Pedagogy of Ecology

“A teacher should carry a theme- a refrain to sing ideas from. Mine was what they call ‘ecology’ now. I taught children first the system of things. Later we went to grammar and sums. Always time for that. I wanted to show them there’s only one place they can get an education- in the school of thought. Learning rules is useful, but it isn’t education. Education is thinking, and thinking is looking for yourself and seeing what’s there, not what you got told was there. Then you put what you see together. It’s more difficult to get kids today to look for themselves. They wan their visions to be televisions. ‘Eyeballs!’ I said to them. Once your eyeballs start working, then you can see the land is kind.”

Alice Venable MiddletonSmith Island, MD 1978

Environmental Science

• Environment: Circumstances and conditions that surround an organism or group of organisms. Social and cultural conditions that affect an individual or community

• Environmental Science:Systematic study of our environment and our place in it

Brief History of Environmentalism

• Utilitarian Conservation- resources should be sued for the greatest good, for the greatest number of people

• Biocentric Preservation- organisms should be preserved because they have a fundamental right to exist

John Muir

Gifford Pinchot

Rachel Carson

Current Conditions

– Decline in ecosystems to produce the goods and services on which we depend

• Between 1/3 to 2/3 of all species could be extinct by the middle of the 21st Century.

– One fifth (1.3 billion) of the world’s population lives in acute poverty with <$U.S. 1/day

Difficult Choices

Environmental Science Vocabulary•Environment

•Natural Resource

•Habitat

•Ecology

•Organism

•Commons

•Economics

•Ecosystem

•Population

•Stakeholder

•Sustainability