nURTURING

In 1974, as a part of a bicentennial project I was working on, I arranged to visit with a Nation Park Service specialists in historical interpretation. After a brief meeting one afternoon at his office outside Atlanta, I returned to the city thinking my session had not been very productive. However, the phone rang that evening, and I will never forget his final words of advice: "Steve, listen. Are you paying attention? This is really crucial. Now, get this: What is important is not the way people were but the way they thought they were."

In other words, how people act has a lot to do with how they perceive themselves. If we just look at what people did at any given moment, without examining their thoughts and feelings, we will always come away with a one-dimensional image of them. By the same token, if we just present the ecological understandings we have come to know, without dealing with the human thoughts and feelings involved, we will always end up with a flawed perception of what is happening with our learners.

In the field of environmental education, the term ecological understanding has been used for years, but it is also ecological feeling that we seek. If ecology is the study of an organism's relations with its surroundings, then for us, a significant part of that relationship must include an affective dimension.

"We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect, we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy." -- Carl Jung

Ecologists attempt to understand and explain the behavior of energy at different levels of organization in life, but a vital factor in human energy involves our feelings. Consequently, an ecology text or course that does not take into account the feelings of its learners rapidly becomes a shallow pretense. It denies the very wholeness it claims to represent.

A Zen master once said that Zen was the art of making the concrete and the abstract one and the same. In earth education, that is what we are truing to do with the understandings and the feelings. We believe wisdom lies in fully grasping our ecological relationship with the earth -- using both our head and our heart -- and once achieved, such wisdom brings a happiness uncommon in the modern world.

We are convinced that it is unnatural and unhealthy that many people in our societies today have become so completely removed from the actual source of the energy and materials that support them. Most species of life cannot be taken from their natural communities so easily. Extricated from the matrix of their existence, they are life captured fish flopping forlornly on the ground, vainly seeking the familiar. (Visit a zoo and watch the neurotic behaviors of those poor awkward creatures, then compare what you see with what you will find wandering around any large urban area.) Perhaps we cannot statistically prove that people who are more connected to the earth are wiser and healthier and happier, but common sense tells us that it must be so.

Continue... "Nourishing, Enriching, Or Healing"

Earth Education... A New Beginning Copyright © 1990 The Institute for Earth Education. All Rights Reserved.