"Burning Buildings" & Place-Based Environmental Education

My fiancée once posed a question to me: “If you were standing between two buildings, both on fire, with your loved ones in one building and a thousand strangers in the other, and you could only make it to one building in time who would you save?" Many people would argue that you have an obligation to save the greatest number of people, even if it results in the death of your loved ones. She argued the opposite, that you have an obligation to your loved ones, but she took it a step further. She said that the other building would take care of itself if everyone felt and acted in the same manner. There’s definitely a logic to that, and it appeals to my sense of personal responsibility (even if part of me does wonder about those in the other building). Furthermore, when it comes to problem-solving, those experiencing a problem generally have a more practical and realistic sense of what constitutes a successful resolution than those totally unconnected with it.

I think the same principle applies to environmental issues, as well. It’s easy to garner widespread support for polar bears, coral reefs, giant pandas, or mountain gorillas, and that support is valuable. However, one of the problems with flocking to global issues is that it leaves no one addressing the local ones. No, they might not be quite as glamorous, but they’re every bit as critical. More importantly, though, if a community isn't looking after its own environmental interests, who will? Even more significantly, in an era of many challenges, we need to start seeing nature as part of the solution to those challenges rather than something to be fixed. One need look no further than colony collapse disorder in bees to see just how important the natural world is to our own way of life.

Those who live in a particular area should have far more knowledge of (and far more stake in) how a given environmental issue is affecting them than a remote decision-maker. Take stream bank erosion, for instance, a problem that is very serious at the LREC in Missouri. It’s easy to make a blanket statement that total channelization would take care of that problem, but such a move would also impact the species that live in the riparian corridor, as well as make Deer Creek even “flashier” than it already is (one inch of rainfall in an hour can raise the water level about six feet). It interferes with groundwater recharge and speeds the creek up, worsening erosion problems elsewhere. I think that the situation would be far better than it is if we all did what was best for our section of the creek (modest slopes, plenty of vegetation to provide habitat & promote better water infiltration, trees to shade the creek from the sun, and runoff control to decrease the water flowing from impervious surfaces) and took care of the whole in due time. Further, I think we’d get a lot of satisfaction and a lot of benefits from that process. We need to- all of us should have a basic understanding of our immediate environment and, a relationship with it beyond that of a consumer. Hopefully, with exposure, we’d appreciate nature and ourselves more; eventually, I’d like to think that we’d come to be a community again, a group of organisms looking to themselves to meet their critical needs before looking outward. A key part of community is interdependence, and we’ve lost that somewhere along the way. Showing youth how the natural world they see every day operates, as well as how it benefits us as humans, can go a long way toward eliminating that deficit.

In the end, it makes the polar bear more relevant when you bring it up, not less.