The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fix It). Charles Saylan
but to all of us. We need to care about the things we are asking ourselves to preserve.
Unsupervised outdoor play is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, and children today are at risk of what author Richard Louv calls the “nature-deficit disorder.” In his book Last Child in the Woods, Louv eloquently illustrates how, as our urban societies progress and expand, our children are losing touch with where it is we all come from. While Louv's book deals mostly with childhood encounters with nature (unquestionably when our concepts of the world are formed), the loss of context he talks about is a problem we all face, at any age.
The majority of humanity now dwells in cities, where the closest we get to the sources of our food is our trip to the local supermarket. What open spaces remained within the confines of our cities have been systematically bulldozed into housing developments and industrial parks. Urban parks and greenbelts without economic potential are infrequent in urban planning. Even the stars of the night sky are hardly visible, obliterated by the glow emanating from millions of urban electric lightbulbs.
We work to survive, and in our spare time we play video games, watch television, work out at the local indoor gym, or surf the Internet. We spend our time in cyberspace frolicking with e-mail, text messaging, or logging into electronic social networks, where communication is abbreviated and quick. Even when we do get outside for some recreation, many of us plug into iPods to listen to our favorite tunes, thereby excluding the sounds of the world around us and insulating ourselves from face-to-face encounters with other humans. Unfortunately for the future of environmental conservation, these are the things our societies seem to care about.
No parent wants his or her child to grow up afraid. But fear has crept into much of what we do, undermining how we view the world. For parents, the world outside their influence may seem a hostile and foreboding place for children. Media bombards us with stories of kidnappings, sexual abuse, school violence, and drug addiction, leading us to mistrust anyone we don't know or who might appear different from us. We hear of wild animal attacks, threats from disease, and the presence of sleeping terrorist cells, all of which lead us to mistrust the space outside of what we perceive to be within our control. Overprotectiveness, motivated by simply wanting to protect the ones we love, may have a darker side, a societal undercurrent of fear and mistrust that it may inadvertently foster.
We long for safety and security, but our leaders and our media teach us to seek it through insulation, fortification, or avoidance. There are risks in the world, indeed, but learning to temper the exaggeration of fear with reality may help us become stronger, more compassionate and tolerant people. These are qualities that will permit a spirit of cooperation to develop and flourish, qualities that education can help develop.
Environmental education faces a difficult challenge: how to address what is clearly “the bad news” while simultaneously creating a capacity for action in our students, our citizens. There is no clear or easy solution to this, but we must do more than simply focus on scientific literacy. We must nurture the development of individual morality, a sense of poetry and literature, and a historical perspective, things that give context to our humanity. Without these, it is unlikely we will care enough to protect our collective future.
Much, however, has been accomplished in a relatively short time. Look at the vast array of environmental organizations; the segments of academia focused on environmental science, law, and public policy; and the spectrum of governmental agencies on the planet occupied with policy making and regulation of environmental laws. The very existence of these organizations and institutions is a credit to environmental awareness and the spread of information in our society. If we consider that it has been less than fifty years since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring which directed mainstream attention to the severity of human impacts on nature, the remarkable growth of the green movement is nothing short of extraordinary.8 Why then don't we see measurable reductions in the progression of environmental degradation? Has the “environmental community” lost some of its ability to bring about change? Questions like these probably don't have answers, but there are several related points worthy of discussion and thought.
Like the labor movement that preceded it, the environmental movement took shape in an atmosphere of adversity originating with the industrial sector, which has a long, sometimes bloody, history of fighting regulation. Regulation, to an industrialist, is an intrusion and is often perceived as government's meddling in the affairs of the free market. It represents unknown costs not easily controlled and is something to be resisted with vehemence and determination. As opulence often shares the bedroom with power, those promoting environmental reform were confronted with an unprecedented barrage of antagonism launched by industry and served up via elected officials, legislative process, and the media. Progress was difficult and slow, and opponents were many and well financed and organized.
In the face of such overwhelming resistance, is it possible that the environmental movement lost some objectivity in designing and implementing its approach to outreach? Environmental advocacy groups may have overlooked the importance of establishing some common ground with the more conservative factions of society. In failing, early on, to focus on the widening philosophical and political gaps in our society, the movement itself may have inadvertently fueled the unfair characterizations and contributed to its own isolation from the mainstream.
Some environmental ideals, however, have germinated in typically conservative strongholds of society. The organization Ducks Unlimited originated in the hunting and outdoor sports community, a faction not traditionally allied with the green movement. Now one of the world's largest wetlands and waterfowl conservation groups, it endorses efforts to reduce global emissions.9 Ducks Unlimited is an excellent example of how conservation awareness can grow out of individual circumstances or pursuits. Hunters need space and waterfowl for successful hunting, and the conservation of wetlands assures them future access to what they value and perceive as their heritage.
The establishment of marine protected areas, on the other hand, has met opposition by sportsmen and -women. One of the strongest and best organized sources of opposition is the sportfishing community, which does not want its access to fishing grounds to be regulated or restricted. But while it may be difficult to find a middle ground between those who want restrictions and those who don't, both sides undoubtedly have central and common concerns. Things like depletion of fish stocks and the potential for exceeding potential tipping points in the marine food chain will adversely affect the future of sportfishing.
Along similar lines, commercial fishers along the Pacific Coast of the United States have become increasingly aware of the adverse impacts to the salmon fishery (and their livelihoods) resulting from logging industry practices like clear-cutting, the effects of upstream pollution, and the diversion of freshwater from rivers and deltas for agricultural development.10 As the effects of the human assault on nature worsen, environmental allies will come from all walks of life, all cultures, all nationalities. This will present continuous new opportunities to build responsible stewardship and strengthen the foundation of environmental protection. Substantial and diverse educational efforts to accomplish this should already be well under way, but generally they are not. Perhaps, as the impacts become more visible, the environmental education community should work harder to find and build on these potential commonalities. Localizing education to highlight and build on such commonalities might help forge alliances for environmental protection, whereas disagreement and hostility between stakeholders was previously the status quo.
Any self-respecting “What Went Wrong” chapter wouldn't be complete without at least the mention of cooperation and sharing-and its lack-in the environmental, academic, and scientific communities. This topic warrants deeper discussion, and receives it in later chapters, but some cursory discussion is necessary here.
There is a decided lack of cooperation within the ranks of the green movement, as is common to many political coalitions. Territoriality is partly a reaction to the perception of threat, and perhaps because many environmental organizations grew up in an atmosphere of adversity and obstructionism, this fostered the rise of competition, protectiveness, and distrust. Perhaps this atmosphere is a result of diverse ideologies and methods of arriving at what is probably the common goal. Perhaps it arises from the perceived competition involved in securing private and public funding or finding and keeping influential board