Teaching Environmental Literacy: Across Campus and Across the Curriculum

1 At the Forest’s Edge: A Place-Based Approach to Teaching Ecosystem Services

1 At the Forest’s Edge A Place-Based Approach to Teaching Ecosystem Services Keith M. Vogelsang and Eric J. Baack Biology When human societies adopt an extractive relationship with nature, the native vegetation and natural contours of the land give way to satisfy the short-term needs of a developing society. As important as economic developments are in meeting the needs of a community, some of their costs are shifted elsewhere, either in space or in time. For a devegeted landscape, these costs may include eroded hillsides where the native forest once held soil in place. Or, these costs may increase stream flow variability in a forest that once regulated the flow of water over and through a landscape. The retention of soil and regulation of water flow are two examples of ecosystem services, defined here as the benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems. Ecosystem services include the provision of raw material (e.g., fish or timber), the regulation of natural processes (e.g., flooding or climate), essential supporting services (e.g., oxygen in the atmosphere due to photosynthesis and the formation of soil), and cultural services (e.g., recreational opportunities or aesthetic gratification) (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2003). 30 ⭈ keith m. vogelsang and eric j. baack Human societies have always altered ecosystems: too often, those changes have been made without an understanding of the consequences. In the past century, ecologists have traced the myriad connections between di√erent ecosystems and the processes essential to human life. As the ability of human societies to alter the earth intensifies, it is increasingly important to understand the services that ecosystems provide as a way to o√set or prevent losses that threaten our long-term social and economic prospects. In this chapter, we discuss a placebased approach to introducing students to ecosystem services. Many environmentalists are uneasy about a focus on ecosystem services and attempts to place a value upon them. Placing a more sophisticated price tag on nature suggests a continuing willingness to buy and sell, and a failure to see value in non-economic terms. Despite these concerns, we view the lens of ecosystem services as one useful perspective, a productive addition to historical valuations of ecosystems based on what could be extracted from them. Many Americans may question whether preserving wetlands for their rich biological complexity is worth the cost—but these same individuals will likely agree to wetland preservation if doing so o√sets property damage from flooding or fees for building a higher levee. Our focus on the forests of southern Indiana emerges from several concerns. First, ecosystem services in the abstract can become an unappealing litany of complex processes. When teaching environmental literacy, we strive to engage our students with the local landscape, teaching ecological concepts along with (we hope) a love of place. We thus o√er our home landscape—Indiana’s forests— as a model for how to embody the abstractions of ecosystem services in the history of the natural communities of a particular area. In other places, the native landscapes might be dominated by sagebrush, ponderosa pines, arboreal cacti, or perennial bunchgrasses, and thus our attention would turn to the particulars of these ecosystems. When choosing our focus, we first look for changes that are dramatic, and so readily apparent to students regardless of their formal background in ecology or natural history. Deforestation fits these cause and e√ect requirements: ancient Greek and Roman writers noted the prompt e√ects of deforestation with the erosion of soil and the drying of springs. If we were examining the loss of prairies, we would start with the erosion that accompanied the conversion of perennial grasses to annual crops. After capturing student interest, we could then move on to other important consequences of prairie conversion, such as the loss of carbon storage in the soil and its connections to global climate change issues. Finally, our choice of forests reflects a deliberate e√ort to provide a message of hope. Environmental educators must necessarily increase student consciousness to the grave challenges facing humanity without being seen as the voices of fear and despair. The regeneration of forests in Indiana and elsewhere testifies to the resilience of the natural world, and to the impor- At the Forest’s Edge ⭈ 31 tance of understanding the conditions under which ecosystem services can be restored. Elsewhere, we might turn to the rebirth of...