Connecting to Nature: “The Past Speaks to Practice”*[i]

by

Joe Baust

Have you ever wondered if the way you teach environmental education is effective? Do you also ask the question; is there a new and improved way that may create a better situation for teaching and learning about our earth?

We ask the questions, though we want to believe we already know the answers. What is best is what we know. Anything outside our practice is not always easy to do. We may even believe our way is new and improved.  

We must know others have grappled with what is best.  Knowing there are historical antecedents to our field is easily dismissed in entertaining any questions about what we do and whether it is effective. As someone pointed out to me, there are few ways of doing things that have not been used before. It is not new, but we believe it is.

Our foremothers and forefathers have traveled this road, have asked themselves questions with regard to what is the best way to learn about nature, is there some technique that is more effective? Can we learn from their wisdom? After all they are the historical antecedents to our profession the titans?

Rachel Carson suggested: “It is not half so important to know as to feel.” [ii]  Her voice may be interpreted that in order to have a connection to nature, having an emotional perspective takes priority over knowing the names of things we observe, at least initially. She suggested to us: “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.”[iii] Does this mean Carson is providing a road map to connecting to nature that entails making connections through sensual experiences first and foremost?  When interest is peaked in learners, then would that be the time to provide the wherewithal to scientifically study the names, the interactions, and the essence of what has been emotionally connected to us?

“For Thoreau, a sense of wonder–of awe and oneness with nature–was essential.”[iv] He thought of this in terms of the “spiritual and political: how to be a rigorous scientist and a poet, imaginatively connecting to the vast web of natural life”[v] “Within Thoreau’s journals that many believe were more insightful than Walden, we see his back-and-forth between wanting to feel nature aesthetically and artistically and to report it scientifically, without losing this emotion. His constant concern was to be sure what he considered the “new science” did not lose the essence of our emotional connection he believed would: “protect only what we love.””[vi]

The idea the arts provide a forum to connect science and the scientific process has varying perceptions by many. Some see science as being created for a small group of those who can change our earth or at the very least take actions to stem the tide of the destruction of our earth. This may be one of the reasons many cannot or will not understand the tragedy of lost species, plastic pollution of our oceans, or climate change, to name a few. The masses just do not see it, feel it or seem too concerned about the devastation to our earth. Instead their perception of environmental education is it solely empirical.

It does not mean connecting to nature was/is only science or the arts, but our progenitors have felt a need to be sure there were multiple vehicles for people to see our earth through different lenses.  Thoreau tried valiantly to seek a balance, if not more toward the side of the arts. He guarded this intersection jealously. He and others have tried to provide a roadmap to connect to nature holistically, using as many tools as they could to help others feel and see the importance of what Buckminster Fuller called our “Spaceship Earth.”

Wulf in her article about “What Thoreau Saw” sees the problem with being disconnected from nature this way: the “perils we face” are reported so filled with “data stuffed reports” to woozily constrict concern or connection to “OUR WORLD.” The outcome tells us only the experts can help solve these problems. Her point is without “poetry and imagination,” the arts, there is precious little that connects us to our earth. Without intuitive, sensual experiences we doom a sense of our earth and its systems, indeed the problems we have created. We just do not see it is our problem because it belongs to the scientists. Even more perilous, the current trend by many is to be dismissive of science and scientists all together. This is because science is nothing but specialists who cannot communicate and what they do convey are their beliefs (which is not science at all, but that is what people have told me).

We have many examples of those who preceded us like Da Vinci, Coleridge, Frost, Angelou and others who make the connection to nature through the arts; Thoreau, Emerson, Carson all implored us to see our earth using the arts. There was a tension between what Thoreau saw was his need to observe and scientifically record nature while not losing a sense of “beauty and mystery in the process.”[vii] In spite of Thoreau seeking to integrate science and the arts, there is a tendency to think of science insularly.

This adventure in connecting to nature also makes us think of Thoreau using his olfactory sense to smell tree bark, listening to the songs of birds, the sounds of the forest. Exploring nature could be done through measuring, identifying and naming using our extensive scientific tools. But does this inspire everyone to connect to nature on his or her terms? Emerson feared if those of us were lost in science, he believed it would: “cloud the sight.”[viii] He was concerned about the zeal to be theoretical exclusively, we lose that which helps us want to see, observe, listen, smell, and touch, to connect to nature and our earth. Are they suggesting the sensory, the first-hand experiences being first and used as one of those tools to connect persons to our environment?

Trying to come to a sense of wonder without regret Thoreau used strong observation skills and he used extensive scientific tools, but made the statement: “What speaks to the soul, escapes our measurement.”[ix] Thoreau was speaking to the German poet and writer, Johann Wolfgang Goethe: “Nature must be experienced through feelings.”[x]

More recently Richard Louv’s book, Last Child in the Woods, has us asking why has it been so instrumental in calling our attention to why neither children nor adults go outdoors? His suggestion to us is we must begin by having children have outdoor and provide free-play. But there is much skepticism about outdoors and free play. As several colleagues mentioned to me, you cannot allow children to have free play in nature because they would not know what to do. They need to be shown! Really?

In their free-play children often represent what they see with art, in their way. Children seem to be the most adaptable to the unknown when they are younger.[xi] Younger children depend upon their senses to learn. We find however children are discouraged to go outside for numerous reasons and if they do they are directed in what to do. Heavens, allowing children to use their creative and intuitive senses to connect to nature using the arts and other school subjects is seen as impossible or at least improbable. Louv in a speech reflected in his youth. He went outside and sometimes used cardboard boxes to make constructions, a fort. Imagine being outside in nature with something as simple as a few boxes and creating, sculpture? 

Sir Ken Robinson tells us creativity in four year olds decreases by the time children move to the sixth grade.[xii] Their natural artistry developed in free play outdoors is evident when left to their own devices, but over time it precipitously decreases. They learn to not explore at all and certainly not in nature. The reason is simple… Thoreau’s model of connecting science and the arts has been lost. (We only have a short time allotted for science. That does not permit us to do other subjects.)

What have we lost? The essence of environmental education has always been how it should and must interrelate to all disciplines and school subjects, especially the arts. Many colleagues have told me environmental education is social studies, while some say it is literature, poetry, mathematics, and science. It is all of these, and they are interconnected. However we want to approach it, environmental must interconnect school subjects; we must not lose sight of what Thoreau and his consorts knew: the world is interconnected and we must see this through experience in the broadest context. The arts are as integral as any other discipline. If we do not believe this all we have to do it peruse Thoreau’s journals filled with drawings and sketches. Indeed they are also rich with language, social studies and math and science. His journals interweave the disciplines. His ability to communicate to us, telling a story of beauty and nature, he knew required the panoply available to him.

There was a national foundation whose mission was to use the arts as a vehicle to connect people to nature, the environment and environmental education. It sought to allow the reexamination or rediscovery of what Thoreau sought, to meld the arts with science. This foundation fought the same battle Thoreau wrestled with in his mind, embracing nature with science without losing the battle to express our world in the arts. There were those who extolled the beauty of this foundation’s effort; some were skeptical because it did not fit “the science,” the STEM of environmental education; some saw it as a way to bring in support dollars, and others saw it as a passing faze. Their effort was a valiant one; it sought to embrace Thoreau and his effort to meld art and science. It was a vexing problem for them to have others understand the need to make this connection. They found that even in environmental education there was an effort to “STEM-icize” it; it was an effort to narrow instead of integrate art or for that matter other subject matter in the fabric of the field.

We must look to our forbearers for how to connect to nature. They provide some direction in how to make environmental education vibrant. They want us to breathe life into our field, to renew our definition of what may be a good way to unite children and adults to our earth. We need look no further than Thoreau, Emerson, Goethe, Angelou and others to give us a well-traveled road; perhaps it could be considered a “Road Less Traveled.” They all had the same goal, to see the earth holistically. As the Project WILD activity attempts to do, Learning to Look, Looking to See, it tries to have us perceive our world more broadly using our senses. For looking does not necessarily mean we see. How do we represent what we see? Thoreau, Carson and others suggest using the arts because it brings in the emotion, and a way to connect not only to the brain, but also to the heart. It is what Rachel Carson and others suggest as a first-hand experience that only occurs by going outside. After or during this emotional involvement it beckons us to tell our story. Then we are at the precipice of asking, “what can I use” to address what I have experienced?

As Wulf shares in her concern: “To me the answer is clear. Thoreau’s love for nature sings off his journal pages in spring…are testimony to the power of renewal and rebirth–and to the importance of harnessing the human sense of wonder to better understand and protest the Earth. In our age…as we distance ourselves from the cyclical rhythms of nature, we are disconnecting from our planet.”[xiii]

We must seek to connect people to nature. Our first step must be to go outside in nature. Then what is the best way to do this? We have guideposts or beacons in our field we must not dismiss. Our forbearers struggled mightily to provide a sense of wonder, an emotional connection to our earth. Foundationally they have provided a path to make learning about our earth more vibrant, linking subjects and skills to nature. Perhaps in this way we may better understand our relationship to the earth. Is this not the essence of environmental education?

As Edward R. Murrow reminds us: “ As the obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.”[xiv] We can only hope we see this obvious soon, as we ask ourselves the question, what is best for environmental education? How do we do this? How can we connect others to the natural and built world in a way in which they feel a part and in which they can tell their story about their experience?

[i] Wulf, A. What Thoreau Saw. The Atlantic. November 2017, Pages 106-120
[ii] Carson, Rachel. The Sense of Wonder
[iii] Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring
[iv] Ibid, Wulf, page 108
[v] Ibid, Wulf
[vi] Ibid, pg. 110
[vii] Ibid, pg. 112
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid, pg. 116.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Robinson, Ken. Do Schools Kill Creativity? https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?lang...
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Ibid, Wulf, pg. 120.
[xiv] Murrow, Edward R. https: www.brainyquote.com/authors/edward_r_murrow