Environmental Education

When you look at your yard, you probably see some grass, a few flowers, maybe a bird or two. Susannah Lerman, 2010 Fellow and 2011 Leadership Grant recipient, sees a huge opportunity for wildlife habitat with little or no investment. Lerman began her career wanting to work with species in remote areas, but she soon realized that cities offer the best opportunities for educating people about nature. Now she finds ways to increase citizen participation in increasing wildlife habitat and reconnect people with nature, particularly in urban areas.

Mass Audubon has appointed Becky Cushing to succeed René Laubach as Berkshire Sanctuaries Director. She will oversee Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary in Lenox, as well as Canoe Meadows and Lime Kiln wildlife sanctuaries in Pittsfield and Sheffield, respectively. Cushing, 30, worked previously for Mass Audubon on Cape Cod and the South Coast, and returns to the respected conservation organization after working for The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in Vermont since 2013. On May 20, she will move into the position overseen for 29 years by Laubach, who retires at the end of this month.

"A plastic piece of play equipment is the same color, the same texture and the same shape every day," says Christy Merrick, director of the Natural Start Alliance, a Washington, D.C. play advocacy group for early-childhood educators. "We would advocate a much more naturalistic approach."

A Network Innovation grant supported a special series of events on conservation filmmaking at the North America Congress of the Society of Conservation Biology. Fellows Tara Cornelisse, Kristy Deiner, Naomi Fraga, Matt Hamilton and Sarah Reed helped organize the events, titled “How Filmmakers and Conservationists Connect People, Nature, and Climate”, which also featured ecologists, scriptwriters, directors and producers as panelists and participants.

This newest column from H. Bruce Rinker, Ph.D. might at first glance seem very specific to Virginia state politics. The fact that similar bills passed in Tennessee in 2012 and Louisiana in 2008 means it is a larger problem of which we think everyone should be aware.

To help bridge the gap between research and practice, NatureBridge partners with Dr. Nicole Ardoin at Stanford University and her team of researchers to create semiannual Environmental Education Research Bulletins. Their goal is to synthesize and summarize research recently reported in the peer-reviewed literature that may help environmental educators, organizations, and agencies critically reflect on and improve their practice.