In his 2004 Massey lectures Ronald Wright suggested that "our faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology" (Wright, 2004, p. 4). In effect we have raised the idea of progress to the status of cultural 'myth'. Wright states that myth

is an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patterns that reinforce a culture's deepest values and aspirations Y myths are so fraught with meaning that we live and die by them. They are maps by which cultures navigate through time (Wright, 2004, p. 4).

In drawing upon the historical record Wright identified how numerous cultures across the planet from Easter Island to the Sumerians of Iraq and the Maya of Mexico have destroyed their 'natural capital', the ecosystems which ultimately supported their civilization. As Wright states: "Progress has an internal logic that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe. A seductive trail of successes may end in a trap" (Wright, 2004, p. 5). In a similar vein, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond (2005) maps out the history of collapsed civilizations and the reasons for their ultimate decline and downfall. Humans like to believe in linear predictable changes to their way of life and economy. We cling to this belief despite the fact that human history tells us that enormous changes due to technological development, social upheaval and environmental collapse have often been the driving forces which determine the wellbeing and survival of societies. Diamond identifies a number of common interrelated and interdependent factors which can lead to societal collapse:

[H]uman societies and smaller groups may make disastrous decisions for a whole sequence of reasons: failure to anticipate a problem, failure to perceive it once it has arisen, failure to attempt to solve it once it has been perceived, and failure to succeed in attempts to solve it (Diamond, 2005, p. 438).

This paper will explore these factors in turn while considering the nature of the critical scientific literacy necessary to help young people create a society which avoids these systemic societal failures and the "progress traps" which ensue. The question whether current conceptualizations of science education are adequate to this task is one worth considering given the enormous implications. The unfortunate reality is that examples of societal failures in terms of our unsustainable use of both natural and nonrenewable resources are becoming more and more frequent. From the collapse of the cod fishery to the problem of global climate change, our collective ability to resolve complex socioscientific problems has proven sorely inadequate. Canadians have a right to ask why, if our established approaches to science education and scientific literacy are adequate, Canada manages to rank so low in terms of environmental performance when compared to other industrialized countries. In a recent study Canada ranked 28th out of the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on twenty nine environmental indicators (Sustainable Planning Research Group, 2005). For example, the Simon Fraser report indicates how inefficient we are in terms of energy and water consumption; our per capita consumption of energy is almost double the OECD average and other northern countries, like Norway and Sweden, have per capita energy consumption rates at least 25% lower than Canada.

In fairness, Canadian's scientific and ecological literacy, or lack thereof, is only part of the problem. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of traditional forms of science and technological education cannot escape scrutiny.

If young people become both aware of and active in shaping public science and technology policy, they may yet help halt the widespread ecosystem destruction and biodiversity collapse we witness today, and in doing so improve the quality of life for everyone. This cannot be done in the isolation of science classrooms alone; an active scientific literacy must also connect in deep and systemic ways with cultural, ecological, geographical and mathematical literacies if this is to become a reality (Sadler, 2004; Hurd, 2002; Kolsto, 2001).

We live in what has been called the "Anthropocene", a geologic epoch in which humankind has emerged as the "potentially intelligent" globally dominant species, capable of virtually reshaping the face of the planet and its ecosystems through both intention and accident (Schellnhuber et al., 2004, p. 1). This immense responsibility is unprecedented in human history; we have collectively become 'planetary engineers' in the sense that our ability or inability to manage our relationship with the Earth ecosystems will have profound consequences for all living things. The UN predicts that world population will rise by 40% from the current 6.5 billion to 9.1 billion by 2050 (BBC, 2005) and this fact alone will put an unprecedented strain on the ability of natural systems to meet human demands. Global energy consumption is growing at approximately two percent per year and is projected to double by 2035 and triple by 2055 (Friedmann & Homer-Dixon, 2004). In large developed countries upwards of 85% of this energy is derived from fossil fuels which when burned generate carbon dioxide and contribute to climate change. The health of global ecosystems over the last thirty years has been tracked by the World Wildlife Fund using a composite measure called the 'living planet index' (LPI). The LPI is the average of three separate indices measuring changes in abundance of 555 terrestrial species, 323 freshwater species, and 267 marine species around the world. The trend lines for the LPI over the last thirty years are distressing:

While the LPI fell by some 40 per cent between 1970 and 2000, the terrestrial index fell by about 30 per cent, the freshwater index by about 50 per cent, and the marine index by around 30 per cent over the same period. These declines can be compared with the global Ecological Footprint, which grew by 70 per cent, and with the growth in the world human population of 65 per cent, from 1970 to 2000 (WWF, 2004, p. 2).

The Living Planet Report is blunt:

In 2001, humanity Ecological Footprint was 2.5 times larger than in 1961, and exceeded the Earth biological capacity by about 20 per cent. This overshoot depletes the Earth natural capital, and is therefore possible only for a limited period of time (WWF, 2004, p. 1).

What is becoming increasingly clear is that our expanding collective ecological footprint and the trends identified will in one way or another force us to change our behaviours, and the choices we make will determine whether we continue to have a liveable planet for all. We now turn to explore how the factors identified by Diamond which lead to societal collapse connect to science education and scientific literacy.

1. The Failure to Anticipate Emerging Problems

Diamond argues that society's failure to anticipate a problem before it arrives may be due in part to a lack of experience with the nature of the problem itself in that we are simply not sensitized to its seriousness. Many of the most serious problems threatening human health and the planet fall into this category. Most of these problems, from climate change to the loss of biodiversity or the outbreak of emergent diseases, are complex and interdisciplinary and span considerable periods of time. The connections and issues linking the concepts of sustainability with science and technology are inherently complex and interdisciplinary in nature, and most of the problems in this area tend not to be amenable to simple echno-fixes Often, when our collective infatuation with technological fixes and simplistic solutions is applied to complex problems, the result is not a 'solution' in any sustainable sense of the word, but in a more intractable problem (Hughes, 2004).

How well does science prepare young people to anticipate local, national, and global problems? What changes or trends involving science today can young people identify as being beneficial and/or detrimental to the quality of life on the planet? In this area, science education can involve students in exploring future science scenarios and precautionary thinking. The 1992 Earth Summit io Declaration in part states:

In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of seror irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.

A critical scientific literacy helps young people develop a multi-contextual understanding of the precautionary principle, both its pros and cons, and a commitment to ask the difficult questions of those who make claims about the imperatives and inevitabilities concerning emerging scientific and technological developments. The precautionary principle in essence steps in front of the deterministic discourse of hype and certainty that often surrounds science and technology in the popular media. In considering the revolutionary nature of robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology, Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems (one of the most successful info-tech companies ever created) comments:

Perhaps it is always hard to see the bigger impact while you are in the vortex of a change. Failing to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery and innovation seems to be a common fault of scientists and technologists; we have long been driven by the overarching desire to know that is the nature of science's quest, not stopping to notice that the progress to newer and more powerful technologies can take on a life of its own his is the first moment in the history of our planet when any species, by its own voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself - as well as to vast numbers of others (Joy, 2000, p. 10).

Critical examination of the notion of progress and the cognitive disconnect between corporate public relations, media spin, economic dogma and ecological realities is not part of an instrumental form of scientific literacy. Not all discourses surrounding the interface between science and value-laden public issues are rational, scientific or even representative of the scientific consensus. One study found that forty percent or more of he news content of a typical U.S. newspaper originated with public relations, press releases, story memos, or suggestions (Rampton et al., 2001, p. 22). In light of corporate media concentration and the influence of the public relations industry in massaging the public discourse of scientific and technological issues involving business and industry, students need critical literacy skills more than ever.

Our democratic system requires people to participate in public science and technology policy creation, as well as in learning opportunities involving role plays, debates and participatory forums wherein students develop skills in complex decision making processes involving scientific tools and data. Such participation is essential to fostering active citizenship. Roth and Desautel (2002) argue that instead of school science as scientist, science participation in public affairs related to science should be more prominent. They also suggest that when students are forced to learn what knowledge counts without being able to interrogate it, they are literally disabled in terms of developing the competence for questioning of any form of knowledge (Roth & Desautels, 2002, p. 13). The traditional school science emphasis on universality and a decontextualized understanding of the nature of scientific practice contribute to an overall failure in situating school science as knowledge in action as a vehicle to connect students' everyday experiences with their science lessons (Jenkins, 2002, p. 27).

2. Failure to Perceive Emerging Problems

The second factor, a failure to perceive a problem after it has arrived, may result from the fact that some problems are imperceptible in terms of our day to day experience. Some issues are simply drowned out in a sea of pop culture noise dominated by celebrity and the performance of money markets. For example, the increasing concentration of persistent organic pollutants, heavy metals, greenhouse gases and the slow but steady erosion of soils and ecosystem viability are not phenomena generally perceptible to our senses. In addition, they occur on timescales long enough to escape our immediate attention. We find it very difficult to perceive slow trends characterized by gradual up and down fluctuations. As Diamond explains, we do not notice that each successive year is on average slightly worse than the preceding one because our baseline standard for what constitutes normalcy shifts gradually and imperceptibly (Diamond, 2005, p. 435). The creeping normalcy which accommodates the slow erosion of environmental quality and viability is abetted in part by our technologies:

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. What with accelerating technology and the next-quarter perspective that goes with electronically accelerated market economies and the next-election perspective that goes with the spread of democracy, we have a situation where steady but gradual environmental degradation escapes our notice. Preoccupied with breaking news, we risk falling victim to slow problems (Brand, 2005, p. 109).

The 2004 U.S. Science and Engineering Indicators report indicates that most adults pick up information about science and technology (S&T) primarily from watching television, and two thirds of Americans do not understand the scientific process itself (National Science Board, 2004). Furthermore, the study found that few science-related news stories attract much public interest and that the number of people who watch television news or read a newspaper has been declining for a decade. It warns that this does not bode well for news about S&T, which must compete with a host of other topics for the attention of the American public (National Science Board, 2004, p. 7-3). It is sobering to consider that:

most of us no longer have any idea where to find the line between fact and fantasy, between what is scientifically plausible and what is scientific nonsense. In this hyper-technological age, where so many things, perhaps even our survival, depend upon subtle decisions by a scientifically informed citizenry, that ignorance is deeply alarming (Homer-Dixon, 2001, p. 34).

An effective scientific literacy must help students discern the trivial from the significant and the ideological sponsored junk science from the real thing.

3. Rational Bad Behaviour

.At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts. - George Orwell

The third factor identified by Diamond in societal failure is a result of people advancing their own interests by behaviour harmful to other people and the environment. This rational bad behaviour employs correct reasoning in the short or immediate term even though the result of this process may be damaging to the wider public and the environment. There are many examples of so-called perverse subsidies wherein government economic subsidies support practices and/or products which lead to undesirable consequences for individuals, the environment and society as a whole. In Canada, a variety of industries receive subsidies including the:

• Fossil fuel industry $5.6 billion annually
• Mining industry $600 million annually
• Nuclear industry $156.5 million (in 2000 alone)
• Transportation $600 million to $2 billion (1995-2000) (Boyd, 2004, p. 320)

Extensive energy subsidies in Canada and the U.S. mean that citizens of both countries have the lowest energy prices of any G8 country. Both Canadian and U.S. federal governments and their energy industries have worked to undermine international efforts to reduce energy subsidies (Boyd, 2004). Evidence of their effectiveness in maintaining energy subsidies is clearly demonstrated by the proliferation of large gas guzzling SUVs on our highways and the profligate use of energy in all facets of North American lifestyles. This disconnect is evident in the media hype surrounding the much touted 2005 Car of the Year, a large Canadian built 5.7 liter V8 which attains a paltry 7.22 km/liter (17 mpg). With the planet facing the prospect of runaway climate change, due in no small part to carbon dioxide emissions from the transportation sector, a car this fuel-inefficient is more reminiscent of the 1950 rather than the environmental realities of the 21st century. There is much for young people to consider regarding scientific literacy and values concerning the decision making processes of corporations manufacturing and people purchasing this type of vehicle. The Ford Model T, produced between 1908 and 1927 achieved a fuel efficiency of 25 miles a gallon, however in 2004, the average fuel economy of the Ford fleet (cars and light trucks such as SUVs) is only 23 miles a gallon (Reguly, 2005).

The sport utility vehicle (SUV) phenomenon of the past ten years is one of the reasons why the rate of oil consumption (and greenhouse gas generation) has surged in North America. In the U.S., one in four vehicles sold is an SUV. A Statistics Canada study reports that since 1999, SUV production in Canada has increased dramatically, and in the first nine months of last year alone Canada produced just over 350,000 SUVs, nearly double the 190,000 SUVs Canadians purchased (Magnusson, 2005; Beauchesne, 2005). The short-term benefit from the manufacture of gas-guzzling vehicles in turn increases the demand for oil, which also benefits some provinces more than others. The impacts of this economic cycle on the climate are initially being felt most significantly by the people and ecosystems of the Canadian arctic, communities not involved in the decision making processes which are changing their lives. It is important for students to understand how science, social justice and economics often collide in the construction of public policy. Even apparent disengagement from the issues and tensions swirling between science, power, ethics and political engagement are not without consequence, as Orlie (1997) explains:

Systemic power relations are sustained and elaborated by the daily, routine behavior of individuals. The individual alone cannot make entire peoples disappear, but individuals who imagine they are without power, and who are thoughtless of their power effects, participate in such disappearance (p. 3-4).

Science education has a responsibility to help young people develop balanced scientific perspectives concerning the issues of the day and the significant issues they will face in the future. It also has a responsibility to encourage students to ask uncomfortable questions, questions which touch on politics, social justice, worldviews and long held beliefs. Through explicitly refusing to endorse a deferential or a passive attitude toward power in all forms, both corporate and governmental, science education can genuinely claim to be emancipatory in scope. Often the presence of "large and uncomfortable" scientific facts meets stiff resistance from politicians, business and industry leaders, and citizens who do not want to confront issues which challenge orthodoxy, vested interests and entrenched comfortable worldviews. The failure to solve perceived problems often occurs because maintenance of the status quo benefits some people. Developing a critical scientific literacy requires that students grapple with sci-tech issues that are not only complex but raise uncomfortable questions, including those that challenge dominant economic interests and worldviews. This includes consideration of whether current conceptions of science literacy help young people appreciate how disconnected the messages of corporate public relations, media spin, and neo-liberal economic dogma can be from environmental science realities.

Science education has a positive role to play in helping students develop their own personal frameworks for ethical living by exploring the tensions between individual action and participation in public science politics:

[G]ood and harm are done simultaneously and in ways that perpetuate power relations that precede new activities one of the tragic consequences of ethics is that living ethically entails acting politically, and the conditions of political action cannot be supplied by the individual alone. But neither can the conditions of politics be created without individual action (Orlie, 1997, p.3-4).

Scientific literacy also has social justice dimensions. Milner (2001) developed the concept of civic literacy as a framework measure for comparing societies capacity for informed political participation (p.3). He argues that high civic-literacy societies, such as the Scandinavian ones, adopt more egalitarian policies reflecting a fuller range of interests in society because they encourage political participation from a broader segment of society. He contrasts these high civic-literacy societies with low civic literacy ones, like the U.S., where a lack of civic competence contributes to larger differences between the upper and the middle classes with the economically disadvantaged. Milner is unequivocal: democratic societies that more equally distribute intellectual resources- i.e. high civic literacy societies- also more equally distribute material resources (Milner, 2001, p.29). He also poses a critical question which connects civic, political and scientific literacy:

how can we avoid mirroring a globalized world economy, with its minority of inners and a majority of osers, losers not so much due to economic deprivation, but to their inability to take informed action to make their society better for themselves and others? (Milner, 2001, p. 30)

Toward this end, science education has an important role in providing young Canadians with opportunities to practice active informed citizenship with respect to science and technology issues, and with opportunities to see how their participation in community decision making indeed makes a difference

4. Disastrous Values

Diamond asserts that the crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values when times change (Diamond, 2005, p.433). He also acknowledges that it is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one's core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival (p.430). For Diamond, some of the irrational motives for failure to solve perceived problems include:

• Internal clashes between the short and long-term motives of the same individual.
• Crowd psychology and groupthink
• Psychological denial on an individual and group level (Diamond, 2005, p.434)

Science education has a role to play in helping students understand the moral and ethical implications of a continually expanding material economy. For example, the reification of economic growth and Gross Domestic product (GDP) as the primary (often sole) indicator of our collective success as a society has distorted our perspectives concerning the right of other species to coexist on this planet. The $500 billion (US) spent on global advertising to drive the flywheel of consumption and consumerism has fostered and abetted our collective state of denial concerning the seriousness of the ecological crisis humanity has created.

Science education needs to provide multiple interdisciplinary opportunities for students to critically reflect on their worldviews and values. This involves breaking down the disciplinary ilos which often exist in secondary schools to create, for example, science and art, science and business, and science and geography learning projects. It is through these types of interdisciplinary perspectives that issues related to sustainable consumption and production systems, advertising, consumerism, ecological footprints and sustainable development, can be examined in the depth required.

5. Unsuccessful Solutions

According to Diamond, even if we have anticipated, perceived and/or tried to solve a problem, our efforts may fail because the problem may be beyond our present capacities to solve; a solution may exist but be prohibitively expensive, or our efforts may be too little and too late (Diamond, 2005, p.436). Climate change may be the exemplar here: enormously complex, wrought with many levels of uncertainty, the issue challenges established ways of thinking, living, economic orthodoxy and vested interests which see no profit in change.

Some research indicates that younger Canadians are less likely to be participants in both elections and in political parties than did previous generations at that age (O'Neill 2001). Further, O'N eill warns us that Canadians should not be complacent concerning this level of political disengagement because it is unlikely to be reversed with age. An empowered form of science literacy would help young people understand the realpolitik involved in science and technology public policy. School science which fails to move beyond science as/for experts and cook book labs effectively fails the broader public interest in fostering the development of critically literate citizens. Science education has the potential to re-engage students with science policy and any number of controversial issues including genetically modified organisms, cloning, nanotechnology, and the weaponization of space. One thing is certain - the decisions and policies surrounding any of these controversial issues will be of a higher quality and more broadly balanced and defensible if more informed and critically scientifically literate people are involved in crafting them.

Conclusions

The proper functioning of our democratic political system depends on the collective decision making power of an informed populace. This entails having the ability to bring critical thinking skills to bear on contemporary STSE issues, and to embrace and work with complexity to appreciate the value of multistakeholder dialogues and to arrive at compromised nuanced yet rational decisions. In considering the state of scientific literacy today, we need to reflect on how well we prepare young people to grapple with the macroscopic issues identified by Diamond and Wright. Science education has a responsibility to help students understand the reasons why we have so much difficulty as a society in addressing the chronic and serious implications of sustainability. As educators, we are not in the despair business but this does not mean we do not have a duty to help inform students about the necessity for fundamental change.

This includes consideration of the scientific thinking skills which will allow students to discern junk science from the genuine thing, and media literacy skills to help them develop the ability to use media to create, share, organize and discuss scientific information in ways that make it actionable and useful in their lives. Although these are undoubtedly enormously complex questions and undertakings, they are inescapable if we are genuinely interested in helping young people deal with the complex, contentious, and multi-faceted messy socioscientific problems and opportunities of tomorrow.

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