For those who like historical past, it’s best to try the web site for “Views on Historical past,” the newsmagazine of the American Historic Affiliation. Extra particularly, I have been having fun with a recurring column referred to as “All the things Has a Historical past,” which supplies the histories of every little thing from 20-sided die to elevator sounds to Huge Mouth Billy Bass, and rather more.
The newest entry, written by Sherri Sheu, the Haas Curatorial Fellow on the Science Historical past Institute in Philadelphia and an at-large member of the AHA Council, is in regards to the “Johnny Horizon Environmental Check Equipment,” a toy for budding environmental scientists manufactured by Parker Brothers in 1971 that capitalized on the rising curiosity in environmentalism and ecology that was ignited after the primary Earth Day in April, 1970.
Sheu describes the equipment:
The equipment contained 10 experiments for kids to check the air and water of their neighborhoods. Kids may take samples from their native waterways and tradition a petri dish to check for fecal coliform contamination or dip pH strips to check acidity and alkalinity. They may check smoke density within the air or use sticky paper to search out and depend air particles. Within the spirit of the scientific methodology, the experiments may very well be repeated a number of occasions, with refill kits additionally obtainable for buy.
“Johnny Horizon”—which Sheu describes as a “rugged outdoorsman determine”—was a mascot created in 1968 by the Bureau of Land Administration to advertise environmental training by means of a collection of anti-litter public service bulletins by means of the Nineteen Seventies. Sheu additionally explains that whereas the kits taught actual science and supplied some sense of company to youth searching for to deal with environmental points of their neighborhoods, the kits centered on particular person duty—do not litter, keep away from pesticides, and so forth.—and did not tackle a lot by way of extra structural options, which, in fact, is an ongoing drawback:
But, for all its testing capabilities, the equipment couldn’t present many options. In a listing of strategies, the handbook advisable studying extra books on the setting and instructed customers to chorus from littering, keep away from pesticides, cut back plastic use, and journey by mass transit. Solely within the final advice did the booklet counsel reporting check outcomes to the EPA or native authorities. The equipment supplied a solution to observe the setting, to not clear up environmental issues or have interaction in political motion.
It’s maybe an excessive amount of to ask for an answer to wide-scale environmental air pollution from a toy. Nevertheless, the constraints of the Johnny Horizon Environmental Check Equipment illuminate a long-standing stress of the environmental age: What can on a regular basis residents do in mild of the necessity for world systemic change? A half century after the equipment’s look, many people nonetheless really feel that we try to confront local weather change with solely youngsters’s toys.
