Florida's Orange County Convention Center is big. Big enough to hold the Sears Tower, if you laid it on its side. So big you could walk ten miles and never leave the cement behemoth. Its electric bill is $325,000 per month.

This hulking structure in Orlando seemed appropriate for the carnival-like setting of the National Science Teachers Convention, the largest gathering of educators in the nation: more than 14,000 science teachers and hundreds of exhibitors passing out armloads of pamphlets, packets, books, stickers, posters, and other educational goodies.

Though there were a handful of conservation groups at the event, those of us sitting at the Native Forest Council booth were clearly in the minority.

When I started teaching 20 years ago, I could never have imagined such a perverse display: industries and their front groups trying to justify everything from deforestation to extinction of species. Worse yet, they were targeting America's teachers and, ultimately, our children. Corporate America has dug its claws into one of the last refuges of commercial-free space left in our society: public schools. One of the>pillars of our democracy, public education, is now for sale:

* The coal industry's Greening Earth Society passed out videos and teachers guides to the "fallacies" of global warming that mocked environmental concerns.

* Weyerhaeuser boasted of the recovery of Mt. St. Helens, as if this somehow justified clear-cutting.

* The "Temperate Forest Foundation" offered a video titled "The Dynamic Forest." In this shrill presentation, insects and fire hurt forests, but industry provides the needed remedies--with the help of chain saws.

* The American Farm Bureau, avowed enemies of environmental education, propositioned teachers to reconsider the dangers of chemical biocides.

They were selling lies, and the teachers were buying--quickly filling their bags with curricula as corrosive as the pesticides that the Farm Bureau promotes. Where were the largest environmental groups to counter this frontal assault on environmental education? Where was the outcry of the educational community? Their deafening silence was tantamount to complicit resignation.

Selling Out Our Schools

Most people consider our public schools to be hallowed ground, where young Americans of various religions, races, and social strata collectively learn the tools of citizenship. Yet multinational corporations now view our children's schools as convenient locations for the dissemination of propaganda debunking environmental concerns, and as the tip of an unimaginably profitable marketing iceberg. The stakes are incredibly high.

Education about the environment is being assaulted on two fronts. First, multinational corporations are designing and distributing environmental curricula that are professionally produced, easy to use, often free, and incredibly biased in favor of industry. Second, some of the most prominent conservative think tanks in America are mounting a well-funded attack on genuine environmental education.

Their objective is simple: protect industries that despoil the planet and prevent any emergence of citizen awareness. The spectrum of curricula is breathtaking and its shamelessness is overt. The American Nuclear Society provides "Let's Color and Do Activities With the Atoms Family." Materials I received from Exxon portray the Prince William Sound cleanup as a victory of technology, brushing over the cause of the disaster: the Exxon Valdez. But the most brazen campaign of miseducation is carried out by the timber industry.

Big timber spends millions on its thinly-veiled national PR campaigns, touting them as educational programs (which, of course, they generously donate to public schools). They offer hikes, presentations, and paid workshops for teachers. They distribute books, posters, videos, lesson plans, and other materials. Through the looking glass of big timber, old growth forest become decadent biological deserts that require clear-cutting in order to survive. Industry is not destroying the forests, the propaganda explains, it is "managing" them, acting as their stewards--even saviors.

A timber company in my own community offers a hike in a small section of their forest. Activity one in their educational pamphlet resonates strongly with the kids, and can shrewdly confuse the most earnest educator. The activity begins when the largest child in the group plays the big tree. The other children stand closely to the big tree and crowd it. The guide asks them to choose three words that describe how they, the little trees, feel when you are crowded together under the big tree. Then all the little trees scatter out, providing more space. The purpose of the exercise is to help them visualize the benefits of thinning the forest. (For full realism, perhaps some of the children should be asked to visualize the feeling of being chopped down and processed into end tables.)