Taking Root is the title of a documentary telling the compelling story of Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai. A seemingly innocuous idea, Maathai discovered that tree planting had a ripple effect of empowering change. Planting trees for fuel, shade, and food is not exactly something that anyone would envision as the first step toward winning such a prestigious award, but as the trees grew, a spirit of hope and confidence also grew in ordinary citizens. Now over twenty years and thirty-five million trees later, the physical and social landscape of Kenya has completely changed.
Many children have few opportunities to break away from their screen oriented lives and get outside to participate in positive outdoor activities and experience nature in a fun way. Over the past school year I have had the chance to provide such opportunities once a month for a local class of third graders through a program known as Taking Root. With the objective of garnishing meaningful interactions between children and the open spaces around them; I was able to share and model my enthusiasm about nature and caring for the environment with 26 youngsters. Unlike so many school activities, lessons in this program were not standard driven; the idea was never to get children to understand the big ecologic picture, but to teach attitudes of curiosity, responsibility, and care for the environment. This was done through the intimate study of individual landscape features: plants, bugs, birds, water, etc. All within a preserved open space just beyond the back fence of the playground. Rather than focusing on proper identification, activities were based on observation and formation of meaningful memories; cattails became known as hotdog plants and mountain chickadee are “cheese-bur-ger” birds.
School and life in general, for a third grader is exceptionally riddled with rules. Just as it is for adults, nature provides the chance for escape and undistracted enjoyment of the moment. It’s okay to run, yell, and throw rocks, if you’re not hoping to see wildlife that is. Environmental education is an opportunity to show kids that school is not a form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world. Similarly to the way Wangari Maathai helped progress a nation using the environment as a tool toward empowerment; our interactions with Mother Nature and her children are the beginnings of potential preservation and conservation. Can we teach children to look at a flower and see all the things it represents: beauty, the health of an ecosystem, and beyond? Can we test for that? Or should we simply appreciate a child’s infatuation with something beautiful and leave the rest up to them?