O'Really bugs me, again.

There are few people that the Phactor disagrees with more often than Bill O'Really. So it was rather ironic that the day after blogging about how to get kids of all ages interested in plants, his column "Kids fear bugs; how will they fight Chinese?" (sorry, you'll have to look it up yourself) arrives in our daily rag. The title was such a disconnect; what could one have to do with the other? But his lament was well-meant, right up to the last part, and he has touched upon part of the problem of getting people familiar with and appreciative of nature. O'Really was right; you can barely get today's youth out of the house let alone getting them to spend any time in nature. They are as he observes machine-heads. You take kids out to the greatest place ever and they sit down and try to access their text mail or some game or the internet, just as if they were in an airline terminal. Wow! O'Really and the Phactor agree about something! People who are raised this way are never going to by sympathetic to conservation efforts let alone be expected to make any sacrifices to protect nature. No surprise here, O'Really didn't make this connection. Instead he worries about how they would fare in a war against the Chinese! It takes a pretty twisted mind to make that connection, but that's the O'Really we all love to mock as the dumbest smart guy around.

Good on ya, mates!

If there is some small hope for the future of our planet, it's to be found in kids like these. Actually I'm not worried about the planet. Earth did fine without humans for 3.8 billion years, and it will do just fine without them too. So it's really just our species that's a worry, and all of those other organisms that will become extinct because of us.

But this is how revolutions start, small, locally, people doing what they can when they can. So here's my congratulations to these kids, you, and other people like you, are the best people on Earth today.