9. from the Bubble to the Forest

BARRY WOOD

9. FROM THE BUBBLE TO THE FOREST

Nature School Environmental Education

INTRODUCTION

Awareness of the human impact on nature began in the nineteenth century, but recognition of the severity of environmental problems traces to well-documented studies in the decades after WW II. In the 1970s, under the impetus of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Environmental Education (EE) emerged as a worldwide priority, though the various declarations and charters tended to address educational administrators and assume EE as a subject to be taught within the traditional education system. This amounts to an implicit endorsement of the classroom as a sufficient site for environmental education. But the indoor classroom, the traditional school system, and the dominant educational establishment is a certification body. As a state-funded system, brick-and-mortar schools certify children, adolescents, and college graduates for employment in the industrial-age technosphere – the source and ongoing instrument of overconsumption, energy waste, atmospheric and ocean pollution, biodiversity loss, and general environmental degradation. Alongside these developments, a less known tradition of outdoor education has emerged. In the 1920s, outdoor schooling developed against a romanticized background of nature and rural living. People living in villages and small towns with childhood memories of countryside and farmsteads chose outdoor schooling for their children. Trekking and camping gained popularity with the establishment of national parks, recreational camp grounds, and the Appalachian Trail in 1937. As outdoor schools and forest kindergartens emerged, the benefits for children – physical, social, mental and emotional – were recognized and acknowledged and documented. But research has uncovered other benefits. A childhood of deep immersion in nature is common to the classical environmentalists from John Muir to Al Gore, and contemporary research with ecologists shows “significant life experiences” of nature regularly cited as instrumental in their choice of profession. This chapter suggests that Outdoor Education and Forest Kindergartens provide the best foundation for politically neutral environmental education, and thus ideal as platforms for developing committed environmentalists capable of addressing the wicked problems of environmental degradation.

EARLY NATURALISTS

Recognition of environmental problems began, though sporadically, in the nineteenth century. John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, may be the symbolic reference point: his Mountains of California (1894) brought attention to Yosemite Canyon, the Tuolumne Meadows, and what he called the Big Trees (giant sequoias) scattered through the rugged wilderness of the Sierra Nevada mountains which even then were in danger from logging. But the need for preservation of nature was implicit in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), and his excursion books, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and his voluminous journals. Thoreau’s most famous quotation, “In wildness is the preservation of the world” from his essay “Walking” (1863) has achieved enduring recognition with Eliot Porter’s flagship volume for the Sierra Club, In Wildness is the Preservation of the World (1962). John Burroughs’ Signs and Seasons (1886) and a dozen other books set forth the beauty of nature in language reminiscent of the transcendentalist writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whom his writing is often compared. Theodore Roosevelt’s Wilderness Hunter (1893), despite the numerous animals he hunted, championed wilderness: In hunting, the finding and killing of the game is after all but a part of the whole. The free, self-reliant, adventurous life, with its rugged and stalwart democracy; the wild surroundings, the grand beauty of the scenery, the chance to study the ways and habits of the woodland creatures – all these unite to give to the career of the wilderness hunter its peculiar charm. (1996, p. 329) Together Thoreau, Burroughs, and Roosevelt forged a tradition of environmental stewardship that continued far into the twentieth century in Rachel Carson’s trilogy, Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955); Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968); David Rains Wallace’s The Klamath Knot (1983); and Thomas Berry’s Dream of the Earth (1988). But alongside these landmarks of environmental writing, a counter tradition was developing, dating perhaps to the pointed indictment of George Perkins Marsh in Man and Nature (1864): “Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste …. The ravages committed by man subvert the relations and destroy the balance which nature had established between her organized and her inorganic creations” (2008, pp. 71, 78). The emblem for profligate destruction is surely an American bird, the most populous on the continent – five billion strong when Europeans arrived. Aldo Leopold identifies 1871 as the year that “pigeon hunters by the scores plied their trade with net and gun, club and salt lick, and”, and virtually wiped out an estimated 136 million passenger pigeons in Wisconsin. “It was the last big nesting in Wisconsin, and nearly the last in any state” (1949, pp. 14–15). They were driven to extinction; the last one in captivity, Martha, fell off her roost in a Cincinnati zoo on September 1, 1914. The tragic story

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