Poll Asks Preteens: Are You Worried Earth Won't Exist When (If) You Grow Up?
—Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center

I received a phone call just after noon on Sunday from a Princeton, New Jersey-based polling firm that asked to speak to "pre-teens" aged 6 to 11 [i.e., children] for a poll about the environment. They encouraged me to listen in. My 11-year-old daughter answered five questions that grew increasingly dire. The pollster said they are not told who the client is, so they don’t bias the survey. But the bias strongly came through in the questions.

... Then they asked which environmental happening would be the scariest: the extinction of the polar bears, global warming causing the melting of the polar icecaps leading to flooding, a severe shortage of drinking water, or increased air and water pollution. The daughter said a drinking water shortage.

Then came the question that even my daughter thought was erratic. They asked if my child ever worried that the Earth wouldn’t exist any more when she grew up. She said "no" in a very baffled tone.

The last question was the sneakiest, the one that sounded like a tattle-on-your-parents moment. They asked are you sure your parents doing everything they can to preserve the planet, like recycling and keeping down use of electricity? My daughter said yes, although she could have easily said "no." We use plastic grocery bags, don’t drive a hybrid, and not every light bulb in our house is a compact fluorescent.

They could have asked these same questions to those of us who grew up in the 1970s and we would have given dire answers, because that's what the conventional wisdom was at that time. We were told that oil reserves were about to dry up, that air pollution was dire, and that the Earth might be cooling dramatically.

Somehow, the world still exists now that we've grown up. But Eco-panic never seems to take a holiday.

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