Landscape and Language

by editor | Sep 12, 2024 | Environmental Literacy

Landscape and Language

Going outside can enhance language arts skills and open childrens’ eyes to the wonder of nature.

By Lorraine Ferra

When the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke admitted to his sculptor friend Rodin that he had come to a standstill in his writing, the artist suggested that Rilke leave his desk, visit the zoo, and look at an animal for a long time. For several weeks perhaps, Rilke acted on the advice. He singled out a panther and watched it until he could see it and then wrote a memorable poem which reverberates with the monotony of the panthers pacing back and forth behind the bars of its cage. As a sculptor, Rodin understood the necessity of keeping the senses alert, an ability considered basic to the visual arts but often neglected in language. And so we continue encouraging children to produce grammatically flawless compositions and stories — writing that is often devoid of visual and tactile imagery, music, and that aura of silence which can draw us further into the depths of an experience.

I have been looking at the beginnings of two stories by fifth-graders about Utah floods. The first was written by a child who was asked in a creative writing class to describe the event:

One year there was a great flood is Salt Lake City. Stores were closed, and homes were destroyed by the rough water…

Well written grammatically, but echoing in tone the nightly reports of newscasters on local Utah television stations.

The second story’s opening was composed by a child who was advised to go to the scene and witness it firsthand. Besides observing the flood waters, she was to listen to bystanders’ conversations, discern facial expressions and notice the surroundings and activity:

Would you like to meet the father of a flood, stacking sandbags with tears in his eyes? His son ran away in the spring…

What a magnetic invitation to enter the story! The imaginative intelligence and emotional engagement in these lines could have been generated only by attention and sensitivity to detail. Moreover, the fact that the child was present, looking and listening, enabled her to internalize the event, a necessary component of transforming the writing process into more than a mere exercise.

As a poet-in-education, I have been passing along Rodin-like advice to children “This evening, sit outside and watch the sunset. What does it remind you of? What does it smell like? Write a poem about your ideas while you watch the sun fall behind the mountains.” As a result I receive poems describing the sun on the horizon “quiet as a pumpkin sitting in my backyard or “slipping away like someone turning off a lamp in the late evening.” A first-grade boy, whose attention had been diverted by a rainbow, handed me this short poem:

What is a rainbow? Sometimes
I think it is a beautiful bracelet
That turns on a girl’s wrist.

-Rick Lee Robins

The beauty of this poem lies not only in the product, but also in the process; the child did not simply follow the “assignment” in writing about a subject, but rather gave himself over to the few brief moments of the rainbow’s sudden appearance. He was “looking in the purest sense, without the self-consciousness that sees the object or occurrence as homework, without that myopic vision which blurs the possibilities awaiting the peripheral vision of the imagination.

Beyond asking children to observe and write outside the classroom, I have been taking them on what I call “poetry field trips” to meadows and canyons, migratory bird sanctuaries, aviaries, farms, city parks, even cemeteries. The decision on a location could be connected to a current geography, science or social studies unit, or best, could be simply contingent and spontaneous. But regardless of the relationship to the curriculum, it is perception and the act of writing that are integral to the awakening of language.

Early one fall morning I arrived with a group of fifth graders at Utah’s Bear River Bird Refuge, one of the country’s largest sanctuaries on the Pacific Flyway. The sun was still low in the east as shadows of cattails lengthened across the narrow road through the river channels. As we began the twelve-mile auto tour through tall reeds, the children, having spent much of the commuting time consulting various field guides and wagering over who could spot the most species of birds, suddenly quieted in the wild beauty of the place.

In preparation for the experience, I had suggested that they practice looking and wondering the way Walt Whitman did when a child brought him a clump of grass, and I recited parts of Whitman’s poem for them:

A child said What is the Grass? Fetching it to me
With full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

 I guess it must be the flag of my disposition,
Out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancers designedly dropt,

…

 Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the
Produced babe of the vegetation.

…

 And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

-from Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (from “Song of Myself” section 6)

Although they all readily agreed that the last image was “weird,” they were, nevertheless, enchanted by its mystery and haunting sense of beauty. *I recited that line in a lower, reverential tone of voice which lent to the ambivalence and left them wondering at its openendedness). They like the way Whitman initially confessed his helplessness in satisfying the child’s curiosity and then enumerated the various “answers.” I reminded them that the poems they would write about the birds would not rhyme, explaining that always trying to find a rhyming word often cuts off the flow of their ideas and feelings. The Whitman poem was a good example, filled as it is with its playful exploration while moving in tune with the natural rhythm of the human voice. It was also an inspiring model for a new way of looking and imagining. As we drove deeper into the refuge, the boy who had been reciting the familiar nonsense about “the pelican —his beak holds more than his belly can,” pulled his tablet and pencil out of his backpack while watching a flock of magnificent birds descending a hundred yards away and began his poem: “Pelicans resting like huge white clouds on the blue river…” I sense we were on our way.

One girl, convinced that there were no birds more wonderful than the whistling swans, composed this gracefully tangled mixture of images:

They float like leaves over the river,
Like crowned kings, but different in ways—
Their long necks resemble arches
That have been standing for thousands of years.

–DeAnn Perkins

Besides capturing the majesty of swans in “crowned kings,” she unconsciously unfolds her thinking process, making it part of the movement of the poem as she pauses with “but different in ways—” and then works out the association of swans with arches. The association was real for her, since she had lived as a very young child in southern Utah near the Arches rock formations. The sight of swans had evoked that childhood world which she transformed into a magical kingdom in her poem.

All the children were overwhelmed by the wide variety of bird life, but one boy was particularly charmed by the snowy egret’s alternating displays of stately and comic posturing. His poem evolved into a “candid camera” clip of what he found to be the bird’s human-like quirks of vanity:

THE QUESTION MARK

The snowy egret flaps his wings once
Or twice, to show his pride. But
When a noise comes near, he pokes
His head up out of the water
Like a question mark.

–James Fairbanks

It was unmistakable that observing the birds intensified the children’s pleasure in writing about them. They clearly wanted to write and read their poems as the went along. The experience was similar to coming upon a secret and longing to tell it to someone who would also find delight in the excitement and wonder of it all. Their poems were spontaneous celebrations of being in this landscape of strange and wonderful birds, not written assignments after the fact.

Ultimately, the “secret” children stumble upon in writing poetry is an inner landscape, that realm of language (a place all their own) in which they can wander about and conceptualize the world in such a way that trying to communicate where they have been requires a new way of speaking. Moreover, the accumulated experiences of reading and writing outside the classroom can encourage a habit of spontaneity among children. The next poem, in which the young writer saved the breathtaking moments of watching a Cooper’s hawk devour its prey in her yard, is an example of this spontaneous writing:

THE HAWK IN MY YARD

The hawk comes in
on silent wings
and perches high atop
the old bare-branched tree.
His piercing beak pokes
his dead prey
and little sparrow features
fall to the ground.
He sits with his back to me
and, with a wary eye,
turns his head
to watch
over his shoulder,
then shifts his feet
and ruffles his feathers
as the cold night air draws near.

–Allison Prescott

The writer just happened to be outside when the hawk came in “on silent wings.” Her poem reads like an eyewitness account by a reporter at the scene of a mysterious event, and her last line, “as the cold night air draws near,” leaves us shivering with her in the darkening yard filled with the hawk’s awesome presence. Also, this tactile ending of the poem points to the fact that once the wonder of looking and seeing is encouraged, the other senses seem to open naturally as we allow the daily events of our lives to penetrate the shell of routine.

With the same group of fifth-graders I led another poetry field trip to a canyon just a few miles outside of Salt Lake City. It was a weekday morning, and, as I had expected, we found ourselves alone on the canyon trail. Alone, that is, with aspens and pines, hawksbeard, lupine, and perhaps a dozen other newly opened, wild flowering plants.Each child had access to booklets on the regional wildflowers and had already thumbed through the pages filled with color photos of variegated flower accompanied by their “wild” names: Rose Pussy Toes, Goatsbeard, Prairie Rocket, Yellow Monkey Flower, Creeping Barberry… The names were enough to excite their imaginative instincts.

Before going off on the search, we gathered together and I read them a poem by Denise Levertov in which she speaks of tulips “becoming wings/ears of the wind/jackrabbits rolling their eyes…”

Rarely do I ask children to write without first reading them a poem or two from selections of classical or contemporary poetry. Doing this results in the stimulation of ideas and exposure to the various ways language can be explored. I ask them to recall favorite lines and to tell why they suppose the poet chows a particular word out of so many possibilities. This habit invokes a necessary attentiveness to language and consequently to careful writing.

The Levertov model was the right choice. Its associations broadened the list of exotic names the children had learned in the field guides, and its last stanza established the perfect mood: “some petals fall/with that sound one/listens for.”

These last words drifted off in the cool mountain air, and so did the children, quietly, as if listening for the flowers. One by returned, after sitting for a while beside a wild rose, with his poem:

THE WILD ROSE

High in the silent forest
a wild rose sits, in its center
a harmless sun rests. Its petals
are wings of a baby chick.
Its leaves are hands waving goodbye.

–Adam Lewis

The delicacy of language and imagery parallels the fragility of the rose. “A harmless sun” is a wonderful metaphor for the flower’s sun-like stamens. And the las image in which leaves are seen as “hands waving goodbye” suggests the transience of all living things, not only of the flower. These kinds of insight come from the children when we gather again to share our poems. “It makes the flower seem like a person who’s going somewhere. Maybe not coming back for a long time,” one child thought. Some children affirm the idea while others volunteer new perspectives, and the writer listens, sometimes shyly, mostly pleased, and often happily surprised by his or her poem.

Commenting on each other’s work, especially outside the classroom environment, creates a unique communal experience and noncompetitive atmosphere in which children learn things about themselves and the world that they never considered before. And what better place to write and read about a wild rose than in the mountains on a spring morning while its fragrance mingles with the smells of pine and canyon life?

The following poem approaches that place in poetry where the barriers between thought and speech dissolve into simple acts of praise:

SHOWY GREEN GENTIAN

What are you,
a falling start,
or hidden fire growing
quietly by yourself?
Showy Green Gentian,
What a beautiful name!

                        –Rosemary Fairbanks

The effortless conversational tone, so spontaneous and direct, reveals an intimacy with the subject which the young writer might not have achieved at her desk by simply looking at a wildflower picture. It also accents the personal impact of the observing-writing process that keeps children connected to what is most human in themselves and in their perceptual relationship with their environment.

The idea of “poetry field trips” does not imply that creative writing cannot happen in the classroom, for imagination can be stirred in any environment. But the imagination relies on senses not dulled by routine, by schedules, or by school bells that move us so quickly from one activity to another that we no longer hear them.

# # #

Lorraine Ferra was born and raised in Vallejo, California, a seaport on the east side of the San Francisco Bay. She was a nun for seven years in a community in Fremont, California, where she majored in theology and education and taught in elementary and secondary schools.

After leaving the convent, she lived for several years in Salt Lake City, pursuing seminars in modern and contemporary poetry and creative writing under the directorship of Robert Mezey at the University of Utah.

Her poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies since 1976, and some are collected in Eating Bread (Kuhn Spit Press, 1994) and What The Silence Might Say (One-Crow-Dancing Books, 2012).

Her creative writing book, A Crow Doesn’t Need A Shadow: A Guide To Writing Poetry From Nature (Peregrine Smith Books, 1994) has been endorsed by the National Council of Teachers of English.

Ferra is a recipient of a Utah Arts Council Award in Poetry and a Westigan Poetry Award selected by John Haines.

She has worked extensively for many years as a poet-in-residence with various state arts programs across the country and, since 2002, through the Skagit River Poetry Foundation in La Conner, WA.

Lorraine and her spouse, Deborah Trent, have lived for twenty-three years in Port Townsend, WA.

Equity in a Time of Socio-Environmental Justice

by editor | Apr 18, 2024 | Environmental Literacy

Equity in a Time of
Socio-Environmental Justice

by Max Jimenez
Environmental Literacy, Policy

This article was republished with permission and originally appeared in California Classroom Science (CCS), an e-newsletter produced by the California Science Teachers Association (CSTA).

hen we talk about the education system and how it can be utilized as a tool to promote equity and fight for socio-environmental justice, I’m sure we are all wondering, what can this possibly look like? As someone who has gone through California’s public education system from elementary school all the way to a four-year public university, I have so many ideas of possible solutions. My thoughts don’t just come from what I’ve read, they come from what I’ve experienced as an immigrant woman of color who came from a working-class family.
Reflecting back to when I was younger, I don’t recall having any formal discussions about what was going on in our environment. I believe that this was due to our underfunded and under-resourced public education system. In each grade, I had between two to three different teachers, making my education experience unstable and inconsistent. However, I remember watching commercials and cartoons with the jingle, “reduce, reuse, recycle,” to reduce pollution that was hurting our environment. Yet, I felt that there was never a reason that truly connected with me. Even if I heard of different ways I could make change for the better, I didn’t understand why it was vital for me to be a part of that movement for social change. Awareness is great, but no matter what age we are, it is much better to be conscious, and that only happens through thoughtful interactions that empower youth.
As I got older, I learned why the practice of “reduce, reuse, and recycle” was important and how pollution affects my family and me. I learned that my community was more susceptible to certain diseases due to our lack of access to clean air and healthy foods. This brings me to my first point, it is crucial to create spaces for young people to identify how certain issues are closer to them than they think. We cannot water down and sugarcoat problems because we believe that we need to protect young people from the harsh truth. By hiding the truth from young people, we are losing the opportunity to make change. We don’t have time to waste. Young people have the most to lose because these issues impact their future and they deserve to know the truth.
In fact, knowledge is so accessible nowadays that even if you don’t tell us, we will find out anyway. We know where our money is going and we will find out what key decision makers are voting on issues that affect us most. Young people are so fed up, that they are registering to vote in historic numbers and there has been an increased number of young people running for office!

My second point is that for education to be effective, it must be relevant to what students are going through in their daily lives. Often, this is related to climate and other environmental issues. If they are able to understand that these local issues are affecting them and the people they care about, then it’s only a matter of time until they will be able to connect it to larger, global issues. This doesn’t just create a better understanding of what is happening in our world, but this makes it easier for young people to find solutions to the issues they’re concerned about. As a benefit, this nuanced understanding that these different struggles are interconnected teaches young people what it means to be in solidarity with other people’s struggles.

In learning spaces, it is important to accommodate people’s understanding of the world. This brings me to my third point, students come from different backgrounds, and I have noticed that “environmental justice work” has been structured for white and affluent communities. We must consider how sustainability can be inclusive to people of color and working-class communities. We need to make sure that the movements we are fostering center around frontline communities who are being impacted most. Centering around frontline communities means honoring the resilience and experiences of those community members (for example, black and brown youth). This does not mean you can tokenize their existence and participation to benefit your own agenda. Some ways you can prevent tokenization of frontline community members is to avert your assumptions around the idea that all people they share their identities with (whether that’s race, gender, class, etc.) are the same because each is unique. Despite shared identities, there are different intersections of identity that people face, making their experiences unique from one another. Having one person carry this responsibility to represent everyone who holds the same identity is an unfair expectation. Another example of tokenization is when young people aren’t given the opportunity to claim their power in spaces that are meant to empower them. In addition, it is common for organizations and classrooms to tokenize marginalized community members for the sake of fulfilling a “diversity” requirement. Doing so is extremely disrespectful, and folks with privilege must do their own research* to find ways to honor the wisdom and experiences that marginalized community members face systemically.

I have experienced tokenization on different occasions. My first memory was when I was working with a climate education organization called Alliance for Climate Education (ACE). ACE took young people, including myself to the State Capitol to lobby for progressive climate policies. ACE helped us practice how to lobby with government officials and supported us throughout the whole process. My experience when lobbying was difficult because it was my first time talking to government officials and persuading them to support climate policies. What should have been an empowering experience, didn’t feel that way. It didn’t feel empowering because when I would tell them why these climate policies are important to the livelihood of those in my community, and when I asked them to support a bill we were advocating for, they either applauded us or told us that we did a great job. It was obvious that they didn’t take us seriously. Some of them even asked to take a picture with us even if they didn’t seem serious about supporting what we asked for. It was hard to accept that even if the communities we were a part of were being affected by climate change and environmental racism, people in power didn’t seem to get past the fact that even if we are young, our voices matter. The fact that they had the audacity to make that experience a photo opportunity for them, to make it seem like they engaged with youth, was even more disrespectful because they didn’t take our demands seriously. This example of my experience being tokenized was disempowering and disheartening. However, I learned a lot about my experience lobbying and I hope that you can recognize that it is especially crucial for learning spaces, such as a classroom, to avoid this kind of culture. The first step to avoid this and honor young people’s experiences is to remember that we are all students (no matter your age) and there is so much we can learn from young people if we include them in the conversation.

Lastly, if we really want to honor young people in this movement, please take us seriously. Don’t give us a pat on the back or applaud us when we demand justice. Don’t patronize our experiences and don’t use our resistance as a photo opportunity to make yourselves credible in the same space where you are making decisions that don’t benefit future generations. It is not up to you to decide how and what we learn, the world is changing so fast and we don’t have the option of waiting until we are older to take action. We need y’all to make space, instead of taking space from us, so we can fight and create a world that we can AND want to live in. Accessibility for all is a priority if we want to embody the word, “justice,” because what is the point of having environmental or climate education if all students do not have access and if it’s not done in a way that respects local expertise. Making space can mean creating lesson plans that will give students the opportunity to share the knowledge they already possess with one another. Allowing students to build collective knowledge is essential in establishing their confidence, as well as creating opportunities for students to develop a community with one another. We must restructure these top-down, vertical learning structures where students are only learners and are only capable of retaining information. An effective solution I have seen is providing collaborative learning spaces that allow students to flourish. This means that educators take on the role of facilitator. Facilitators are still able to reach learning goals, but in this way, the participants have the agency to find their own way of achieving those learning goals. We must have faith that our students have the power to analyze their surroundings critically and that they are able to develop these skills on their own. From my experience, I learned the most when my teachers and mentors/femmentors constantly reminded me that the knowledge I possess has great value. Asking students what they want to learn about and involving them in the creation of lesson plans will show them taking the initiative over their own education is possible. I know that when I was given the space to take control over what and how I wanted to learn, it was easier for me to understand the concepts my teachers carefully planned and allowed me to recognize that I have the agency to empower myself through education.

To close, when we all talk about justice, people will have different approaches and when young people decide to be militant—don’t repress and silence us! We need your support in this intergenerational fight for socio-environmental justice. We need to remember that organizing and fighting for this justice is not glamorous, it is a necessity. The actions we take to defend our Earth, and our livelihoods are acts of survival.

Some good starting places for those willing to dig deeper:

Cohen, Julie. “How Social Justice and the Environment Connect.” Futurity, 2017.
Sandler, Ronald L, and Phaedra C. Pezzullo. Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007.
Southern Poverty Law Center. “Analyzing Environmental Justice.” Teaching Tolerance, 2018.

Max Jimenez is a 4th-year student at the University of California, Santa Cruz studying Politics and Community Studies. She was raised in Northeast Los Angeles, where she continues to organize for environmental and housing justice.

by editor | Apr 18, 2024 | Environmental Literacy

“We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate, and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.”
– Sonya Renee Taylor

he outdoor science and environmental education (EE) field is reeling. The impact of COVID-19 has been devastating. The pandemic has revealed that across the country, organizations in this field are structured and have responded more like restaurants than school systems. Within days or weeks of the shutdown, there were massive lay-offs and furloughs, and by the end of the calendar year, if shelter in place and physical distancing guidelines are not lifted, nearly three-fourths of all organizations are uncertain about their ability to reopen (Collins, Dorph, Foreman, Pande, Strang, & Young, 2020). Ever.
For all of us, regardless of what sector of business, government or public good we are in, there is no playbook or set of best practices for making our way through this situation. Every organizational leader we’ve talked to is juggling competing priorities, responsibilities as novel as the virus itself, and no-win decision-making dilemmas, with fewer resources than they had before. It is clear that the challenges of 2020 will continue to test even the wisest and hardest working leaders.
And, as is a common theme during crises (especially economic crises), we are hearing from white-led organizations that work on equity, inclusion, cultural relevance, justice, and diversity, much of which began recently, is “being put on pause.” Some leaders are questioning whether or how equity work can continue when they don’t know if their organizations will survive this crisis or when most of their staff have been laid off. This line of thinking leaves the field on a path that will return us to the “normal” that resulted from decades of performative commitments to racial equity, inequitable policies that disadvantage Communities of Color, and exclusive and marginalizing workplace environments (Romero, Foreman, Strang, Rodriguez, Payan, & Moore Bailey, 2019). We suggest that anti-racism in our field is important enough that we should pursue it even when it is not convenient to do so.
What if we returned from this pandemic with a deep and profound commitment to a new way of being? What would it look like if, instead of this crisis making our work towards equity slower and less important, it became an opportunity for the field to work towards equity faster and make that work a higher priority? What if equity and inclusion were built into every fiber of our reimagined and reopened organizations, considered in every new initiative so that “pausing” is not possible as it is simply how we go about each day? As the Learning Policy Institute wrote, “(school) districts and states can make policy and practice decisions in the coming weeks and months that both respond to current needs and chip away at long-standing gaps in opportunity and access. (Cardichon, 2020)” We believe the same is true for environmental education organizations.
Here are seven ideas for white-led organizations to join the effort in transforming the EE field to a new way of being that is rooted in racial equity and has justice embedded at every inflection point:

1 Talk about racism.
Racism is at the heart of inequity in this country. Currently, the impacts of COVID-19 on health and the economy are being disproportionately felt by People of Color. When we think about how environmental education can emerge stronger from this pandemic, it must involve naming race as a factor in inequity. As The BridgeSpan Group wrote in a recent report, “A race-neutral approach would fail to account for the ways that existing disparities and structural racism affect outcomes (Patel, Smith, & Martin, 2020).” We need to directly talk about anti-blackness, white supremacy culture, police brutality, and how racism is built into our country’s policies and systems in deep ways that manifest in our everyday interactions. When white people speak out, People of Color don’t bear the burden alone to bring these issues to light. As Natasha Cloud wrote, “if you’re silent, you are part of the problem (Cloud, 2020).” Specifically, the environmental movement and environmental education field are steeped in racist history from John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, to the formation of our National Parks, to the field’s insular hiring and advancement trends, to the appropriation of indigenous culture while simultaneously erasing its current context and contributions, to the stories we tell and songs we sing at campfires. We have a responsibility to read, discuss, and to educate ourselves and each other about the harm embedded in our history, our “monuments”, and which ones need to be pulled down (Brune, 2020).

2 Rethink goals, priorities and measures of “success.”
There is a damaging, harmful paradigm in our field that tells us that the value of our work is defined by “numbers served.” This paradigm privileges quantity over quality and outputs over outcomes. When our funders, our boards, and our egos tell us that more is better, and the surest sign of resilience when we reopen is to return to our previous scale as quickly as possible, equity is always the casualty. Prioritizing numbers served will lead to two racist outcomes: we will design programs for majority audiences first and wait until “later” to adapt them for marginalized communities with “special needs;” and we will offer programs first to customers that can pay retail program fees because more revenue allows us to hire more staff and run more programs. Scholarships, tuition waivers, transportation grants, and community partnerships will have to wait until “we are back on our feet,” until we have “more bandwidth.” A new paradigm would have us look away from head counting, and instead prioritize addressing the needs of the most vulnerable communities first. Communities that have been hit the hardest by COVID-19, hammered by school closures, failed by remote “learning,” traumatized by racist violence, and historically denied the physical and emotional benefits of access to safe outdoor spaces–what if we designed our reopening strategies to serve these communities first? We can make the case to our philanthropy and government agency partners that they should also adjust their measures of success to address relevant societal challenges rather than simplistic numeric targets.

3 Re-imagine the workplace.
For those of us still working, the workplace looks radically different. Not only have our office locations largely shifted to our homes, but ways of interacting, meeting, conducting programs and doing business have been completely disrupted. This disruption is an opportunity to examine our existing workplace structures, systems, and cultures through the lens of white supremacy culture (Okun, n.d.). Tema Okun and Keneth Jones write that white supremacy is part of the fabric of all of our organizations, but the good news is, there are antidotes. Let’s re-envision how we work with one another: how decisions are made, who holds power in our organizations, what kinds of expertise and lived experience are valued and promoted, what we expect from one another, and how transparent those expectations are. Let’s create new practices and traditions, define shared values, and create new feedback systems that promote equity, inclusion, respect and power-sharing.

4 Reinvigorate professional learning.
Organizations facing a financial crunch when reopening may have a natural reflex to reduce professional learning time to maximize the time spent delivering programs. We recommend going slow to go fast. Double down on professional learning and the reflection time that it provides to rethink the quality, purpose and priorities of your work. In addition to safety protocols, program logistics, and inspiring new natural history content, make sure that your new team has plenty of time to get to know each other, to build rapport and a common vision, to define values, and to create a brave space for challenging conversations together. Ensure that professional learning includes time to: increase understanding of the history of racism in our field (and the U.S. more broadly), reflect on unconscious bias, build awareness of and strategies for confronting microaggressions, and focus teaching and learning on cultural relevance, multiple ways of knowing, and, as Paulo Friere says, “using education as a practice for freedom (Friere, 2018).” Take some time to learn directly from the communities that you will be inviting to your programs. While your whole team should have opportunities to attend conferences and workshops, it is important to prioritize the participation of professionals who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in these opportunities. For many Black, Indigenous, and People of Color on a mostly white staff, their only opportunity to find affinity spaces, empathy, mentors of Color, and relief from being a “minority” is to attend professional learning experiences outside your organization. Professional learning and networking that includes opportunities to engage in affinity spaces can provide for those with marginalized identities an antidote and healing to counteract the effects of isolation and oppression, and, for those with dominant identities, provides a learning space that does not rely on the emotional labor of the oppressed.

5 Redesign hiring practices.
When we’re open and begin to rebuild the capacity of the EE field, we can reconsider what expertise we want at every level of leadership in our organizations. We must prioritize experience and expertise advocating for and communicating about equity, lived experience in and with the communities we’re striving to reach, and models of leadership beyond those rooted in white supremacy culture and characteristics. Redesigning hiring practices includes redesigning job announcements and job descriptions, qualifications, hiring criteria, interview questions, performance evaluations, and where we recruit. These reimagined components will ring true if they mirror comparable revisions to our organizational mission, vision, values, goals and priorities. Changes to the racial and gender diversity of our directors, middle managers and instructors that six months ago could only happen gradually over years, could now be a stunning and welcome example of punctuated equilibrium. Our newly comprised teams will be uniquely suited to establish partnerships and design authentically culturally relevant programming with and for marginalized communities that we aim to serve first. Note to HR directors and hiring committees: you shouldn’t have any trouble finding qualified Professionals of Color to apply; they were among the first to be laid off at the outset of the pandemic!
6 Rebuild partnerships.
Establish authentic and mutually beneficial relationships with a broad range of environment-rich organizations across sectors including environmental justice, youth development, health and wellness, food justice, nutrition, transportation, clean water, clean air, and more. These organizations may not self-identify as being in the environmental education sector. Meet, read up, listen carefully, find the intersection of the goals of your programs with the needs and priorities of your partners. In addition, establish partnerships with school districts, county offices of education, and other mainstream education systems that can provide access to environmental education experiences for a broader range of learners. When we envision mutually beneficial relationships, rather than audiences or customers we can serve, we can dismantle a deeply rooted sense of saviorism that positions those with resources as benevolent bringers of outdoor experiences. Partnerships with community-based organizations and school systems can help us to identify vulnerable populations, and help us to understand what societal conditions have led to their vulnerability. If these genuine partnerships are established at the same time that we have redesigned hiring practices and reimagined our workplace, we can have the resources, expertise and lived experience within our organizations to build trust and expedite the efficacy of our work together.
7 Redefine the field.
With broader partnerships, inclusive workplace cultures, more equitable hiring practices, and a clear focus on equity at all levels of our work, we can redefine the field of environmental education — which has roots in the oppression and marginalization of People of Color — into a field that works towards ensuring that every person is able to access the healing benefits of spending time outdoors and connecting to nature. Environmental education can be a field that recognizes and honors that “environmental literacy” is comprised of the knowledge, skills, know-how, attitudes, values, and beliefs that are held by communities in unique and powerful ways.
Centering equity cannot be the work of one person or even one organization–individuals must work together to change policies, pedagogy, curriculum, culture, and systems. All of these steps are part of a systemic approach to centering equity and, in particular, racial equity. Prioritizing racial equity will enhance the environmental education field for us all. As BridgeSpan articulates, “deliberately prioritizing racial equity will further benefit the rest of society through the ‘curb-cut effect,’ which has shown that laws and programs designed for vulnerable groups have positive impacts on others (Cardichon, 2020).” Naming racism, creating antidotes to white supremacy, valuing many kinds of experience and expertise, and building strong partnerships will improve our relationships to each other and to nature, and make the environmental education field stronger, more resilient, and vastly more relevant.
None of these actions are new. Each of these ideas has been articulated, described in-depth, and called for by social justice and environmental justice leaders of Color in the environmental education field and beyond, for decades, often in ways that are under-recognized and under-supported. Their messages have been largely ignored or unseen by white-led and predominantly white organizations. There is nothing good about this pandemic: the loss of life, loss of jobs, loss of cherished organizations is staggering and hard to comprehend. Since there is no going back, let’s figure out how to use this moment, by establishing an environmental education field that is truly centered in racial equity and inclusion.

References:
Brune, M. (2020). Pulling down our monuments. Retrieved from https://www.sierraclub.org/michael-brune/2020/07/john-muir-early-history-sierra-club
Cardichon, J. (2020). Using federal stimulus funds to advance equity and opportunity. Learning Policy Institute, Washington, DC. Retrieved from https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/blog/using-federal-stimulus-funds-advance-equity-opportunity
Cloud, N. (2020). Your silence is a knee on my neck. Retrieved from https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/natasha-cloud-your-silence-is-a-knee-on-my-neck-george-floyd
Collins, M. A., Dorph, R., Foreman, J., Pande, A., Strang, C., & Young, A. (2020). A field at risk: The impact of COVID-19 on environmental and outdoor science education: Policy brief. Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley; California. Retrieved at https://www.lawrencehallofscience.org/sites/default/files/EE_A_Field_at_Risk_Policy_Brief.pdf.
Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury publishing USA. (First published in Brazil in 1968).
Okun, T. (n.d.) white supremacy culture. Retrieved from https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/White_Supremacy_Culture_Okun.pdf
Patel, S. M., Smith, A. H., & Martin, H. (2020). Racial equity implications of the covid-19 pandemic: Opportunities for philanthropic response. The Bridgespan Group. Retrieved at https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/library/philanthropy/racial-equity-implications-covid-19-philanthropy
Romero, V., Foreman, J., Strang, C., Rodriguez, L., Payan, R., & Moore Bailey, K. (2019). Examining equitable and inclusive work environments in environmental education: Perspectives from the field and implications for organizations. Berkeley, CA. Retrieved at http://beetlesproject.org/resources/equitable-and-inclusive-work-environments/

Jedda Foreman is Director of Environmental Literacy programs at the Lawrence Hall of Science. She is a passionate educator deeply invested in place-based and experiential education.

Rena Payan is the Senior Program Manager at Justice Outside, where she is tasked with working toward equity and representation in the outdoor field by supporting young adults from diverse backgrounds through training that will develop them into outdoor leaders, stronger community advocates, and more confident stewards of the Earth.

Laura Rodriguez is Chief Program Office at Justice Outside. Her passion for the outdoors is matched by her desire to effect change within the outdoor field; and to this end, she approaches the work of racial equity, inclusion, and cultural relevancy with resolve, authenticity, and empathy.

Craig Strang is Associate Director of the Hall and the Director of BaySci (The Bay Area Partnership for Science Education) and MARE (Marine Activities, Resources, and Education). He is also the BEETLES Principal Investigator.