Last year, An Inconvenient Truth got the attention of an awful lot of people. As well it should have. Arguably, not since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring has there been anything so successful at sounding the alarm that the world is, in fact, on the brink of environmental armageddon.

But there is another inconvenient truth.

You won’t read about it in the New York Times or the Boston Globe or the Washington Post. There will be no mention of it on the evening news tonight. Certainly, very few people are even talking about it. While it might not have the raw visceral power of melting glaciers, rising oceans and superstorms the size of Australia, make no mistake about it, the war on creativity is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

But of course, why would people like you and me know about that? We do, after all, work in advertising. We’re creative people. We invent. We imagine. We play with concepts. Words and pictures. Pictures and words. We make things that never existed before. But this is a terribly insular business. In many ways, we are as out of touch with the real world beyond our MacBooks and our One Show pencils as the plane crash survivors on Lost are out of touch with theirs. We do work on an island. And almost everything on that island is different than it is on the cultural mainland. How we think. How we dress. The books on our shelves. The music in our iPods. We eat, drink and sleep a creative life and we can imagine no other.

But what if I told you that we are not alone on this island? That there is trouble brewing just over yonder mountain.

As any environmentalist will tell you, we exist in a complex ecology of interdependent relationships. You cannot impact one without having an effect on the other. As the ice in Greenland goes, so goes the North Atlantic current, so goes the beach where I swim. It’s like living in an apartment building. You crank up the stereo at two in the morning and there is no way the people next door or across the hall or downstairs aren’t going to feel the impact of that.

Although we might not realize it, we exist in a creative ecology as much as we do an environmental one. And, I’m sorry to say, it is every bit as complex and tender and fragile as any glacier or estuary or salt marsh or tidal plain. Maybe more so.

I’m even sorrier to say that the health of that ecology, which everyone from Thomas Friedman to Richard Florida agrees is so crucial to the future of this country and this society, is imperiled.

There are a lot of reasons for this. But there are some in particular that, if left unchecked, are going to continue to jeopardize our ability to innovate. If that happens, we will be lucky to tread water creatively compared to the rest of the world, let alone rise above it.

A culture of intolerance
“What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.”

Robert F. Kennedy said that and he was right.

How can a society hope to keep the creative train on the tracks if there is room on that train for only a few? Creativity doesn’t work that way. It has no chosen children. No fair-haired boys or girls. There is no official language of creativity. It doesn’t worship a god. A great idea can come as easily from the homeless shelter as it can from the country club.

Tolerance for divergent opinions, our openness to fresh ideas, has been fundamental to our success as a society. For much of our history, the creative class was every class.

We’re not so tolerant anymore. Not really. Not in every quarter. Belief is one thing. Unyielding belief—this is a cancer that eats at the creative soul. If I cannot tolerate your belief in creationism and you cannot tolerate my belief in evolution, if we are so polarized that neither of us can open our minds to the other, then do we not risk being unable to open our minds to anything? Creativity cannot survive in an atmosphere like this anymore than a rose can survive on Jupiter.

No idea left behind
Once upon a time, there was a steel industry in America. Not the pale vestige we know today, but a real live, vibrant and thriving steel industry.

For the longest time, people in the steel business pointed fingers, blaming everyone but themselves for what was happening in the foundries. In the end, American steel went down and it never really has gotten back up.

Is it me or is our public education system starting to feel an awful lot like steel’s sad story? Everyone says they know what’s wrong with our schools. Everyone says they know who’s to blame. Yet the problems get worse.

We’ve all seen the charts. How American students measure up to the rest of the world. Did I say measure? They barely register: 18th in reading; 22nd in science; 28th in math. It’s been estimated that one-third of students who start ninth grade never make it to the twelfth. One-third. I don’t know about you, but I have serious trouble getting my head around numbers like that. There’s another number that troubles me even more. See, there’s another bar on that chart. Problem solving. Anyone want to guess where your typical American school kid ranks in the global scheme of things? Twenty-ninth. Worse than math. Worse than reading. Worse than science.