting us know how far they had travelled in order to show us that we could have an influence outside of our local community. This was around 1987; the idea of engaging in mass-littering in the name of Earth Day apparently didn’t seem ironic back then. If a school were to attempt the same thing today it would probably make the national news.
