Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘bruce gellerman’

Child Environmentalists

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 5, 2013| Leave a Comment »

On the radio show “Living on Earth,” Bruce Gllerman interviewed Antioch education professor David Sobel recently about helping kids grow up to care about nature.

“Research shows that adults who are strong environmental stewards were allowed to explore nature unfettered as kids. …  Sobel says educators are too focused on rules and making sure that students learn correct scientific terms instead letting kids be kids. …

“SOBEL: Kids should have alone time in the woods. If it gets crazy, then there should be some adult intervention. … There needs to be a large quotient of being outdoors, in the meadows and in the woods, as well as the more didactic, pictorial experience of IMAX and National Geographic.

“GELLERMAN: So basically, take the kid kayaking.

“SOBEL: Take the kid kayaking. Take the kid berry-picking.

“GELLERMAN: Well, [with] a lot of parents — you say ‘berry-picking’ and they’ll say, ‘Oh my gosh, they’ll pick something poisonous!’ I know I take my kid mushrooming, and I tell other parents, and they look at me like ‘Oh my God, should we call the police on this guy?’

“SOBEL: Exactly. It’s fascinating how shocked and disapproving other parents are about [that] kind of behavior. … One of the things in childhood that seems to shape environmental behaviors in adulthood is parents taking their kids mushroom picking and berry picking: selecting a natural resource for consumption …

“GELLERMAN: You know, Professor, if I were asked, I could trace my environmentalism to when I was just maybe four years old. And my mother gave me a spoon, put me in the garden, and I started digging to China. Do you have a memory like that?

“SOBEL: The analogous memory that I recount is a snow day when I was about eight years old. And my friends and I decided we would play this game where they were gonna go off and I was gonna to follow them fifteen minutes later. And in the midst of tromping through waist-deep snow all by myself, my glasses were fogging up, I had one of those little epiphany moments: that I was out here, all by myself, in the snowy wilderness, and wasn’t this great! It’s a recurrent phenomenon that kids have these great moments, somewhere in early to middle childhood, that often connect them to the natural world.”

More at the website, where you also can listen to the recording of the interview.

Photo: Flickr CC/your neighborhood librarian
Walking in the woods. 

Read Full Post »

Kicking the Plastics Habit

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 7, 2012| 6 Comments »

Not long ago, I listened to a certain “Living on Earth” radio broadcast with amazement. A woman was explaining how she made up her mind to live without plastics. She did not make the effort sound easy, but she did make me think of ways I might cut back.

The “Living on Earth” account begins,”We live in a plastic-filled world. It’s used in almost everything, from cars to chewing gum to prescription drug bottles. Five years ago, Beth Terry decided to stop consuming plastic and she’s survived to tell the tale. Host Bruce Gellerman talks with Terry about her new book, ‘Plastic Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Too.’ ”

Terry tells the host, “Five years ago, almost to the day, I stumbled across an article about the plastic pollution problem in the ocean. And what completely blew my mind, and broke my heart, was this photo I saw of a dead albatross chick on Midway Island, thousands of miles from civilization — halfway between the United States and Japan. And it was just the carcass; it was full of plastic pieces. Like the plastic that I used on an everyday basis — things like bottle caps, things that didn’t come from the middle of the Pacific Ocean — they came from us. I just had to change. …

“I didn’t commit to stop using the plastic I already had, first of all, and I don’t recommend that anybody go through their house and purge the plastic and throw it away, because that’s just so wasteful, I think. But when my computer broke and it couldn’t be fixed — my first step is always to try and fix things and make them last as long as possible — but, when it couldn’t be fixed, I looked on Craig’s List and I found a secondhand computer.”

My own worry about plastics is how unstable the components are and how chemicals may escape into the air we breathe and the water we drink. When plastics are heated, as in a microwave, they can be dangerous. Please use ceramic containers for warming food in your — er — plastic microwave.

Read more of Terry’s alternatives to buying new plastics at “Living on Earth.”

Photograph: Beth Terry, with the plastic she collected in the first half of 2007.

Read Full Post »