Today I attended the first ever White House Summit on environmental education.  There were speakers ranging from Richard Louv to NASCAR. 

The Presidential Environmental Youth Awardees were inspiring.  And it was wonderful to hear Education Secretary Arne Duncan express his enthusiasm for environmental education and the new Green Ribbon Schools program (inaugural winners to be announced on 4/23/12!).

However, it was pretty clear from the onset that there was indeed an elephant in the room…

Just a few weeks ago the White House recommended to Congress (through its annual budget request) the effective elimination of three environmental education programs that were funded by Congress at about $35 million last year (or about 1/4 the cost of a F-22 Raptor fighter jet).

What does the elimination of these programs mean?  What is at risk?  First, let’s consider just a few examples pulled from thousands of local grants to schools, nature centers, parks, zoos, science centers, natural history museums, aquariums and other community-based organizations over the years:

• Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Missouri received an EPA grant to engage their youth in environmental education and outdoor experiences.
• The Galeton School District in Pennsylvania received EPA funds for under-served students to monitor water quality to determine the environmental impact of natural gas extraction from Marcellus Shale.  
• Environmental Learning for Kids (ELK) in Denver, Colorado, received an EPA grant to provide career, leadership and life skills for you under-served youth through its Leadership Corps program.
• The Seacoast Science Center in New Hampshire received a NOAA grant to create new partnerships across New England for teaching informal, outdoor ocean science to under-served families in five New England communities.
• The Science Museum of Virginia received NOAA funds to provide earth science and climate change education for visitors through its Science on a Sphere platform.
• Trout Unlimited in the Chesapeake region received a NOAA B-WET grant for their Potomac Waters Youth Education Initiative to educate students about the importance of headwater streams to brook trout and the entire watershed.
• The University of Wisconsin received a NSF grant to create a regional Great Lakes network to increase the adoption of effective climate change education programs by working with teachers, businesses and the public.
   

This is just the tip of the iceberg!  These funds support programs like National Public Lands Day and the development of innovative curricula.  The National Environmental Education Foundation has leveraged millions of dollar in public/private partnerships through a modest federal investment.

At the summit, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that EPA would maintain $5 million in funding for FY 2013, which is about half of what Congress provided last year.  This is a good step, but we still have not seen a detailed plan for how these funds would translate to grants and other support from EPA. 

Administrator Jackson also reinstated an inter-agency task force created by the 1990 National Environmental Education Act to improve coordination among federal agencies and stakeholders.

Unlike the steps announced by EPA, no one mentioned the major cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Program or the National Science Foundation environmental education programs.

At the end of the day I left with some new ideas and was pleased with the reinstated task force,  but I did not hear a commitment to the financial investment our nation needs to prepare the next generation to address climate change and enter the new green jobs sector.

Did you attend the summit?  Watch it online?  Please share your thoughts with me by leaving a comment below.  And stay tuned for future action alerts to support environmental education.

Today the bi-partisan No Child Left Inside Act (NCLI) (S.1372 and H.R. 2547) was introduced by Senators Jack Reed (D-RI), Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Congressman John Sarbanes (D-MD).  The NCLI Act will provide states with incentives to create environmental literacy plans. Historically, this legislation has been overwhelmingly bi-partisan passing the House back in 2008 with 68 Republicans voting in favor of the measure.  As the Elementary and Secondary Education Act works its way through the House and Senate for reauthorization we have been busy working with the NCLI Coalition on Capitol Hill educating Members of the importance of environmental literacy for our future success in the 21^st Century. Currently there are over 40 states that are in various stages of working on environmental literacy plans and the introduction of NCLI helps to fuel the momentum.  NCLI will help put environmental education back in our nation’s classrooms and provide our future workforce with the environmental foundation they need today, to address the environmentally-based economic problems of tomorrow!

TAKE ACTION: Urge Congress to support the No Child Left Inside Act!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last week must have been a slow news week for the right wing media,  as the new Maryland state environmental education graduation requirement was placed on their “most wanted” media hit list alongside the First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign; which is as much about children’s health as it is about our military readiness.  Reports have come out that we as a society have become too fat to fight!  Regardless of the reports the right wing continues to attack the program and now they have set their sights on environmental education.

Last week on Sean Hannity’s Fox news show, he railed against the environmental literacy requirement just passed by the Maryland Board of Education.  He suggested that teaching children about the environment was somehow pushing climate change “propaganda”.   What do you think gets the Hannity Fox news “Take back America” clan so riled up about getting kids in touch with nature and learning better in school through hands-on environmental education?  Do they fear it means that when kids grow up they will be less likely to follow their right wing policies that result in dirty air and water in our communities if they understand all sides of an issue including their impact on the environment? Under the new Maryland requirement, students will need to exhibit their understanding of energy, matter, and sustainability among other issues in order to graduate.  Why is that bad? We need to teach kids the full story about the environment and the challenges they will face, we can’t ruin the planet and burden future generations further by not telling them the full story.

No one really knows what’s behind the right wing’s radical agenda, other than billions of dollars (thanks Koch brothers)!

Environmental Education and playing outdoors in nature is a child’s fundamental right.  Kids these days spend 7-8 hours in front of a screen and only 4-7 minutes outside in unstructured play.  Therefore, any measure such as a graduation requirement that will get our kids off the couch and out of doctor’s offices waiting for adolescent diabetes medication should be welcomed with open arms, not ridiculed as a “conspiracy indoctrination” scheme as “so and so” put it.   Hannity and the Tea Party enthusiasts want to keep our kids indoors, pumped up with sugar and fat, so once they wake up from their food haze they will be powerless and unprepared to reverse the damage being inflicted on our planet!

Environmental literacy is a pathway to maintaining U.S. technological leadership — by helping kids stay interested in and not bored by science and technology.

Environmental Education will not only prepare our children to be stewards of the environment but it will provide them with the skills necessary to innovate and lead in the 21^st Century clean energy economy.  Therefore, Maryland’s environmental education requirement should be cheered by anyone who cares about the future of our economy and ranking in the world!  The question we need to ask is why Hannity doesn’t want our kids to lead in the inevitable green economy? Why are they so bent on holding America back?

We need a thoughtful and educated workforce prepared to take America forward, not the noise of a clan of people with antiquated ideals that want to take our country “back” to the 20^th Century!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The U.S. Department of Education announced today the creation of the Green Ribbon Schools program, which will recognize schools that have taken great strides in greening their curricula, buildings, school grounds and overall building operations.

In a time when budgets are tight, the Department of Education is encouraging schools to engage in a creative win-win scenario – cutting expenses while using the school facilities as dynamic learning labs for students.

Here’s what Education Secretary Arne Duncan had to say:

“Environmental literacy is an important part of a well-rounded, world-class education. Through the Green Ribbon Schools program, we’ll be holding up schools that are leading the way in teaching science and in ways that show students the importance of developing clean energy sources and sustainable solutions for the environment.”

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley also spoke about the importance of environmental education and green schools to prepare Americans for the coming clean energy economy.

The effort to get the Green Ribbon program adopted by the Department was conceived and coordinated by the Campaign for Environmental Literacy (CEL), and the Green Ribbon campaign’s steering committee – CEL, Earth Day Network, the National Wildlife Federation and the U.S. Green Building Council – worked for over a year to make this happen. Seventy-five national and state organizations also supported the push for the initiative.

We are excited that this federal initiative supports the work of the National Wildlife Federation, which has helped more than 4,000 schools go green over the last 15 years through Certified Schoolyard Habitats and Eco-Schools USA.

Stay tuned for more details about Green Ribbon Schools in the coming weeks…

Written by: Danielle Moodie-Mills and Jenna Peters

This week, members of the No Child Left Inside (NCLI) coalition traveled from as far as Hawaii, New Mexico, and Kentucky to educate their Members of Congress about the NCLI Act and environmental education’s role in strengthening America’s competitiveness in the global economy.  Our ultimate goal is to convince Congress to embed the NCLI Act into the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) which we expect Congress to move on this summer!

After a training session at the National Wildlife Federation’s National Advocacy Center in Washington, D.C., with policy experts from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Earth Day Network, North American Association for Environmental Education, Association of Zoos and Aquariums, National Wildlife Federation and others, we left for meetings on Capitol Hill.

Members and staff were excited to hear from their constituents on such an important issue.  I joined a meeting with the Alliance for New Jersey Environmental Education who shared  a story  about a child who often “goofed around” in the back of the classroom, but perked up when her teacher started teaching about things that excited her like the trees outside and how they help produce the clean air she breaths.  Environmental Education is instrumental in this type of systems thinking and helps to foster innovation in America.  It empowers students to see the connection between their subject areas, their daily lives and interactions with the world around them.

By the end of the day, about a dozen state affiliates of the North American Association for Environmental Education met with more than 25 Congressional offices to educate them about the NCLI Act and environmental education’s role in the global, clean energy economy.  Check out this video report from leaders of the Environmental Education Association of New Mexico!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The inclusion of NCLI in ESEA will substantially strengthen America’s education systems by:

• Incentivizing states to develop State Environmental Literacy Plans to ensure that every student is prepared to understand the environmental challenges of the future;
• Funding professional development for teachers to deliver high quality environmental education and utilize the local environment as an extension of the classroom;
• Improving systems and critical thinking through environmental education which aids in boosting student achievement; and
• Encouraging teachers, administrators, and school leadership to make time and resources available for environmental education for all students.

We hope you will join us in supporting the No Child Left Inside Act by taking action online and joining the No Child Left Inside coalition.

NWF’s Campus Ecology Team is back for Day 2 of the Sustainability Education Summit where hundreds of environmental, education and business leaders are working together to create an action plan for sustainability education.

Just moments ago, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had this to say: “It’s been clear for a decade or more that education must play a central role in sustainable development… Today I promise that we [the Department of Education] will be a committed partner to advance a more environmentally literate and responsible society…Preparing our students to be good environmental citizens is some of the most important work we can do…”

Next up, Congressman John Sarbanes (D-MD), the lead sponsor of the No Child Left Inside Act, highlighted the importance of infusing environmental and outdoor education at the K-12 level and providing a dedicated focus on environmental education for the U.S. Department of Education.

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Sustainability activity is mushrooming on campuses around the nation-except in one vitally important place: college classrooms.  As the recent National Wildlife Federation National Report Card on Sustainability in Higher Education recently revealed, growing numbers of colleges and universities are building sustainability into their mission statements and campus master-plans, and into campus operations and student life. However, faculty and curriculum development on behalf of environmental studies appears to lag behind the progress made in these other campus sectors, and has lost some momentum since 2001.

In the Puget Sound region of Washington State, the Curriculum for the Bioregion initiative, which I direct, is embracing the urgent need for sustainability topics to become an accepted feature of college classes. The goal of the program is to have many more undergraduates encounter sustainability concepts in their courses, particularly in ways that relate to where they live, work, and play. To accomplish that goal, we need to engage large numbers of faculty members in sustainability teaching. And we need to demonstrate how sustainability ideas operate close at hand-on our campuses and in our surrounding communities.

In 2006, our planning phase revealed findings quite similar to those of the 2008 NWF National Report Card. While several campuses in the Puget Sound bioregion were starting to build sustainability goals into planning and campus operations, and while student activists had succeeded getting their student bodies to approve “green tag initiatives” on two campuses, faculty and curriculum development for sustainability education was almost non-existent.

To be sure, many universities had robust majors in place, in environmental studies and natural resources planning and management. But we found that opportunities for all students to gain understanding about environmental protection, environmental justice, or sustainability were remarkably few. For the most part, environmental topics were isolated in environmental science classes; sustainability was being taken up only in some global studies and business classes.  Global warming, climate change, and energy-among the most critical topics for today’s students to understand-were startlingly under-represented in the curriculum.  We began to realize that thousands of undergraduates could go through their entire college or university career without any exposure at all to sustainability as a lens with which to view the world-or a tool with which to make informed choices in their lives.  Not only that, undergraduates might encounter dozens of classes with no reference to the communities where they live or to the idea of citizenship in one’s home place.

Yet, at the same time, on the 18 campuses where we conducted our initial inquiry, we found faculty members from a variety of disciplines who wanted to learn more about the field of sustainability and its core ideas and how to build them into their classes. We also consulted several hundred students. While admitting they had only minimal knowledge of their home bioregion and its issues, these students said they were eager to learn about sustainability, especially how to use this knowledge in their homes and in workplaces.

Using that advice, with funding from The Russell Family Foundation, our Curriculum for the Bioregion initiative has been building “faculty learning communities” to work collaboratively on sustainability curriculum development. The goal is not a single course or curriculum but rather a diverse community of faculty members developing an array of engaging learning opportunities across the disciplines. The focus is on introductory courses in the disciplines (the 101-level courses) and on general education classes-and the faculty who teach them.  Faculty learning communities are developing teaching-and-learning activities and assignments related to core content or “big ideas” in the disciplines. (“Big ideas” are concepts that matter to faculty in their respective disciplines, but are also ideas powerful enough that students are likely to remember, recognize, and use them for many years.)

The rationale here is, first, that sustainability needs to be taught as core content in a course, not as something uncomfortably patched on as a sidebar or optional topic. Second, the sustainability learning opportunities need to appear in assignments. It is assignments that students take seriously. It is in assignments that students actually work with the material, the ideas, of a course. And it is through assignments that teachers can see how students are learning.

In the 2007-08 academic year, faculty learning communities were created for introductory biology and English composition-classes that typically are among the highest enrollment classes. Twenty faculty members in each community met over a year’s time to develop and share strategies for integrating core ideas and skills in their courses with sustainability contexts and content; each teacher agreed to develop one “teaching-and-learning activity” in depth and write it up for publication on the Washington Center website.

For example, a biology class, studying the fundamentals of energy cycles, researched the energy budgets and environmental implications related to producing different biofuels, asking the question, “How sustainable?” Another introductory biology class, learning the fundamentals of genetic expression, bought small samples of fresh salmon from local markets to sequence the salmon-tissue DNA with lab instrumentation. The DNA analysis revealed which salmon samples were wild Pacific salmon and which ones were farmed Atlantic salmon – offering an opportunity first to check “truth in labeling” and second to explore the worrisome environmental and economic impacts of salmon farming in the Pacific Northwest and to raise questions about sustainable fisheries.

Taking a literary approach, one English class built a “wiki site” about their neighborhoods on the north side of Seattle. Another, while analyzing how writers shape arguments with rhetorical devices, compared Thoreau’s classic 1862 essay “Walking” with contemporary Native American writer Linda Hogan’s 1990 essay of the same name, identifying and comparing the strategies each author used to ask us to form deeper bonds with the natural world.

This fall, the Curriculum for the Bioregion initiative is forming three new faculty learning communities, in the fields of chemistry; philosophy and religious studies; and sociology and anthropology.  These communities will each spend the year developing and sharing integrative assignments to teach sustainability in their respective introductory classes. In the coming years, the aspiration is to reach introductory classes in the 15 disciplines for which there is predictably high enrollment.

The emerging curriculum ideas will appear on the Washington Center website as a resource for a broader audience of faculty and to stimulate thinking about developing sustainability literacy. Additional opportunities such as summer faculty institutes and seed grants will make these opportunities more available to faculty-making it possible for them to create communities, share resources and strengthen one another’s professional practice.

The faculty members participating in this initiative come from different places with respect to their interests, their knowledge of this bioregion, and their background in sustainability studies. Yet, when they come together with both diverse perspectives and a spirit of generosity, the mutual support and learning is beyond measure. Our initial evaluations of the program reveal that these faculty members will continue to deepen their interests and capacities for teaching sustainability, especially with locally rooted examples and applications.

We need these kinds of communities of practice to be the trail-blazers for sustainability education. Not only are they providing curricular ideas, they are proving that every academic discipline has important things to say about healthy communities and about our responsibilities to future generations.