7. Get out!
As the four horsemen of the coming global apocalypse bear down upon us in the coming decade, the environmental landscape will be radically transformed.
ment, we reject it, or try to. But environmental education exists within the culture, and culture is as much a part of us as the air we breathe and water we drink. We cannot surgi- cally remove ourselves from it. During the first wave of environmentalism, several
environmentalists became embedded in mainstream culture. Paul Ehrlich made innumerable appearances on late night talk shows — he was fluent, passionate, urbane, interesting and had a distinct point of view. Rachel Carson, too, embed- ded herself deeply in American culture, even though her career was startlingly short, as she died of cancer soon after Silent Spring was published. When the tsunami hits, establish yourself as a spokes-
person for the environment. Speak for the trees, the Lorax implored. When the wave hits, local media will be seeking angles and stories, and you want them to find you. You must have a compelling message that you can state in direct, digestible elements, and you have to be able to use the shared language of culture to talk to the mainstream. If you are unable or unwilling to embrace — and even exploit — the culture in which you live, the wave will pass you by. Read popular magazines. Watch TV. See movies. Know who’s hot, and for what. Listen to popular radio. Talk to teens. As you become culturally fluent, you will gain access to new language and new metaphors that allow you to estab- lish an intimacy with a wider audience.
6. Know one big thing
One of Aesop’s fables tells about a very sly fox that runs into a very dull hedgehog and winds up with a face full of quills. The fox knows many things, sums the fable, but the hedge- hog knows one big thing. I think often of that story and of the importance of knowing one big thing. As a green teacher, it is essential to be knowledgeable,
but it is difficult to master the complexities of all environ- mental issues, from climate change to water to garbage to energy to deforestation to diversity. And you certainly don’t have the time to teach all those issues. But perhaps you can pick one of them, an issue that you think will capture not only the attention of your students, but your own attention and imagi- nation as well, and specialize in teaching it. My daughters both enjoyed their fifth grade teacher, who is famous within the school for her addiction to birdwatching. Students who don’t have this teacher don’t get it, but those lucky enough to be assigned to her class come out avid birdwatchers. They catch her passion. Children want to see adults committed to something; they respond to passion. If you are passionate about the environment, your students will catch on. And if you know one big thing and know it well, students will flock to you.
“Think of our life in nature,” wrote a passionate Thoreau in his posthumously published The Maine Woods, “daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The com- mon sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?” More than a century later, we still need to answer these ques- tions, now even more so. Environmental education offers
an increasingly rare commodity: real connection to the real world, the world of dirt and trees and bugs and birds and clouds and flowers, things many parents understand their children desperately miss. Yet kids are less and less exposed to that world every day. Given that children spend hours consuming technology, they increas- ingly spend less time outdoors. In his intriguing book Last Child in the Woods (a must-read for green teachers), Richard Louv coined the phrase “nature deficit disorder” to explain what he sees as the impact of the extinction of exposure to nature on children’s psychological, emotional and physical health. “I like being inside,” he quotes one youngster as saying, “because that’s where all the plugs are!” Unplug your students (after, of course, you’ve exploited technology); get them to where the bugs are. These seven action items are offered as only the begin-
ning of a list of things that we can do as green teachers to surf the coming wave of environmentalism. You probably have more ideas, maybe even some rebuttals. That’s good: this is a big messy complicated subject. Dive into the con- versation, and continue finessing the list.
The race is on
In 1970, the stated goal of the newly emergent field of envi- ronmental education was to create an enlightened citizenry who understood the environmental implications of their actions. Almost 40 years later, while there have been notable successes, while we have won a few battles, we have essen- tially lost the war: our citizenry is as ecologically illiterate as ever, maybe
even more so, given the decline in our relationship to land and the bewildering complexity of environ-
mental issues facing us. In EE circles, we often talk about access to schools and students, forgetting that the larger, perhaps more important, more difficult issue is access to culture: how can we get environmental concerns into mainstream popular culture?
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