Resist Being Curmudgeonly

High schoolers, and some younger students, too, "share[d] their ideas for making the world greener, safer and happier."

(Chronicle photo)

The ideas included flying cars, giant holes to turn rising sea water into attractive fish ponds, streets paved with mah-jongg tiles, time limits for showers, a system of Tokyo-style capsule hotels and special dormitories made out of compressed dirt. Teachers would be housed in those...

San Francisco Bay would be a lot cleaner, said Vanessa Chavez, 18, if the city would install giant nets on storm drain outfall pipes. The nets would catch junk the way that mesh nets on home dryers catch lint.

Vanessa, a student at Kennedy High School in Richmond, said all the city would need to do is hire about 100 people to go around town during a storm to clean out all the nets.

Too often young scolds propose drastic restrictions on behavior (don't fly, don't eat meat, confiscate guns, etc.) to achieve their visions. The kids at the Youth Policy Summit, for the most part, are trying to invent new ways and products to nudge society in the right direction.

It would be easy for adult curmudgeons to throw cold water on such ideas, but this kind of creativity should be praised, not buried.