Battle Over Environment Moves to the Classroom : Schools: Critics say many curricula supplied by activists or industry are biased. Some states move to ban advocacy.

Arizona state Rep. Rusty Bowers began campaigning against environmental education after his son came home from a grade school ecology class declaring that coyotes didn’t kill sheep.

In Virginia, business consultant Jo Kwong questioned how environmental issues were being presented in local schools when her children became obsessed with recycling household waste but couldn’t explain what recycling did.

And California activist Lance King took offense at classroom materials touting the environmental benefits of disposable diapers. The materials were distributed to schools across the country by Procter & Gamble, a leading manufacturer of the diapers.

Environmental lessons have been a staple of public education since the National Audubon Society began taking schoolchildren on nature walks in 1910. Today, 30 states, including California, require or strongly encourage it as part of public school curricula.

But just as Congress has come to challenge many of the nation’s environmental policies, a number of scholars, activists and legislators are disputing the validity of what is taught to their children as well as questioning the motives of teachers.

Led by Bowers and Republican legislators, Arizona has passed laws banning environmental advocacy in the classroom and slashed funding for programs. Similar measures are under consideration in Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

Earlier this year, a subcommittee of the California Senate failed to deprive the state Department of Education of money it has used to leverage $4 million in federal grants for environmental education in secondary schools.

In many schools, environmental education is still linked closely to scientific inquiry. Field trips to ponds and tidal pools, terrariums and worm composting bins are all part of the process of exposing young minds to the wonders of nature.

But also becoming part of the curricula are teacher-sponsored letter-writing campaigns to save dolphins or stop logging, and textbooks that encourage children to join environmental groups or take part in product boycotts.

As a result, experts warn, environmental education is getting caught up in a potentially chilling controversy over the teaching of values, reminiscent of the divisive disputes over evolution and sex education.

“We are teaching what to think, rather than how to think,” Kwong said in a paper being published this month by the Center for Study of American Business at Washington University in St. Louis.

She said typical lessons reduce complicated scientific issues to simple doomsday scenarios. Children are taught that acid rain is destroying forests and that overpopulation will exhaust our resources, she said, even while debate continues among scientists. “They are taught as facts rather than hypothesis to children,” Kwong said.

Backlash against environmental teachings has been particularly heavy in rural areas. School officials in Idaho, Oklahoma and Oregon have placed restrictions on the way environmental issues are taught.

In Meridian, Ida., a bedroom community near Boise, teachers have been warned “not to talk about cutting trees in the rain forests, about reintroducing wolves in Yellowstone or even about recycling,” said recently retired Meridian teacher Lee McGlinsky.

The push to muzzle environmental education often comes from conservative groups that assert that teachers and textbooks present business and technology in the worst possible light. Plastics and pesticides are high on the ecology education hit list, their role in improving worldwide health conditions largely overlooked, the critics argue.

“Environmental education is presented like a morality play,” said Michael Senara, a University of Arizona political scientist and a leader in efforts to change the way the subject is taught. “There is little effort to explain the trade-offs involved in so many decisions society makes about whether to use or not use something.”

Officials of the North American Assn. of Environmental Educators, the largest group of its kind, concede that the critics have a point.

The problem, they say, is that the mandate to teach environmental education often does not include any standards or guidelines for teachers to follow, let alone a budget to pay for textbooks.

As a result, teachers wind up relying on a host of material from environmental groups and corporations that frequently promote causes and products.

“There’s no question that a lot of propaganda gets packaged as classroom material,” said Kathy McGlauflin, president of the environmental educators group.

Consumer and environmental groups, meanwhile, charge that big business has been effective in spreading its own propaganda. Many companies develop curricula on environmental topics and offer them free to financially strapped public schools.

Released last summer, an analysis titled “Captive Kids” by the nonprofit Consumers Union looked at 21 sets of environmentally oriented classroom materials that are widely distributed. Most were sponsored by businesses and industry groups, such as the American Gas Assn. and the National Live Stock & Meat Board, whose products are directly linked to the environment.

In the vast majority of cases, Consumers Union said, industries used the materials to promote the benefits of their own products without mentioning or seriously considering harmful side effects.

“The American Coal Foundation dismisses the greenhouse effect,” the report states. “The Exxon Education Foundation’s . . . program doesn’t tout its products but implies that fossil fuels, in general, pose few environmental problems and suggests that worries about oil spills and strip mining are unfounded.”

Consumers Union directed its harshest criticism at household products giant Procter & Gamble for its educational packet “Decision Earth,” which said that disposable diapers are environmentally preferable to cloth diapers.

Decision Earth did not mention that Procter & Gamble had financed the study that produced the favorable comparison, according to Consumers Union.

“Decision Earth” also taught that clear cutting forests mimicked “nature’s way of getting rid of trees.” (Procter & Gamble markets a variety of paper products). Decision Earth did not mention such ill effects of clear cutting as erosion, water pollution and destruction of wildlife habitat.

Procter & Gamble no longer distributes Decision Earth, although company representatives insist that complaints had nothing to do with discontinuing it.

California’s Environmental Education Office has screened hundreds of classroom kits, provided by environmental groups and nonprofit organizations as well as industry. Among the material it rejected as biased or inadequate were materials from the National Wildlife Federation, the National Institute for Urban Wildlife and a United Nations primer on cleaning up ocean pollution.

McGlauflin of the North American Assn. of Environmental Educators questioned materials prepared by Earth Force, which seeks to enlist teachers and students in an unabashedly activist alliance. Among its stated goals: to oppose congressional efforts to weaken the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water and Clean Air acts and to lobby the Clinton Administration to strengthen wetlands protection. Sponsors include the Pew Charitable Trusts, Target stores, Times Mirror magazines and the Smithsonian Institution.

“Many of those who shape the environmental education curriculum believe that their purpose is not to weigh conflicting facts, values and theories, but to instill a sense of crisis,” Kwong wrote.

A good example, she says, is the treatment accorded global warming--a phenomenon that most experts think is a potential problem, although they disagree widely about the eventual impact. Rather than encourage students to ponder the scientific questions, Kwong said, many classroom materials assume the worst and paint horror movie scenarios of melting ice caps and rising sea levels.

“Major port cities such as New York, Buenos Aires and Hong Kong would be submerged beneath the sea,” one textbook says, according to Kwong. Another book features an illustration of the Manhattan skyline with water rising higher than the Statue of Liberty.

The strongest reaction to perceived environmental advocacy in the classroom occurred in Arizona.

There, a 1994 law banned use of a curriculum guide that encouraged students, among many activities, to take “an environmental pledge” and to get involved in local environmental politics by drawing up ballot initiatives.

But at a recent convention of the North American Assn. of Environmental Educators, one teacher declared that the banned guidelines were being used by a state university in training grade school teachers.

“Environmental education is alive and fairly healthy in Arizona,” the teacher said, adding that recent public opinion polls made clear to him the role of environmental education.

“We must protect the environment.”