Discuss: Destined for Failure

As a recently retired science teacher, I have seen that the usually single chapter on ecology or the environment is delegated to the end of science textbooks and is the one that consistently gets skipped or glossed over at the end of the year. It is just as important to know ecology, to really understand how the earth works, as it is to know reading, writing and math. We need to be proactive in advocating for it to be included in all curricula. People who drain wetlands for farming or for development are not evil, they just don’t know what harm they are doing. The same can be said for all development or land use decisions that are harmful to our planet. If we don’t understand the function of wetlands, riparian corridors, the interaction of groundwater, surface water and precipitation, etc., then we can’t know how to make decisions that are good for the planet. It is as essential understanding, as important, perhaps more, than any other skill included in our academic subjects. Now, without an education in ecology, we know not what we do.

Interesting to hear from a science teacher.  Do you happen to know of any curriculums that give ecological principles a prominent place?  In my very limited experience, science tends to be taught in a building-block manner, with physics at the bottom, then chemistry, etc.  Environmental science, when offered, is considered the “soft” option—the interior-decorating of the house of science.

I live in Ohio, where we’re facing the death-throes of the auto-industrial economy.  The response has been a rush to embrace the so-called STEM fields: Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.  We’re hitching our future to educating more engineers, some greener than others, but all in the service of creating a high-tech economy. That approach is now being written into the state standards for science teaching. 

It’s an uphill effort, but I’m wondering whether anyone is working on an alternative science curriculum, in which ecology and sustainability might be organizing principles.  Just having such an alternative would open eyes to the choices we’re making about the future.

Several organizations and universities seem to be creating and/or maintaining sustainability curricula for both K-12 and higher ed. Two examples that I can think of are Second Nature (secondnature.org) and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (aashe.org). Children can be a big influence on their parents, and the right teaching materials can help “convert” parents more quickly than any number of arguments in venues that most people don’t read (like Orion, unfortunately).

I can’t think of a more inspiring collection of examples of environmental projects in schools than “Place-Based Education” by David Sobel. This book emphasizes the idea that effective environmental education is less dependent on the inclusion of certain subject matter than it is on connecting students with what’s actually happening in their immediate surroundings (school grounds, watershed) and nearby community.

It just might be that that single chapter on ecology or the environment is at the end of the textbook because the students have to know the material that precedes it BEFORE they can take on the ecological interplay.

I work in research administration at a major public university. The geochemists, the ethnobotanists, the computational biologists who are breaking new ground have to master the basics of biology, chemistry, physics, etc., before they can begin to interweave those disciplines into the complex paradigms that are the only way to understand the environments that concern us humans.

Environmentalism is not for the hobbyist; it’s not a parlor game; with each year that passes environmental sciences demand the highest level of the basics.

Bill says: “Environmentalism is not for the hobbyist; it’s not a parlor game.” 

I understand that you’re looking at this from the perspective of research, but it does strike me as pretty dismissive.  Students aren’t hobbyists, and concerned citizens aren’t playing parlor games.  What we’re talking about is an understanding of basic principles—what it takes to grasp the consequences of different policy choices. (e.g. do we need to protect wetlands or can we mitigate the effects of development by rebuilding them elsewhere?)

Beyond that, though, I wonder whether the reductionist/foundational view of science hasn’t outlived its usefulness.  As #89 points out, the building-blocks approach means that, for students, environmental issues are an afterthought, material that can safely be ignored.  They learn that physics is real, hard science, whereas ecosystems are soft, fuzzy, and hard to measure.  The result is that people who talk about space travel are taken seriously (let’s explore Mars!), whereas bioregional ecologists are regarded as nostalgic primitivists.

So the question is: how do we get our educational priorities straight?  How can we teach science as if the Earth mattered?

I don’t, believe me, think there’s an easy answer. But it’s not the question of a flat-earth amateur, either.

I agree with Rick that we can’t dismiss the non-specialist, because a large number of people get their introduction to environmental causes and efforts through folks like volunteer trail interpreters in local wildlife/ecology centers, for example.  If we think of concerned non-professionals as merely amateurs and make light of their contributions, we don’t do anybody any favors, and we get called “elitists.”

Grass roots may be something of a cliche these days, but environmental education and awareness starts there: right where the dirt meets the plant.  If our goal is to educate the populace on the necessity of sustainable practices in the small snapshot of our daily lives as well as in the big picture, we have to welcome everyone who expresses and interest—and then work on raising the level of their understanding.