Teaching Environmental Literacy: Across Campus and Across the Curriculum

7 Environmental Literacy and the Lifelong Cultivation of Wonder

7 Environmental Literacy and the Lifelong Cultivation of Wonder Lisa H. Sideris Religious Studies A newspaper cartoon that hangs outside my o≈ce door depicts two elderly men engaged in a fireside chat. One old curmudgeon remarks to the other, ‘‘I remember when there was no damn environment.’’ The humor of this observation plays upon a distinction between the environment as a modern concept—frequently, an issue or problem—and the environment in the quaint old sense of nature, the great big world out there. Rachel Carson is someone to whom we are deeply indebted for our concept of the environment in the former sense of the word. But Carson would have urged us never to lose sight of the environment in the latter sense—the natural world in all its magnificence and wonder, its immediacy and visceral impact. In educating ourselves and others about environmental problems and solutions, we should not forget to cultivate an attachment to the very entity that inspires our concern in the first place. With Carson’s life and work as a touchstone, this essay explores the important role a sense of wonder can play in fostering and sustaining environmental virtues and love of particular places, and in energizing interdisciplinary approaches to environmental problems and their solutions. 86 ⭈ lisa h. sideris Rachel Carson and Nature Study Rachel Carson was born in 1907 in Springdale, Pennsylvania, a small, bucolic community near the Allegheny River and not far from the heavily industrialized and polluted environs of Pittsburgh. Carson’s keen sense of the beauty of her immediate surroundings may well have mingled, at an early and impressionable age, with an equally acute awareness of the manmade threats edging ever closer to her little farm (Lear 1998: 392). Many years later, Carson would begin Silent Spring with a fable about a small rural community whose backyards, fields, and streams were mysteriously silenced and stilled by careless chemical assaults: ‘‘The people had done it themselves’’ (Carson 1962: 3). As a young girl, Carson’s passionate interest in the natural world was reinforced at home and in school. The informal education Carson acquired during her solitary wanderings in the woods and streams near her home was formalized in the nature-study curriculum widely used in the early twentieth century. Embraced by Cornell botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey and his colleague Anna Botsford Comstock, as well as Indiana native Gene Stratton-Porter and many others, nature-study sought to put children into direct contact and lifelong ‘‘sympathy’’ with nature (Bailey 1911). To describe nature-study as formal, however, is perhaps misleading: nature-study advocates chafed against the formal, dry, mechanical teaching of biology and natural history. In place of learning facts and memorizing names, they encouraged education via the senses and the emotions. They understood their curriculum to be distinct from science education, not in the sense that it was unscientific but in that it sought to lay the foundation and provide the moral framework for later scientific knowledge. ‘‘Nature study is not the teaching of science,’’ Bailey argued. ‘‘Its intention is to broaden the child’s horizon, not primarily to teach him how to widen the boundaries of human knowledge’’ (Bailey 1911: 30). Nature-study was seen not as an additional program to be added to a pupil’s list of daily lessons but a way of looking at the world that could be combined with virtually any of his subjects. The claim we hear today that all education is environmental education has roots in the nature-study tradition. While cultivation of the proper orientation, the proper virtues, was part of the overall goal, nature-study achieved this goal indirectly. Rather than preach the injunction ‘‘Thou shalt not kill,’’ Bailey explained, ‘‘I should prefer to have the child become so much interested in living things that it would have no desire to kill them’’ (1911: 31). A common thread running through Carson’s writings is that cultivating a sense of wonder is the best way of curbing destructive impulses toward the natural world. ‘‘The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction’’ (Carson 1998: 163). Environmental Literacy and the Lifelong Cultivation of Wonder ⭈ 87 The nature-study curriculum of a century ago was motivated by many of the same concerns that animate current environmental education and literacy programs—concerns...