hi everyone.
awesome conversation today about Environmental Generational Amnesia. Thank you Peter for moderating. i feel as though we could have continued for several more hours, playing with these ideas of human interaction patterns with nature or the non-human other.
We used the word "important" quite a bit today, and i wanted to look at that more closely, so this post is an invitation to engage with what "important" means in this context of environmental generational amnesia. I caution us, a primarily white, middle-class, educated group, to be aware of our perspective on what is important for others. To say that marginalized inner-city kids don't get the importance of environmental issues is a matter of perspective. Perhaps we should ask what is important to inner-city students, and how can we access their interests and concerns to create learning environments that educate about environmental issues and/or community stewardship.
Mark pried at this in our discussion by offering two distinctive kinds of interactions: Educative and Intuitive. Intuitive interactions with nature might be described as the cross-cultural human fear (or easily learned fear) of snakes, as we discussed today. These kinds of intuitive interactions may be relevant across cultural and socio-economic (SES) groups, and may provide access points to environmental issues and concepts.
Educative interactions are something altogether different, and this is what i'm curious about. How can we provide environmentally-focused/stewardship-focused learning experiences in an urban setting that validates the culture and concerns of inner-city students? Put another way, how can human interaction patterns be relevant to an inner-city (or urban) learning experience? Health issues is one idea that we addressed in our discussion today. Any other thoughts?
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Health is one way to justify environmental- or stewardship-focused designs and learning experiences for inner city children... but then we need to think about the different kinds of health. Has anyone read Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods? I haven't yet, but from shorter articles I understand that there are various emotional, behavioral, psychological and learning benefits associated with a child's knowledge of the natural world or amount of contact with nature.
(Along those lines, I'm also interested in translating some ideas from horticultural therapy to relate to questions of educational landscapes.)
But when we're talking about inner city kids we shouldn't assume that their cultural/environmental heritage lies in the inner city! Many inner city families have recent ties to rural places, especially new immigrants. In their case, more "natural" environments may represent something they are trying to leave behind for a more prosperous, urban life -or something they have been pressured to leave behind. I have talked to parents who feel nostalgic for their past lives in rural areas and regret that their children will grow up without the skills and familiarity they might gain if they had more opportunities for learning about the natural world, often through farming.
Finding out what is important to people isn't easy to do by guessing, either way. But people are often eager to tell stories... perhaps we should look at that a bit more. Seems like environmental literacy may suffer as do cultural and oral traditions-- maybe they are passed on in similar ways, by example or through storytelling, between generations?
Brenda and Annika -- yes, important issues about environmental values and culture. I've conducted studies not only in inner-city Houston (w/ African American children and adults), but in Portugal and the Brazilian Amazon. I write about it, e.g.,
Kahn, P. H., Jr. (1999). The human relationship with nature: Development and culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
And many of my publications which you can pull off as pdfs from my website: Http://faculty.washington.edu/pkahn/
From my data, I suggest there are some surprising and, if I can use the word -- important -- similarities in children's environmental reasoning and values between diverse cultures. But, yes, there are differences, as well! But the differences don't mean kids the world around don't care, but the question is how do they care. And at the level, then one likely sees people and cultures (esp. ours) coming up "short" as we're losing so much so fast in terms of the depth of human experience with nature.
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