Last week I went to an Earth Day concert at my son's school. He and his Grade 2 colleagues assembled on stage and sang songs about the importance of preserving our environmental heritage, highlighting the virtues of recycling, conservation and composting.

It is hard to find fault with an educational process that strives to highlight responsible stewardship of the planet to our youth, but as the concert ended and my fellow parents bundled their environmentally sensitive children into their SUVs for their trip home, I found myself wondering if perhaps there wasn't something missing from the evening's festivities.

And then it occurred to me: the importance of science was hardly stressed.

There is no doubt that we live in an age where environmental issues are a priority. The world's rainforests continue to be brutally slashed, resulting in, among other things, a horrific rate of decline of biological diversity. Air pollution is an increasing concern in many urban environments across the world while sustainable generation of electricity has become a primary issue from Ontario to California and beyond.

To some, our current problems signify nothing more than the chickens coming home to roost. A greedy, capitalistic society intent on "progress" and "wealth generation" at the risk of all else reaps what it sows like any other; and despoiling the environment for short-term gains involves the inevitable consequences of sacrificing our long-term sustainability.

There is something to this, just as there is something to the claim that, by their very complicated natures, global environmental concerns are inevitably linked with greater socio-political issues, often making it difficult to untangle the full picture.

So we are faced with a war in Iraq that is "all about oil," which seems partially right, but still overly trite and simplistic; a "war on drugs" that is clearly related to the despoilment of unique environmentally sensitive lands throughout Latin America, and concerns related to genetically modified foods that range from legitimate, to speculative to merely protectionistic.

The mixture of science, politics and money is an explosive, confusing and often highly dangerous one, not only because, as has often been said, humans are perfectly capable of using innovation for evil as well as good, but also because political manipulation of the scientific method inevitably leads to bad science.

Much of the beauty of science lies in the fact that it is fundamentally removed from the meddling subjectivity of the human condition: bowling balls fall down independent of our desires, and the Big Bang is true, or false, independent of how comfortable it makes us feel.

For some, this is deeply disturbing -- an amoral coldness that has no resonance with relevant human issues, such as the environment. But for others such as myself, science's ability to make clear, unsentimental value judgments is nothing less than liberating, starkly presenting to us what is feasible or not, thereby allowing us to productively address how we think it might be best to proceed.

So by all means let us educate our young on the virtues of conservation and moderation. But before we rush home to watch that hockey game on our big screen TV, let us pause to consider how we can let science guide us through our current crises.

Let's ensure that our children are presented with real information on complicated issues and a spectrum of views on how that information could be interpreted. And let's stimulate them with exciting tales of what real scientists are currently doing to address these pivotal issues.

Maybe the next Earth Day concert I go to could have a song or two on fusion and fuel cells. That would be great. It would be even better, however, if the kids had some idea of what those things were.