An Invitation to Greener Practice

In the United States, thoughtful people have been thinking and talking about conservation and ecology for over 100 years. By 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt had already set aside over 42 million acres of national forests and created 53 national wildlife refuges. John Muir, one of the first modern preservationists, founded the Sierra Club in 1892, and it is still one of the most important conservation organizations in the United States today. In 1962, Rachel Carson published the book, Silent Spring, in which she describes the impact of agricultural chemicals on the environment, and in 1971, Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle was another wake-up call on the impact of industry on the world’s ecosystems, and was the required text for a course in ecology that I took at UMass in 1972. Here we are, more than 35 years after that course, and we have come to a place where we can longer just think and talk. We have to act. Every one of us in the field today has dedicated our lives to caring for the well-being of young children. Today, we must expand our definition of what this means. If we care about young children, we MUST care about the planet. We have come here to consider strategies and to develop a personal action plan for becoming “green” early childhood practitioners. Five years ago, it would have been difficult to find any information or guidelines for intentional conservationist practices in early childhood classrooms. Now, each day, there are more and more models to follow and ideas to consider from within our field. Child Care Information Exchange has joined the effort by including nature education and recycling topics in their daily e-newsletter. The World Forum Foundation has held national conferences on nature education practices. There are also several books available on the topic, including the provocatively titled: Last Child in the Woods, Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, by Richard Louv. In this book, the author offers a compelling case for bringing children back to the natural world, and the consequences if we do not. He cites several sources of evidence that show that nature has a positive impact on both learning and creativity, as well as the positive impact of nature to restore calm in children with so-called behavior and attention issues, even going so far as to suggest that the surge in these problems might even be related to the disconnect between children and nature. Today, I am asking you to consider the possibility that your actions CAN make a difference for the future. What are YOU going to do to make sure that one of your children is not the “Last child in the woods?”

Would you like to learn more about nature education for young children? Go to http://www.classroomtoclassroom.com/ and click on Book. This will take you to my new book, Science for the Whole Classroom, 2008, Infinity Publishing.