Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, Louv, Richard [best free novels txt] 📗

purpose, connection with the community, respect and some income.” Progress has been slow, but impressive, she adds. “At one school, 93 percent of the parents voted to have their children taught on a farm one day a week, for the entire year.”

As in Norway, U.S. farmers and ranchers, to stay solvent and to preserve the cultures of farming and ranching, are looking for new sources of income; some already rent time and space for hunting and other recreational activities. They could do the same, or better, for schoolchildren. If, at times, as a form of subsidy, government can pay farmers not to plant crops, surely it could pay them to plant the seeds of nature in the next generation.

Fortunately, even in the face of economic hard times and trends that move children away from nature, many individual teachers, parents, and organizations around the world—particularly in Canada, Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries, and the United States—continue to work for more nature in the classroom, more focus on “nearby nature,” greener school grounds, and even new designs for ecoschools. In addition, the experiential learning movement and its ancillaries are working to better document the relationship between environmental education in schools and stewardship behavior.

What else would help? Schools could begin to build sronger, more significant relationships with agricultural associations, nature centers, environmental organizations, and bird sanctuaries, rather than using them for one-shot visits. Instead of waiting for a turnaround in school spending, such organizations could band together to hire part-time environmental educators to work in classrooms, organize parent/teacher/ student activities, and help teachers learn how to integrate school grounds and nearby parks, woods, fields, or canyons into the core curriculum. Ultimately, such efforts lead to more effective education.

Higher Education, Ecological Literacy, and the Resurrection of Natural History

Even in the face of draconian budget cuts and test-centric education reform, many individual teachers are fighting to bring nature back to education. In addition to more support from parents—and most importantly, students—these teachers need a public movement to leave no child inside. Such a movement should be grounded in regional networks of committed businesses, conservation organizations, civic groups, even garden clubs. These networks could work for increased funding, and just as importantly, become directly involved. They could organize and support volunteer programs and the greening of schoolyards; they could pay for field trip transportation to woods, fields, streams, parks, nature centers, bird sanctuaries, farms, and ranches; they could help create ongoing outdoor education programs, rather than the one-time visits more common in the past. And they could help educate the public.

A significant push is under way to further document the connection between outdoor learning, classroom-based environmental education, and academic achievement and stewardship behavior. “‘Behavior leads to behavior’ is one of our maxims,” says Lieberman. “For a long time we talked about knowledge leading to behavior; instead, we believe that behavior leads to behavior.” What about the pure joy of being in nature? “Pure joy? Not in the curriculum,” he says, laughing. “We advocate for joy, but certainly haven’t tried to measure it.” As “happy and proud” as Lieberman is about the findings of his study of experiential education, such research is “not enough,” he adds. “We need other people doing more studies.”

But an expansion of academic knowledge, as well as more nature in our primary and secondary schools, will require dramatic change in higher education. David Orr, professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College and founder of the Meadowcreek Project, a conservation education center, calls for a new environmental literacy requirement at the college level. Orr argues that the ecological crisis is rooted in the way we educate future generations. The dominant form of education today “alienates us from life in the name of human domination, fragments instead of unifies, overemphasizes success and careers, separates feeling from intellect and the practical from the theoretical, and unleashes on the world minds ignorant of their ignorance.” In other words, today’s practices help create the know-it-all state of mind, and the accompanying loss of wonder.

Orr calls for a new approach to education to promote “ecological design intelligence” that could, in turn, create “healthy, durable, resilient, just, and prosperous communities.” He asks educators and students this elemental question: Does four years in college make “graduates better planetary citizens or does it make them, in Wendell Berry’s words, ‘itinerant professional vandals’? Does this college contribute to the development of a sustainable regional economy or, in the name of efficiency, to the processes of destruction?” He envisions the kind of education reform—or reformation—that would fully acknowledge the social and biological alienation from the natural world, and the necessity of the healing of that division to the survival of the human race.

Orr proposes that colleges set a goal of ecological literacy for all students, so that no student would graduate without a basic comprehension of:

• the laws of thermodynamics

• the basic principles of ecology

• carrying capacity

• energetics

• least-cost, end-use analysis

• how to live well in a place

• limits of technology

• appropriate scale

• sustainable agriculture and forestry

• steady-state economics

• environmental ethics

Such a focus on ecological reality is essential at the college and every other educational level, but its implementation carries the risk of promoting joyless ideology. A sense of wonder and joy in nature should be at the very center of ecological literacy.

For this type of reform to take place in a meaningful way, there will need to be a rebirth of natural history in the academy. In an earlier chapter, Paul Dayton offered his obituary for natural history. The professor of marine ecology argues that natural history has been “expelled from the ivory tower,” and that biology undergraduates at many universities are not taught classic botany or zoology. The prevailing patent-or-perish approach in the sciences has left many first-year graduate students with little or no knowledge of major phyla, or of the life-history biology of the very organisms they study.

In a scathing paper for the journal Scientia Marina, Dayton and associate professor Enric Sala argue that some students