In the mid-1980′s I was a naturalist at Huron Clinton Metropark’s Kensington Nature Center, in Oakland County, MI. I averaged 300 public programs a year, with the majority of those school programs at the park or in schools. There were 4 of us at Kensington and roughly the same number at the other large metroparks.  In the ’80′s we still had bus-loads of students coming to the park throughout the school year.

Today many school districts can no longer afford to run buses at all, let alone for field trips. Here in Michigan we have specific, arbitrary standards for what children MUST learn in order for the schools and teachers get a passing mark, and I don’t believe that Environmental Education (EE) is high on the list.

These are very real issues which are impediments to expanding EE.  Still, expand it we must because we are raising generations of environmentally ignorant citizens, and the ramifications surround us and are lowering the quality of life for people on a global scale.   How is the problem.

Can we afford to spend more on EE and environmental interpretation when money is so scarce? I would suggest that we can’t afford not to spend money on them if we ever want the pot to grow bigger. Until we have an educated citizenry we’ll never be able to begin to address the looming environmental issues facing the Great Lakes in particular and our global environment generally.

I think it would be great if EVERY Great Lakes restoration project had a component of public education in it, maybe even have teachers on the project teams. Doing so would add the obvious benefits of capturing current work on the Great Lakes (And current is always more interesting.) and engaging a much broader community in these restoration projects.  Such an effort would have to be well planned and developed by folks who knew what the heck they were doing in order to avoid wasting those scarce dollars, but the opportunities for partnerships with school districts and universities to create the new curricula we need is vast. It would need to be addressed to K-12 grades, and university students, and it would have to be repeatable for other schools all across the watershed. Ideally all educational materials would be collected and available through one highly organized, amazingly interesting and outrageously fun internet site that was built for teachers and provided help and support for those teachers to be able to integrate EE into their lesson plans easily. Because we all know that if it isn’t easy it isn’t going to happen. Teachers, like all of us, are way too busy to be able to hunt through long lists of stuff, no matter how good it is.  And it should use current technology, not old technology (though there could certainly be overlap). Like developing units that can be presented with interactive white boards so that students can become really engaged and enthused. The world doesn’t need another coloring book.