Shaping Our Way to Disaster

I think you are right--that we are altering our environments in such a way that is destructive. But is this because we are ignorant, or just don't care? I think the ways in which we (americans, people of the world) have been brought up in society is the problem--we are taught to focus on ourselves and on our own success, not the world around us. I believe many of us are fully aware of the personal destruction we happen to incur upon the planet, yet the key needed to take that step to stop it is not there. I think what we are lacking is deep altruism. This is something we are not taught, but need to be. We all have the makings of a solid foundation: our conscience, knowing the difference and the various shades of right and wrong. But as students, as people, we do not exercise our conscience or our altruistic side enough. Perhaps an effective exercise in conditioning one's altruism habits in  the classroom setting would be to assign a paper to each student, but instead of assigning the final grades to the correct students' work, grades were randomly selected from the body of papers and given back as a final assesment. In effect, this could cause an increase in altruism merely by the fact that you may think you are helping yourself by turning in a good paper. The grade you get could in fact be your actual grade, or someone else's. But you would not know. Essentially, by putting effort and smarts into something you created, you are lifting the success of the whole, or at least of another person, in hope that you will get that in return. Make sense? I suppose on to average all the grades from all papers and assign everybody the average number. Food for touhgt.