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The Appalachian trail: an environmental classroom.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Given recent observations about the detrimental effects of alienating children from nature, there should be a similar concern for addressing such effects in college students. "The Literature and Cultures of the Appalachian Trail" is a course that blends work inside in the classroom and outside on the trail as an answer to the effects of what Richard Louv has labeled "nature deficit."

"We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy."

Henry David Thoreau, "Natural History of Massachusetts"

Introduction

With all of the recent attention on the possible social effects of the alienation of children from nature, one wonders about the ways in which such alienation may affect university students. More than half a century ago, Aldo Leopold, in proposing his Land Ethic, suggested that perhaps the most serious impediment to the evolution of such an ethic is that "our educational and economic system is headed away from rather than toward, an intense consciousness of the land" (223-224). Recently, Lowell Monke, a former teacher of computer skills to elementary school children, critiqued the computer for inhibiting our ability as humans to learn from the nonhuman world. Monke writes that

Western pedagogy has always favored abstract knowledge over experiential learning. Even relying on books too much too early inhibits the ability of children to develop direct relationships with the subjects they are studying. But because of their power, computers drastically exacerbate this tendency, leading us to believe that vivid images, massive amounts of information, and even online conversations with experts provide an adequate substitute for conversing with the things themselves. (28)

Maybe the most noticed of recent work highlighting the potential deleterious effects of sequestering our children in front of computers or televisions is Richard Louv's. He writes that in a society that imposes on its children "an artificial environment for which they have not evolved," eventually "children and adults alike would suffer from what might be called nature-deficit disorder, not in a clinical sense, but as a condition caused by the cumulative human costs of alienation from nature, including diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses" (71).

Louv suggests the possibility that not only children but adults as well may suffer in significant ways from the changes our electronic technology has occasioned in the way we learn. His observations seem important to me because universities by and large don't require that graduating students be ecologically literate. We don't require our graduates to know anything about the environment where they live and attend classes, nor do we ask them to...

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