Healing Waters

by editor | Jan 20, 2026 | Conservation & Sustainability, Critical Thinking, Environmental Literacy, Inquiry, Language Arts, Place-based Education, Questioning strategies, Sustainability

Healing Waters

An Oregon educator breaks the logjam of environmental conflict

by Matt Love

The rain stops and my 7th and 8th grade combined English class hikes down Nestucca Spit, a finger of drifting dunes on the north Oregon Coast. We are there to stimulate our senses for
a poetry writing exercise.

It takes us an hour to reach the mouth of the bay. Across the water, high up on the cliffs, a 10,000-square-foot mansion faces out to sea. Before construction began, an elk herd grazed this headland.

In unison we stare up at the fortress. “I wish we could dynamite that place,” says one student. We all hear him, and we all know who built and owns the house. The owner’s daughter is standing 10 feet away.

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It’s election time and a measure on the ballot calls for a ban on all clearcutting on state and private forests. Oregon annually produces a majority of the nation’s timber supply, so war has been declared. In my social studies classroom, I lead a deliberate discussion on the measure. Within a few minutes, the discussion devolves into yelling and generalizations. Nobody listens. The last comment I hear before I shut it down it “Hey, you live in wood houses and burn wood for heat. You’re a hypocrite!”

Before leaving Portland to teach at Neskowin Valley School on the coast, I never imagined student conflict over natural resource use had the potential to tear my classroom apart. Part of my naiveté was ignorance of rural values, and the other part was sanctimony for my own “enlightened” environmental views.

I had taught social studies in large suburban high schools for a decade and moderated many discussions on environmental issues. But passions rarely flared, and the disagreements never became personal — unlike debates on immigration, abortion and the death penalty, which often generated rancor, confrontations and put-downs despite my efforts to maintain civil dialogue.

In my new community, the stakes — and the rules — were different. I came here to teach English, social studies and environmental science at a school that borders a national forest and a creek that once boasted a legendary salmon run. This was the country, and I was very green.

But I seasoned quickly. I learned that my students have parents or other relatives who raise cows for meat and milk or who log, fish, develop property or work for businesses that service those industries. The Future Farmers of America and 4-H are still part of the culture here, and occasionally students come to class with manure on their knee-high rubber boots. Yet I also have students whose parents moved here from urban areas because of a strong commitment to protecting and restoring the natural world.

These conflicting visions of our shared natural resources divide my students as deeply as more visible differences do in many other places. But why? Virtually every American believes in the sanctity of private property — it’s right there in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. As I have observed in my new environment, where people own much more acreage than a typical suburban lot, it’s about a land ethic. What does each person feel about the role and responsibility of humans in the natural world? Are the land and water and wildlife meant to serve human needs at any cost, or do we have a moral and ecological duty to uncompromisingly protect and even restore the environment? Is there a middle ground?

In practical terms, the conflict often comes down to questions like this: Should a parcel of old-growth forest be preserved, or logged and then replanted, or developed into a home site of golf course? Can the government require livestock operators to fence their cattle 30 feet away from streams? In my experience, dialogue that focuses on specific use plans quickly breaks down along hard lines. As a teacher attempting to help students see beyond the impasse, I ask instead: What about the environment do we value in common, and what can we do together to support that?

Costs and Values

Tillamook County, where I live, is situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Coast Range. It’s a place where many families make a proud living from natural resource industries. Boats troll the ocean, bays and rivers for a variety of seafood: salmon, crabs, tuna halibut. Sale of timber from a nearby state forest provides revenue for schools. Every working day, log trucks loaded with spruce, fir and hemlock roll through the small towns.

The county has 25,000 human residents, 25,000 dairy cows and has given its name to the famous local cheddar cheese. Tourism is important, too. People are attracted to the area because of its beauty and outdoor recreation opportunities. In recent years, a booming Oregon economy has led to the construction of many spacious second homes and commercial enterprises near the shore.

But there is another side to the natural resource economy and real estate development. Clearcut hills blight the landscape and lead to erosion. Only 1 percent of the wild salmon from pre-settlement days now return to spawn in the watershed. Nearly a dozen rivers in the county qualify for the state’s “water quality limited” list, which in slang means “messed up.” New luxury housing for weekend vacationers destroys wildlife habitat.

Tillamook County serves as a perfect example of a rural Northwest community riding the roller coaster of natural resource economics and staggering from tough regulations imposed under the power of new state rules and the increasing enforcement of the federal Endangered Species and Clean Water acts. Life and livelihoods are changing in these small towns, and many folks don’t like it. New laws require 50- to 75-foot building setbacks from streams. Manure can’t be sprayed where it used to be. Beachfront property owners can’t riprap boulders to save sliding homes. There is substantial talk of tearing down dams on the Snake River to save salmon, ending grazing on federal land and turning forests into parks — notions that were inconceivable just a few years ago.

A chorus of other voices echo Tillamook High School senior Jacob Day, whose editorial in the school newspaper advocated dredging a bay and criticized environmentalists for opposing it. “I believe that human beings were put onto this earth to rule and alter our environment however we see fit to make it useful and valuable to us,” Jacob wrote. In the student parking lot of Jacob’s school, which is located between a dairy farm and a timber mill, a bumper sticker reads: “I eat spotted owl for breakfast.”

Your Own Backyard

In my observation, students in these affected rural communities who despise environmental regulations on private property and on natural resource industries vastly outnumber those who favor them; intimidation felt by those who don’t share the majority view is real. Cheryl Roraback-Siler, who teaches biology at Tillamook, encourages structured discussions on local natural resource conflicts but often finds ecology-minded students reluctant to voice their opinions. A dedicated environmental activist who was arrested in 1998 for protesting the Makah tribal whale hunt off Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, Roraback-Siler avoids presenting the pro-ecological perspective unless none of her students will.

“I find myself having the present the other side to many issues,” she says, “because some students feel uncomfortable,” She reports that many times students come up after class and say they wanted to contribute but felt afraid to voice an opinion that might stigmatize them. As one student at Tillamook High observes, “I think there are more people who want to speak up, but they also don’t want their car keyed (scratched).”

Joan Haley, acting director of the North American Association for Environmental Education, emphasizes the importance of balance. “We support the ideal that teachers are not advocates, that they let students make up their own minds,” she says. Haley’s organization urges teachers to present a broad range of information and tie curriculum to “their own backyard.”

She admits that teaching about conflict over natural resources can be challenging. “ think environmental education is misperceived in rural areas. Many people feel it’s going to be an attack on what they do.”

Rural areas are not the only places with natural resource conflicts. Recently, cities such as Portland and Seattle, where endangered salmon swim through the shadows of skyscrapers, have been forced to confront municipal policies like pesticide use and storm sewer drainage that can contaminate rivers.

Although the Northwest’s environmental conflicts make national headlines, other regions experience similar resource-related disputes that impact classrooms. In Florida, for example, the embattled Everglades and its threatened wildlife present many natural resource conflicts that pit farmers, developers and conservationists against one another. In the Southwest, issues like water allocation and reintroduction of wolves create tension, and Rocky Mountain states face dilemmas over managing the Yellowstone bison heard, ski resort development and mining. Teachers and environmental education organizations all across the country report the same story we experience in the Northwest.

Larry Beutler, the editor of Clearing, a magazine for Northwest environmental educators, notes that, as pressure to restore watersheds and protect threatened species increases, teachers everywhere will have the opportunity to look at an issue close to home. For Beutler, the most important common denominator for educators across regions, in big cities and small towns, is this: All parties to natural resource management conflicts have children who attend schools, These students bring traditions, new ideas, disputed scientific facts and different opinions into the classroom. If teachers choose to teach about local resource conflicts, they need to have well-developed strategies for handling tension and promoting meaningful environmental education.

Localizing the curriculum is essential, but local “hook” isn’t enough, Beutler says. It’s essential to build in strategies for managing conflict, not just open the floor to wild debate about a story in the newspaper that most students have never read. For many, this is not a “current events” topic — it’s about their families’ lives and property.

He offers a further caution: “You have to be careful of special interest groups that produce materials that tend to be inflammatory.” A number of environmental education curriculums have received negative attention recently because of their association with corporations or environmental activist groups.

Action Plans

The great advantage or teachers everywhere is that many public and nonprofit agencies involved in natural resource management have developed plans calling for collaboration among the public sector, private industry and advocacy groups in practicing and promoting ecology. These plans can be easily adapted to serve as the hands-on culmination of a unit of study.

At my school we use the local watershed council’s action plan. Because it was developed through consensus, it has credibility in the community. What has worked well for me is using the action plan’s recommendations to bring students (and parents) together to create learning and service opportunities that promote the health of local watersheds and build an ethic of stewardship.

Many teachers who want students to consider all sides to a natural resource conflict use role-plays. To make them topical, I conduct interviews and other research and write my own scenarios. This takes time, but it allows me to add realism — especially if locals are invited to contribute narration and judge presentations. And like all effective role-plays, my scenarios mandate solving a real problem. It’s not enough for students to pretend they are a logger or an activist who lives in a tree. They need to research a local problem, talk to real people and collect scientific facts. After the presentations, the goal needs to be real public outcomes that include gathering hard data, which in turn leads to actions that heal damaged watersheds and reduce conflict between interest groups.

Here, it’s about water — more than 100 inches of rain falls annually in some parts of the county. One point all sides agree on is that, with that much water flowing over land to the sea, water quality is seriously compromised by logging, livestock and development, which in turn threatens wildlife and people and the special character of Tillamook County.

My class studies water quality and ways to go about improving it. Often we find practices (many performed by the students’ parents) that contribute to poor water quality. But we don’t blame or castigate. We decide together what we can accomplish to help our local watershed. We then labor to transform the water and ourselves.

The labor we perform is nonconfrontational and, as I see it, apolitical. I have yet to encounter anyone who objects to having students plant trees and native grasses; remove non-native plants; assess culverts that block fish passage; conduct spawning surveys for salmon; test water for high temperature, sedimentation and fecal coliform bacteria; monitor macro-invertebrate populations; and — my personal favorite ­— sling fish carcasses into nutrient-deprived streams. All of these activities provide students with exciting and legitimate field experience in science. And, to me, they have sort of an evangelical feel, because they rely on great faith that our efforts will matter.

In fact, I call what we do a baptism because it is about a cleansing and forming a new covenant for the watershed and the people who use it. “Baptize yourself in the watershed!” is my rallying cry, which surprises me, since I’m not religious. Even the children of loggers and ranchers who want to keep on doing what their parents do can get behind my slogan. Together we can save the watersheds for all of us, including wildlife, and wash away any conflict that stands in the way of — well, salvation.

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At the time this article was written, Matt Love was an environmental educator and writer based in northwestern Oregon.  This article is reprinted from the Fall 2000 issue of Teaching Tolerance Magazine, published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, 400 Washington Ave., Montgomery AL 36104.

Activity: Watershed Awareness 

Bringing a local focus to education about environmental conflict starts from the ground up — literally. A good way for students to begin is by mapping the natural resource uses (private, public and industrial) in a given watershed. Here are some basic steps that can be adapted for use at all grade l

Map your watershed. After students have a basic scientific grasp of what a watershed is (especially how topography plays a role), have them map from memory the watershed they live in and what goes on there.

Go deeper. At an age-appropriate level, make a complete geographical, scientific and cultural study of your watershed. have the class explore topics ranging from elevation, water quality, endangered species and politics to oral history and local natural disasters (to name a few), so they can gain a complete picture. Remember, watershed awareness involves much more than just science.

Create a model. Have students construct a scale model of their watershed, using clay, sand, Legos, cardboard or — my personal favorite — gingerbread. With the gingerbread, use icing of various colors to distinguish waterways, forests, farmland and developed areas. An edible map can prompt a lively discussion about the “consumption” of natural resources.

Take action. A detailed examination of any watershed almost invariably reveals significant environmental problems. Fortunately, many of these problems have been the focus of intense study by government agencies.

Have students research local environmental assessments and compile proposed solutions for healing damaged watersheds. Many of these action steps, such as tree-planting, reduction of pesticide use, and removal of non-native plants, are ideal for service learning projects.