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If you haven’t seen the advertising on this website, or seen reference to this document before, you should check it out… the best articles, activities, and reviews from past issues of Clearing compiled and published together on a CD-ROM. “The Best of Clearing, Volume VI” is a way to get the best of back issues of Clearing at a very low price (even less than the previous cost of a one-year subscription!).

And just so you know, we’ll soon be republishing an earlier B.O.C — Volume V — which gathers even more great articles from the recent past (think Mike Weilbacher, Jim Martin, and others) in one convenient reference volume for your resource library.

If you’re interested in helping to keep Clearing alive, this is one way to do it. Buy a copy of Volume VI in CD-ROM and keep an eye out for Volume V when it comes available. Click on the “Best of Clearing” link on the nav bar above to buy your copy!

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Last year we began a service-learning summer program for high school students focusing on climate change. The Climate Challenge program consisted of a summer residency in the North Cascades followed by a service project in which elementary-school students were taught by the returning high-school students back in their home communities that fall. We planned a challenging field itinerary for the summer portion – studying glaciers, interviewing scientists and exploring hydrological systems. The student team made both geographic and intellectual discoveries and practiced presentation skills in order to bring their stories to their hometowns. We anticipated that they would struggle to master new skills, become proficient communicators, and hoped that they would become passionate teachers.

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by Lynne Cherry and Gary Braasch
Dawn Publications
ISBN 9781584691037

Reviewed by Heather Mattioli

Books about climate change typically start from the premise that students will only passively participate. Lynne Cherry’s book departs from this tradition by way of including middle –school children as part of climate change science. Throughout an extraordinary photographic and illustrative collection, she also shows students as active researchers and scientists in the study of climate change. The result is a beautiful book that engages children visually, intellectually, and inspirationally, with insight into the science of climate change.

As the title denotes, the book is about the science of climate change, beginning with an introduction about the search and collection of scientific data. Cherry and Braasch feature the involvement of students in many data gathering situations, from tree growth, to water quality and flow to frog populations. Once the data is gathered the clues are explained in an understandable and meaningful way. The reader cannot help but get drawn in through the beautiful pictures and the belief that science is everywhere and we are all participants.

The book introduces the concepts of interconnectivity, developed hypothesis, and stories about children helping scientists collect data. One could not help but get excited about making a change to help the environment and doing it as a scientist with an assortment of tools, knowledge, and nature which seems to make the activity so much more achievable. Throughout the book, children and scientists are found working together in an honest effort to reduce one’s impact on the environment.

Yet, the value of the book lies in the educational resources that it has to offer educators, students, and parents.  The book works as an engaging resource for educators of all types as it offers projects for teachers and students. Also, there is a pretty substantial glossary and resource section that make the text an excellent compliment to environmental education.

http://www.dawnpub.com/our-books/how-we-know-what-we-know-about-our-changing-climate/

To learn more about children and their efforts to combat climate change, check out the website Young Voices on Climate Change at http://youngvoicesonclimatechange.com./

Also:

A Teacher’s Guide to How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate

Author: Carol Malnor

Paperback • $8.95

Based on Lynne Cherry and Gary Braasch’s timely book How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate, this guide helps teachers explore global warming through engaging lessons and classroom activities. Suggestions are provided to differentiate instruction and conduct project-based learning. Lessons and activities are correlated to science standards for grades 5 to 8.

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For many people, a trip to Alaska is the dream of a lifetime. Yet cost and logistics keep many people away. In 2002, a group of dedicated educators joined forces to make such a visit— if only a ‘virtual’ visit—a reality for thousands of children across the Western Hemisphere. Blending good, old-fashioned interpretation and education know-how with technology, the Winging Northward—A Shorebird’s Journey distance-learning project brought the amazing resources of the Copper River Delta, Alaska to a diverse audience. This innovative and ambitious project developed over three years. The following article chronicles the miles traveled, and those yet to come, for this effort.

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Anne Marie Untalan, Michael Becker, and Ashley Sprouse, developers of the HRMS Outdoor Classroom Project.

CLEARING: What have been the most difficult issues in getting this project started?
Michael Becker: One of the Permaculture Design Method principles is to start small, and I highly advocate for starting with small projects that you can have initial success with. Trying to get space is often a hurdle, and if you can show that you have managed a small space efficiently and generated student interest and outcomes you’re more likely to be able to expand. It’s important to have a sense of where you’d like to go in the future but be focused on what you can do today.

CLEARING: What’s your approach to seeking outside funding support?
MB: Funding is a tricky process. As funders get savvier in this area they are looking for a high chance of success. Grants that can show what you have already accomplished with limited resources are more likely to be looked at closely than great ideas with no basis of momentum. Be focused on developing your local base of support, both technical and financial, because that local and in-kind match is key to bigger grants down the road. I look at grants and project development in a pyramid model, the base of support has to be huge compared to those peak funders at the top. The goal is to have it all set up and ready to go so the funders can see that their resources will get the ball running.

CLEARING: What impact does your program have on student behavior?
MB: When working with students, a new ethic has to be created. What does it mean to be outside? Is this just another recess? Clear expectations of what garden behavior looks like are crucial. We call it our “professional” behavior. When we have visitors, or are working outside in view of other teachers, administrators and students there is a different behavior standard. Kids are able to see the value, freedom, and opportunity this can create for them, but it must be, to use a gardening term, “cultivated.”

CLEARING: What do you say to teachers who worry about their ability to lead outdoor learning projects like this?
MB: Not all teachers have background or formal training in these types of activities and at first it can seem like a huge amount of work and a distraction from what we’re supposed to “cover.” As classrooms transfer to a more project-based model, often teachers discover that they actually have more time to work with individual students in a one-on-one scenario because the class has a sense of purpose that keeps them moving forward and allows for a gigantic amount of differentiation. Again, starting with small projects is valuable for future success. Starting too big can lead to burn out on the project before it might yield all that it can. It is crucial that teachers feel supported by their teams and administrators to get programs going.

CLEARING: What are some of your other keys to success?
MB: It’s very important to build a parent and volunteer support network. Search out local expertise and interest to build a crew that can help in the heavy lifting often involved to begin even small projects. Create a sense of community and connection to the project through work parties and celebrations. Try to get some press in the early stages to bolster support and build pride about the work being accomplished. During our week of Outdoor School it requires around 1500 hours of volunteer effort to pull it off smoothly. Parents look forward to the adventures their children will have at the middle school level and are psyched to help out.

CLEARING: What does the future hold for the project?
MB: In the spring of 2008, Hood River County voters graciously approved a bond measure that will allow for major refits and additions at all schools in the district. The Hood River Middle School project directly connects with our five year effort into sustainability science. Working with Opsis Architectural of Portland, the district has developed plans for a separate music and science building on the middle school campus. The building has been designed to achieve LEED Platinum levels of energy efficiency and uses cutting edge technology to produce a building that functions not only as a place to contain students but as a functioning scientific lab.
The district is entering into the “Living Building Challenge”, a design standard that would require the building to catch its own water, generate its own electrical needs on a grid-tied net-zero basis, and deal with waste water on site. Students have been involved in the design process, working with architects and engineers, and will be the primary operators of the system once it is completed. This new building will use many recycled components from an existing structure on campus that had to be removed due to its age.
Attached to the new science classroom will be a grant funded, 1000 square foot glasshouse conservatory to increase lab space and garden productivity. Students will be involved in year round food production experiments including aquaculture, and passive solar season extension. Surrounding the new building will be a highly productive perennial foodscape producing food and craft materials for projects through the school year. In the plan there are new larger spaces for garden beds and an increased footprint for the native plant arboretum.

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Hood River Middle School Outdoor Classroom Project

The Outdoor Classroom Project is a work in progress where students are the researchers, engineers, designers, architects, builders, and users of a multidisciplinary, multi-sensory learning experience.

What you see when you approach the schoolgrounds at Hood River Middle School is nothing short of remarkable. From solar panels on the roof to a working greenhouse in the back, Hood River Middle School exhibits the markings of a unique and visionary school of the future.

As more and more schools around the country are beginning to organize their curriculum to include concepts of ecology, community, and sustainability, some programs, through innovation, vision and determination, move forward in meshing those concepts into a cohesive, integrated and successful program and serve as a model for others to follow. The Hood River Middle School Outdoor Classroom Project has become an exemplary program that began small and grew to encompass an ecological framework that gives students a unique blend of science, technology and permaculture that connects them to real world issues within their community.

Since 1998, science teacher Michael Becker has guided a program that offers students a higher level of connectivity between school and community. Using a hands-on approach to solving real-life problems, students at HRMS accelerate through the basic skills and concepts outlined in the Oregon Academic Benchmarks. The Outdoor Classroom Project is a work in progress where students are the researchers, engineers, designers, architects, builders, and users of a multidisciplinary, multi-sensory learning experience. The Outdoor Classroom Project connects students to key concepts in sustainability through a field based, experience-driven curriculum. Key themes of the project include Diversity, Water, Food, Energy, and Waste.

The Outdoor Classroom Project is divided into three separate strands.

Student harvest from the garden.

Strand 1. Garden Project

The Garden Project has been developing learning laboratory sites on-campus for 6 years. The Garden Project follows a set of ideas called Permaculture, a term developed by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. Permaculture is an ecologically based development design tool that examines the links between water, shelter, plants, animals, and energy. By seeking to create gardens that are ecologically diverse, biologically sustainable, and economically productive one must take into account a wide array of variables. In these variables we find rich opportunities for math, science, writing, and social issues.

Students take tremendous pride, ownership, and responsibility for their work in the outdoor laboratory. The gardens offer an ideal interface to connect with the outside world through a multitude of avenues from selling a tomato plant, to creating a community composting system, to understanding cutting edge active solar technologies, global agriculture systems, and the complex energy grid we are part of. Connecting to a sense of place in a deeper and ultimately practical way provides students a secure launch pad to explore roles and connections at a larger scale. These connections are where the real learning and personal development take place for students. This type of learning ends the eternal question of, “When will I ever use this?” Students don’t just read about it, they are active learners and members of a larger community of research and learning.

Students installing solar electric system with electrician.

Students involved in this project are seen in a new light by other members of the science and business community. The outside world gets to experience students as engaged, respectful people with important learning goals and agendas. Students become teachers.

Conversely, students are able to interface with professionals from a variety of backgrounds and make connections of how school choices may lead to career paths. Most importantly, students interact with adults that are striving lifelong learners outside the educational realm, validating the importance of their studies now. This project is a bridge between school and the world.

Our students plan and grow gardens that provide food for student feasts and celebrations through the year and also a dedicated set of students work spring and summer at the

Gorge Grown Farmer’s Market that happens here at school each Thursday.

Student scientist in the field.

Strand 2. Outdoor School

This past spring marked the fourth year of our independent Outdoor School Program. Students travel from Hood River to Brooks Memorial State Park Environmental Learning Center, for a two-night, three-day field-science experience.

By traveling out of the local environment we are able to experience a new ecological niche and expand our understanding of Columbia Gorge systems. Students are involved in a water quality assessment of the headwaters of the Little Klickitat, study the amazing array of wildflowers on the high slopes above camps Ponderosa Pine forests, and they track and study the diverse wildlife of the this edge habitat.

After spending three days studying the systems of this new place, students are engaged in a land-use simulation activity in which they have to account for increased human habitation development within the parks borders, a very real situation in our home town.

Students stay in cabins with parent volunteer chaperones, eat family style meals in the dining hall and have campfire each night. Students regularly pick this experience as the highlight of their 6^th grade year. Many of out students come from Hispanic families where camping is not a cultural norm and so for many of our students this is a huge “first”. First away from families overnight, first time in the mountains, first time seeing wildlife, all huge experiences in the life of a child, and often for parents as well.

Starting last year high school students from the AP Biology and Ecology class are helping teach field study and staying in cabins with students. This current school year we will have high school students that went to our program as 6^th graders, offering them another chance to be part of our project.

Student habitat analysis work in the park has resulted in grant funding through the Washington State Park service to complete habitat restoration projects that our students have identified as a need. We have developed a unique relationship with the park Rangers and they are an integral part of our program.

Students with Mr. Becker on the climb to view the Eliot Glacier on Mt. Hood.

Strand 3. Alpinee Outdoor Research Program

The Alpinees were a Mountain Education and Search and Rescue Organization in Hood River started after World War II. In 2007, the club decided to disband and began looking for an heir to its assets. The club owns a historic lodge in Hood River that served as their base of operations. This lodge is currently for sale and after the close of sale approximately $200,000.00 will be  placed in trust to provide annual funds expressly for the purpose of taking students on outdoor experience field trips. This fund will provide a source of transportation funds for many years to come. Based on the growth of the fund, there will be consistent funding to weather the variability of school trip budgets. The fund has two main student goals:

1. To expose students to a variety of lifelong outdoor pursuits, in all seasons.
2. To engage students in field research in the natural sciences.

The funds are earmarked expressly for student transportation costs and teacher training.

Research partners are still being developed, but include the Hood River County Soil and Water Conservation District, the Gorge Ecology Institute and the US Forest Service. By putting students in the field with real tasks that have detailed and specific reporting goals, student expectations and deliverables increase dramatically. Students understand that this is real work, not just something headed for the recycle bin. The interaction between field professionals and students is a huge added benefit.

The combination of the day long field-science trips, the outdoor campus laboratories and the three day Outdoor School Program immerses students into fieldwork in a variety of settings, seasons and tasks. By having such a variety of experiences over the entire school year we are able to capitalize on the learning opportunities and give students a myriad of ways to apply, express, and present their learning to an array of audiences.

The new and very exciting development in the project is our new science and music complex. Voters approved a bond that will construct an approximately 5000 square foot complex that will house a large music center with excellent sound acoustics, practice rooms and plenty of instrument storage and also a large science laboratory classroom. The science classroom will have a grant funded 1000 square foot Victorian Glasshouse Conservatory directly attached for student experiments in botany, horticulture and aquaculture. The building is targeting beyond LEED Platinum certification, and has set a goal of reaching The Living Building Challenge. This goal has at it’s base standards a building that is 55% more energy efficient than code, creates it’s own energy on a net zero cycle, catches and stores rain for its water needs and deals with all solid waste on site. In a project like this, the student learning opportunities are endless and don’t have to wait for completion of the structure. Students have been involved in the design phase from day one and worked with many of the professionals side by side on the planning. This building will be a showcase in what is possible for a public building to achieve.

For more information on this program, contact Michael Becker at mbecker@hoodriver.k12.or.us

Read interview with Michael Becker

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By Mike Weilbacher

The following paper was presented as the keynote address at the 2005 conference of the Association of Nature Center Administrators (ANCA) at the Chippewa Nature Center in Midland, Michigan, August 2005.  Mike is a former PAEE president, newsletter editor and Outstanding Environmental Educator (1991), and directs the Lower Merion Conservancy.

Global surface temperatures are rising, glaciers worldwide are melting, the ocean is  warming, rainforests are burning, species are vanishing at the highest rates since the end  of the Mesozoic, coral reefs are bleaching and dying, old growth forests are disappearing,  deserts are spreading, the world’s population is rising, the future of the Arctic National  Wildlife Refuge hangs by a thread, the new energy bill left no lobbyist behind, yet much  of the attention of the western world is preoccupied by a question critical to the fate of  humankind:

Just what is Brad Pitt’s relationship to Angelina Jolie?

For the next hour or so, we’ll nibble at the edge of that question to see its importance to our work, but what we’ll really do is talk through the state of environmental education,  looking at emerging trends and practice using our crystal balls to make predictions for the  road ahead.  We’re going to place our fingers on the pulse of popular culture and take a  reading as to where we all stand.

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By Paul Hawken

From a commencement speech given at the University of Portland, May 3, 2009.

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” No pressure there. Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food — but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television. This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

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A recent post on climate change and race (http://tinyurl.com/b6fzp7) brings up an issue that really needs to be on the forefront of outdoor and environmental education moving forward. It is becoming increasingly clear that climate change will become the defining issue of our times. Just as with civil rights in the 1960’s, this will require sustained and imaginative work on the part of our education system (both formal and informal).

Recent surveys show that the percentage of citizens claiming that the “science is mixed” on human caused climate change is on the rise. Worse, even among those who believe it to be a human-caused problem, there is a high percentage who don’t feel that it is an immediate threat (http://tinyurl.com/cc6uuo). Clearly, we have not just technological and scientific work to do, we have educational work to do. I call this the importance of both “outer” work (the work of technical problem solving that comes from policy changes, technological advances, scientific research, and economic modeling for example) and “inner work” (the work of education, of faith-based institutions, community organizing, etc.).

Outdoor, environmental, and experiential education specialize, it seems to me, in this “inner work.” And yet, we continue to be a very exclusive culture group. We rely on images of humans-in-nature that typically involve the lone white male standing on the mountaintop staring into vastness (check out any current outdoor magazine for examples).

The market for outdoor lifestyles demonizes Walmart while selling clothes, equipment, cars, and other “green” commodities that are unreachable by a large percentage of the US population (not to mention the developing world). We amplify the false dichotomy between “wilderness” and civilization (see: http://tinyurl.com/ac7cav). We sell expeditions and experiences to sublime and far away places so that we can leave the city and suburbs behind to experience solitude or learn about the natural world. Does this sound like a model that invites a larger coalition to meet the present and future challenges of climate change?

People like Marjora Carter (http://www.majoracartergroup.com/) understand this. Until and unless the outdoor and environmental education fields truly examine how we might be ethically and morally bound to actively work toward limiting human suffering and not just simply promoting middle class leisure, we are complicit in the climate change problem no matter what our personal politics or lifestyles.

It is time for us to face, full on, the issues of environmental justice. The conflicts between race, class, and our common constructions of the field can no longer be ignored.  It is not a question of destroying the good work that many have done and continue to do in the name of outdoor and environmental education. De-construction is not destruction. It opens up space for an essential component of the inner work needed to address climate change: solidarity.

How can we extend our projects to link with other projects? How can we form broader coalitions– maintaining (and shifting) our identity while connecting to others? The emerging back-to-the-land movements around permaculture, community gardens, and bio-regionalism provide one such place. Place-based education offers some intriguing ways forward. There are surely others.

If we are to address the clear and pressing problems of the “inner work” of climate change we must heed Einstein’s classic maxim: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.

Jay is an Asst. Prof. of Education and Environmental Studies at Earlham College. His interests include: Experiential Ed, Sustainability and Schooling, and Outdoor Ed. Follow him on twitter: jaywroberts

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