Wachstumshormone

Jul

8

The Window into Green

Filed Under General public, Perspectives | Leave a Comment

by Mike Weilbacher

With the new wave of interest in the environment, will we finally give students the tools they need to become environmentally literate citizens?

In just a few weeks, high school seniors all around the United States will walk proudly across stages, hoisting their diplomas as they graduate from formal K–12 education. As their teachers, we’ll look on with some wistfulness, for the world into which they are graduating—one of spiraling financial crises coupled with huge international challenges—is vastly different from the one in which they started their senior year only 10 months ago.

But wait, it gets worse. If you place your finger on the pulse of the planet, this is what you’ll discover: global surface temperatures rising, glaciers melting, oceans warming, sea levels rising, rain forests burning, coral reefs dying, old-growth forests disappearing, deserts spreading, the world’s population increasing, and species vanishing at the highest rates since the extinction of the dinosaurs.

In short, the ecology that underpins our economy is also collapsing. And the solutions to this challenge elude not only most of our graduates, but also us—their teachers, administrators, and parents.

Will our graduates be ready for these new realities? Will they confidently stride into this world as college students, workers, voters, consumers—in short, as competent, caring adults capable of making good decisions on the pressing issues of the day?

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Jun

19

The Green Tsunami: Environmental Education in the 21 st Century

Filed Under Biological Diversity, Climate change, General public, Language arts, Non-formal, Outdoor education, Perspectives, Science, Social studies, Sustainability | Leave a Comment

tidal-waveBy 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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May

20

Knowing One Big Thing: The Role of the Nature Center in the Next Millennium

Filed Under Outdoor education, Perspectives | Leave a Comment

By Mike Weilbacher
From The Best of Clearing, Volume V

It’s a very rainy day in the middle of Aesop’s fables, and Hedgehog is stuck outside without a dry place to hide. He finds a den, but Fox already occupies it. After much begging and whining, Hedgehog squeezes in alongside Fox, raises her prickles, and a needled Fox quickly vacates his dry den to the now contented Hedgehog.

A fox knows many things, concludes Aesop, but the hedgehog knows One Big Thing: how to use prickers.

Which brings us to fuzzy little beasts called nature centers, a.k.a. environmental education centers. I carry an exquisite love-hate relationship with these beasts. As a freshly-scrubbed, greener-than-a-tree-frog college graduate, I was offered the irresistible opportunity of not only directing a small nature center tucked into the middle of central New Jersey, but directing it when its nature center building had just been erected! Imagine my luck, walking into a vacant building as my first full-time job and inventing a nature center.

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Mike Weilbacher is the executive director of the Lower Merion Conservancy, and is, he confesses, required to teach Too Many Things.