I came across an
article by David Orr,
ecology prof at Oberlin in Ohio. His analysis struck a chord in me as an educator--how modern society devalues human experience at the most basic, and therefore, most profound level.
Look how little time is spent these days with children--40% less than in 1965. The average American spends nine minutes shopping for every one minute playing with a kid. And yet, ironically, few of us really understand how we are "provisioned" in life--where and how we get food, water, energy. Increasingly we distance ourselves from human processes, and, as a sure sign how well this works, at the end of the day, we experience an acute shortage of time.
Stay with me after the flip--I'll make it "worth" your while.
The really informative and useful thing in Orr's article is how he looks at the structures, choices and reasons why, as a society, we have designed our way into a box: having no time for things we claim are most important to us and little connection to the impacts our life-choices have on the environment.
There's that old adage: You are what you .... teach. By that measure we modern Americans are a sad bunch. Here is Orr's riff on what we model to our children in terms of care and concern:
No society that loved children would consign nearly one in five to poverty (New York Times, August 12, 2000). No society that loved its children would put them in front of television for 4 hours each day. No society that loved its children would lace their food, air, water, and soil with thousands of chemicals whose total effect cannot be known. No society that loved its children would build so many prisons and so few parks and schools. No society that loved its children would teach them to recognize over 1000 corporate logos but fewer than a dozen plants and animals native to their home places. No society that loved its children would divorce them so completely from contact with soils, forests, streams, and wildlife. No society that loved its children would create places like the typical suburb or shopping mall. No society that loved its children would casually destroy real neighborhoods and communities in order to build even more highways. No society that loved its children would build so many glitzy sports stadiums while its public schools fall apart. No society that loved its children would build more shopping malls than high schools (Suzuki, 23). No society that loved its children would pave over 1,000,000 acres each year for even more shopping malls and parking lots. No society that loved its children would knowingly run even a small risk of future climatic disaster. No society that loved its children would use the practice of discounting in order to ignore its future problems. No society that loved its children would leave behind a legacy of ugliness and biotic impoverishment.
And I think they get the picture, don't they? The scene looks like this: our society is a grab-bag and you better get yours while you can. Certainly in education, the messages that standardized testing a la No Child Left Behind sends to young people are: you are in this alone, if you don't measure up you will be rejected/left behind, learning is a dull recitation of facts, only "authorities" possess the power to confer success and rewards.
To my mind there has been a catastrophic and overwhelming loss of ideals in this country over the last 30 years--not less their complete absence from contemporary politics. For my parents' generation, education was about self-improvement, identifying important ideals, being part of the civic fabric of society. Now we go to school for personal gain: jumping bloodlessly through hoops, collecting booty from the spoils of a corporate hoard, riding home to the safety and boredom of our sterilized castles.
But what Orr is really getting at, and what I feel is essential to emphasize in education is that how we live, what choices we make in terms of design--from "feedlots, mines, wells, clearcuts, waste dumps and factories"--makes the crucial difference between a world which supports and strengthens life and one which abuses and degrades it.
I love this quote by Wendell Berry that Orr puts in his article to illustrate the fundamental issues that human life encompasses:
To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.
And, of course, the baseline value for many of us, indeed, I would say for most of us in this country, is that we want to create a better world for our children. At least, that's what we keep saying over and over. Orr imagines what that would look like:
The starting point is the child itself and its need for joy, safety, parental love, play, and the opportunity to safely explore the wider world. Such awareness must begin early in life with the development of what Edith Cobb once called "compassionate intelligence" rooted in "biological motivation deriving from nature's history" (Cobb, 1977, 16). The child's "ecological sense of continuity with nature" is not mystical but is "basically aesthetic and infused with the joy in the power to know and to be" (Cobb, 23). Childhood is the "point of intersection between biology and cosmology, where the structuring of our worldviews and our philosophies of human purpose takes place." In other words, our minds are rooted as much in the ecology in which our childhood is lived as in our ("over emphasized") animal instincts. (Cobb, 101) Similarly, Paul Shepard once argued that mind and body are imprinted in the most fundamental ways by the "pattern of place" experienced in childhood (Shepard, 1996, pp. 93-108). For Shepard, the conclusion is that children must have the opportunity to "soak in a place" and to "return to that place to ponder the visible substrate of his own personality." (Shepard, 106). Conversely, the child's sense of connection to the world can be damaged by ecologically impoverished surroundings. And it can be damaged as well by exposure to violence, poverty, and even by too much affluence. It can be destroyed, in other words, when ugliness, both human and ecological, becomes the norm. Ecological design begins with the creation of places in which the ecology of imagination and ecological attachment can flourish. These would be safe urban and rural places that included biological diversity, wildness, flowing water, trees, animals, open fields, and room to roam--places in which beauty became the standard.
It may just be the educator in me going off, but WOW! And also, Right On! We need to hold people accountable for following through on their stated intentions to make the world a better place for children. It would change everything. But then, of course, that would mean that a lot of us would have to change, too. Not just personally, but how we live, what we do, what impacts we bring to our landscapes.
If we don't, as Orr points out, we can look forward to a generation even more alienated and distressed than the current one:
In an ecologically and esthetically impoverished landscape, it is harder for children and adolescents to find a larger meaning and purpose for their lives. Consequently, many children grow up feeling useless. In landscapes organized for convenience, commerce, and crime, and subsidized by cheap oil, we have little good work for them to do. Since we really do not need them to do real work, they learn few practical skills and little about responsibility. Their contacts with adults are frequently unsatisfactory. When they do work, it is all too often within a larger pattern of design failure. Flipping artery clogging burgers made from chemically saturated feedlot cows, for example, is not good work and neither is most of the other hourly work available to them. Over and over we profess our love for our children, but the evidence says otherwise. Rarely do we work with them. Rarely do we mentor them. We teach them few practical skills. At an early age they are deposited in front of mind-numbing television and later in front of computers. And we are astonished to learn that in large numbers they neither respect adults nor are they equipped with the basic skills and aptitudes necessary to live responsible and productive lives. Increasingly, they imitate the values they perceive in us with characteristic juvenile exaggeration.
So, what's the solution? Or, should we just give up?
Myself, I am a firm believer that we must continue to live our lives "as if". As if everything we do matters, because in my world, when I am teaching and working with children, everything does matter. From the courtesies and respect with which I address them to the patience and concern I show as a listener. It may feel useless or absurd sometimes, but the truly human part of our survival process is to do everything you can "as if" it really matters. And in this case, in getting closer to the actual "design" of our social structures, knowing them, changing them, making them better--more ethical and greener--we can live lives of greater integrity, gusto and wholeness.
Architectural design, in other words, is also a form of pedagogy that instructs us well or badly, but never fails to instruct. When we get the design of buildings and communities right they will instruct us properly in how we fit within larger patterns of energy and materials flows. They will tie our affections and minds to the care of particular places. When architecture becomes a form of ecological design it promotes ecological competence, the use of local energy and materials, and creates larger patterns of order.
I'm thinking of CSAs, hybrid vehicles, energy efficient shelter, renewable energies, --all the tangible ways that we can employ the best possible design to meet our needs. I don't think this is over-the-top, utopian, or a case of "back-to-the-land", and I do agree with Orr, "we've tried utopia in industrial terms and it did not work." There are viable alternatives here and, to my mind, Sweden is leading the way--developing sustainable living communities, reducing run-off, pollution, waste, making every intervention on the landscape as minimal and as hospitable as possible.
True, this is an awesome responsibility, but the flip-side is that it carries great rewards: integrity, wholeness, conscious intention, being able to love children honestly, with full commitment. And also, ensuring that the planet continues providing for us in a life-giving, abundant and beautiful way.
What could possibly be a more important thing for any of us to do as part of a community?