Environmental Education

"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.

Dr. Harold Glasser, WMU's executive director for sustainability, was part of the original technical advisory committee that created STARS. He is enthusiastic about the opportunity for the campus to use the STARS system to better document the breadth of activity that is going on to build a campus culture of sustainability. In particular, he says, there is a tremendous amount of superb work in the realm of curriculum and research that needs to be documented along with the extensive energy conservation and environmental best practices for which WMU is already known.

The new O'Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm will grow a diverse crop of vegetables, flowers, fruit trees and specialty plants to teach students and the public about sustainable farming. The farm will work with other campus programs and plans to distribute some of the food, said Patrick Archie, director of the Stanford Educational Farm Program in the School of Earth Sciences.

Last week BBC News published the first results from a year-long project launched at London’s Science Museum in March, 2013. The study found that people were more likely to take positive steps towards reducing climate change when presented with action steps in game form rather than in the midst of a deluge of gloomy facts and figures.

During the 1980s, Mansfield Street in New Haven was an unlikely cradle for a writing career: the block was notorious for its crime rate, not its literary scene. But for Eric Jay Dolin (Yale Master of Environmental Management ’88), championing Mansfield, where he lived as a student at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, in New Haven Register op-eds provided an opportunity to both hone his craft and defend his turf. “They were calling it Manslaughter Street, which was a complete exaggeration,” Dolin recalls. “It was a much safer street than anybody realized, and I had to stand up for it.”