Aforementioned: aphorisms and questions for 2015

Does education work? Australia is compromising the Great Barrier Reef; Canada is destroying its boreal and kelp forests.
  Australia and Canada are two of the best educated countries in the world, yet their citizens have voted for policies that have led to the results pictured above. It is reasonable therefore to ask, "Is education the panacea for human ills that we have long thought it to be?" It will not be possible to fully argue that point in a paragraph or two, but we need to think deeply about it. On the surface one might argue that the results would be much worse without education. Really, how could they be worse? The ugly truth is that our reductionist, technology-oriented system of education is one of the principal reasons the biosphere is now deteriorating so rapidly. Perhaps we should ask if the Great Barrier Reef would be declared officially endangered by UNESCO if Australia had been following the education system favoured by its aboriginal peoples. Similarly, we should ask if the tar sands would ever have been undertaken if we had followed the "uneducated" advice of its aboriginal peoples.

The kelp forest pictured above is apparently healthy, but a single pass by a bottom trawler would utterly destroy the life of that forest. Some think that kelp forests sequester as much as 75% of the carbon absorbed annually by the oceans worldwide. We urgently need to pay attention to that.  The Prime Minister of Canada has declared oceanic research to be unnecessary. Canadians are "well-educated,"but how many even know about the kelp forests along our 15% of world coastlines?