Found: A Fellow Sustainability-Challenger

Ashley Thorne

NAS has published an interview with Holly Swanson, the founder and director of an Oregon-based group called Operation Green Out! (the exclamation point is part of its name!). We first learned of Operation Green Out! while researching Second Nature, an organization that seeks to make sustainability the “foundation of all learning and practice in higher education.” We found that thus far Operation Green Out! seems to be the sole challenger of Second Nature’s education for sustainability agenda, and that it has launched a campaign “to get green politics out in the open and out of the classroom.” Holly Swanson, the organization’s founder and director, is the author of Set Up and Sold Out: Find Out What Green Really Means, and she is a nationwide speaker on the “Green movement” and its “plan to use public education to politically indoctrinate.” By way of introducing NAS members and readers to Ms. Swanson and Operation Green Out! we present this interview.  We are glad to have found an organization that sees the dangers the sustainability movement (Swanson calls it "the Greens") poses for education. As Ms. Swanson puts it,

The Education for Sustainability movement is harmful because this movement is swiftly changing the role of public education in America from a ‘politically neutral system’ to a ‘politically driven system’ rooted in the ideology of the Greens and designed to produce mass compliance and predictable support for one ideology or single party rule.

It's good to know we're not alone in saying this.

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