I hope you will not jump to the conclusion that this WHY of earth education is merely a justification for adding some sensory awareness activities to things. It goes much deeper than that.

First, nurturance takes time and patience and skill. Earth education exists to reintroduce people to the real source of their lives, to take them away from their congested colonies, to remove them from the artificial canyons of their cities, to get them out of their synthetic boxes and immerse them in the green and growing things that sustain them. But many people may respond to such an introduction like kidnapped children rediscovering their real parents after a long absence. They have been so deprived for so long from a healthy relationship with the earth that it will take lots of patience to begin breaking down some of the barriers with which they have surrounded themselves. For some people the process will be like a gradual, wrenching metamorphosis, for others it will occur as a natural unfolding. In either case you will have to be in this work for the long haul.

Second, to enrich means to improve upon the quality of something by adding desirable ingredients. If you say that you want to improve upon the quality of people's lives by enriching their experiences, that implies you may only be adding abundance, that basically their lives are okay. But we believe that for many people their lives are not okay, that without lots of firsthand experience with the natural world people grow up just as deprived as children without good nutrition. They are defective in ways they many never know. For these people a sense of relationships with the earth is more than enrichment; it becomes a basic necessity for the long term health and welfare of our entire species. What we must do in earth education then, is provide nourishment for those who have a poorly developed sense of relationship with the earth and enrichment for those who have already developed a sense of relationship on their own.

In common use, nurturing means to give support during the stages of growth, particularly in the early years. But in earth education nurturing means to nourish or enrich where appropriate, and sometimes to heal. You see, we believe that when you really boil it down, education and medicine are both nurturing fields. One attempts to build, the other to mend. It is good that both are beginning to realize the importance of their similarities, for they should have lots to share. And earth educators will need to learn more healing skills in the years ahead because some people have been so cut off in their lifestyle that a healthy relationship with the earth will be very difficult to build without instituting something akin to a healing process first.

Finally, nurturing is also important for us as leaders. The other two "WHYS" of earth education call upon us to sacrifice, on behalf of other life, but nurturing holds out the promise that there is something in it for us as well. Besides, if we want to convey a love for the earth and instill feelings for it in others, then we must continually renew our own sense of relationship with it at the same time.

Continue... The WHYS: Training

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