The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fix It). Charles Saylan
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like it or not. That society has failed to accept this responsibility is a result of placing ourselves at the center of our universe and believing we are here to dominate our surroundings. Unfortunately for where we find ourselves today, the concept that “man is the master of all he surveys” is at the root of most of what is taught in our schools. It is an idea that permeates our approach to education, and the authors believe it represents a flawed logic that has outlived its utility.
We are always ready to applaud human ingenuity as the means by which our societies have grown and flourished, and we are mostly right in that celebration. We are, after all, remarkable creatures in our ability to reason and choose, to create art and literature, and to hone our minds to perform critical scientific analysis. We have mastered agriculture, literally moved mountains, and made habitable space where before there was only sea. No other species on earth shares our incredible potential to change our surroundings to suit our needs. The industrialization of our societies is what we consider the crown jewel in the story of our development.
Who can blame the founders of our industrial society for their aspirations for its growth? More of any good thing always seems like a great idea. As the Industrial Revolution progressed, life generally got easier for large segments of our population, especially for the newly formed middle class. Motorized transport replaced horse and cart, more goods were available in more places, and for perhaps the first time in our history common folk found themselves with leisure time on their hands. In times of plenty like those at the dawn of industrialization, it would have been difficult to imagine any negative consequences. In fact, it's taken more than two hundred years for us to begin to recognize the detrimental effects of our unbridled industrial expansion.
We cannot dismiss the benefits of that innovation in the form of increased comforts and quality of life, which seem to go hand in hand with development. Advances in the fields of medicine and technology have led to increased longevity and a more active populace, at least in more affluent countries. At the outset of the industrial revolution, when world population was still well under the two-billion mark, who could have known our resources were finite, or that industrial development would have a species-threatening dark side?
Yet, even at the turn of the last century, in response to a rapidly urbanizing America and the loss of individuality through the industrial revolution, the “nature study movement” was born.1 Its advocates were the first to include environmental education as part of school curricula, and it became mandated in a few states. Learning about nature was an essential part of a progressive education. John Dewey, the great progressive educator and one of America's most notable philosophers, believed that, by studying nature, students would develop not only an aesthetic sense but an ethical sensitivity as well. The movement's goal was to take students outside and allow them to imagine a natural world, a world without people, a world before industrialization. By doing so, students would become more grounded and respectful of nature. The nature study movement encouraged students to plant school gardens in order to grow closer to nature and to ward off what the movement perceived as the isolation caused by urbanization and industrialization.
As the nature study movement grew, adults became interested in studying and reading about nature. Authors like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir wrote books that were devoured by the public, perhaps much as nature documentaries are today.2
In many respects, the nature study movement was antiscientific in that it focused on developing a moral link to nature, the consequences of which would, its proponents hoped, result in nature's preservation.
The nature study movement died when many Progressive Era reforms died. It failed in the trenches of World War I, as conservation was redefined to reflect the valuation of efficiency over natural diversity. Using natural resources to support the war effort was more important than saving natural resources. Yet its failure was not complete: it inspired midcentury conservationists, who have had a much more direct impact on our current thoughts on nature conservation, biodiversity, and environmental education.
By the mid 1930s, Aldo Leopold was expressing ideas that would later be published in A Sand County Almanac. In this book, Leopold shared his observations of nature—to which he was deeply and poetically connected—under the threat of overuse, mismanagement, and pollution. He witnessed the disappearance of wilderness and mourned the loss of the harmony he believed must exist between man and land. He saw this harmony as based on acceptance and appreciation of an interrelationship he believed existed between living things and their environment. He gained his perspective from contemplative interaction with his surroundings, understanding nature as admirer, hunter, farmer, and protector, rather than as an impartial and disconnected observer. Aldo Leopold is considered by many to be the father of land conservation and management movements. He remains a major influence in the field, although at the time he lived, his efforts toward local conservation were not particularly lasting or widespread.
In 1962, Rachel Carson, a fisheries biologist turned nature writer published Silent Spring, based on her research into the ill effects and overuse of pesticides. Although the book has become one of the cornerstone publications of environmental awareness, it was strongly contested at the time of its publication. Carson was publicly attacked both personally and professionally, primarily by chemical industry representatives, in an attempt to discredit her findings and keep them from public view.3 In the final analysis, however, Carson's work was reviewed by President John F. Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee and found to be both credible and timely. The subsequent publicity surrounding the publication of Silent Spring, along with the recommendations spurred by Carson's claims, eventually led to a nationwide ban on DDT and a new public awareness of the dangers of pesticide overuse. The controversy over the book marked the dawn of industry's fight against the dissemination of scientific discoveries critical of industrial practices, especially when those practices were proved to cause adverse environmental impacts. This was the beginning of the politicization of environmentalism.
Being an “environmentalist” increasingly became associated with liberalism, perhaps partly because slogans like “Ecology Now” were a familiar rallying cry of the counterculture of the 1960s, which was also characterized by its strong antiwar and antiestablishment sentiments. The potential negative economic impacts that environmental protective legislation stood to make on conservative stronghold professions like logging and industrialized agriculture and fishing may have also spurred something of a backlash, further adding to the characterization of environmentalists as liberals. This was a windfall to those who would benefit from the imposition of lesser or no regulations on industry, because it meant that the general public was less likely to take the issues seriously if they could be framed as the collective ravings of a bunch of “tree-huggers.”
As ideological divisions between liberals and conservatives widened, environmentalists were increasingly marginalized, until the word environmentalist became synonymous with a fringe element. This effectively meant that many underlying environmental issues, being easier to discount, were marginalized along with the environmental movement.
It is already difficult in our world to understand where the truth of any given situation lies. We are pulled in many directions by governments, media, and religious leaders, to name but a few of the factors in play. Even if we are willing to invest the time to understand an issue, we often encounter views diametrically opposed to each other from seemingly legitimate sources, making it even harder to know what is true and what is not. As a result, news regarding adverse anthropogenic impacts on the environment, along with the long-term ramifications, has been largely discredited or ignored altogether by the general public until quite recently. Even now, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, there are many who still believe global warming either doesn't exist or poses no threat and isn't worth worrying about. And without pressure from their constituents, politicians are unlikely to focus their attention or legislative efforts on environmental issues.
In 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was signed into law. The law represented a sweeping federal attempt at educational reform through implementation of standardized achievement testing in public schools, which was designed to compel schools to reach standards set by the individual states. The intent was to raise student performance in subjects like math, English, and science, as well as to increase institutional accountability.