Teaching Perception of Global Change
Life has been around on Earth for about 3 billion years. At the outset, it was a pretty simple affair — single celled organisms without a nucleus. Starting about 550 million years ago, life began to appear in new, more complicated forms. For most of the time since then, life has become more diverse and specialized. We can see this in the fossil record — over most of that 550 million year record, the number of different species of life has increased.
Over the entire, 550 million year span of time since the initial explosion of diversity, there have only been five periods when this pattern has been massively reversed — only five times when there has been a die-off resulting in a large-scale reduction in the number of species. These die-offs are called “mass extinctions” or “mega-extinctions” The most recent mega-extinction happened 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs and, in North America, around half the plant species that had been living before the extinction event.
Since mega-extinctions are very rare in the grand scheme of life and result in so much change, you would think that they are the kind of thing that you would notice. So, it might come as a surprise that the great majority of scientists who study the birth and death of species agree that we are now living through the early stages of the sixth mega-extinction. Mitch Thomashow, formerly of Antioch New England Graduate School and now the new president of Unity College, estimates that we are now losing between 1 and 3 species per hour. Compare this to an estimated background rate of extinction of between 1 and 5 species per year. Welcome to the sixth mega-extinction.
Becoming Aware of Global Change
How can we be living through a cataclysmic event–the kind of thing that has occurred on only five other occasions in the entire story of life on Earth–and not know it?
Bringing the Biosphere Home is Mitch Thomashow’s exploration of this question and of its implications for education. He asks what we can do to provide young people with tools that enable them to perceive global change. If people can learn to be aware of global change, awareness of the mega-extinction will follow. Since human activity is the cause of this mega-extinction, being aware of it is the first step toward taking action toward slowing it down, before it can have dire impacts that will affect not only places that we love, such as Acadia National Park, but also the well-being of our own human species. After all, the history of life on Earth to date shows that extinction events continue until the cause of the event is no longer present. In this case, that would be us.
The Central Role of Place
Thomashow argues that creating awareness of global change grows out of awareness of local change. It does not begin by telling people that we are in the midst of the sixth mega-extinction and that the sky is falling. “Mega-extinction” has no personal meaning; it is just an abstraction. As abstractions go, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average has more personal meaning. “Well, there is the mega-extinction thing to worry about–I hear that it could be bad–but at least the Dow is hitting new highs.” (And so it is, as I write this.)
Personal meaning comes from personal experience. This is why teaching students to perceive global change starts by teaching them to perceive local change. In turn, the first steps toward seeing local change consist of learning to be aware of what is around you in detail. You won’t notice a change in the timing of bird migration if you cannot tell one species of bird from another. You won’t be able to piece together the history of change in a forest if you can’t tell one species of tree from another.
Learning to Manage Scale
Thomashow makes the important observation that if you want to move beyond noticing a change to understanding it, you typically need to be able to juxtapose different levels of scale. For example, here at Acadia National Park we have a pretty good idea of which species of vascular plants are rare. To go beyond this observation to an understanding of the mechanisms that lead to rarity, it is necessary to drop down to a smaller scale, looking at soil chemistry and soil microorganisms. Moving down a level of scale can help in gaining an understanding of what makes the change happen.
Moving in the other direction, to a larger scale, provides a different kind of understanding. The broader scale can enable the observer to see context and impact. In our rare plant example, moving up a level of scale provides a look at the system in which the rare plant exists. What animals depend on this plant for food or shelter? What other plants share the ecological niche associated with this plant, perhaps competing with it and benefiting from its rarity?
The ability to shift from one spatial scale to another becomes all the more important as you “scale up” observations to encompass global change. Rather than centering on something at the scale of a rare plant community, you focus on entire ecoregions, looking at scales larger than a single region to understand the global context. Then, moving down-scale from the entire region, to forests and protected areas like Acadia National Park, you can begin to understand the mechanisms that create regional change.
As an example of the need to juxtapose radically different scales of observation, consider the problem that one of the L.L.Bean Acadia Research Fellows, Dr. Natalie Cleavitt of Cornell, ran into while she was looking at the impacts of air pollution and acid rain on a division of non-vascular plants called liverworts. She found that perceiving the effects of increased acidity (a fairly large scale effect) was only possible if she moved down below the forest level, and even below the research plot level, to look at changes in the kinds of trees that the liverworts grew on, and even at changes in location on individual trees.
Perceiving global change requires not only the ability to shift between spatial scales, but also between different time scales. The core concept of “mega-extinction” requires an ability to look at change over the past few decades in the context of change over the past few hundred years, and then again in the context of patterns unfolding over tens of thousands of years.
The need to help students move between different spatial and time scales takes us back to the idea that understanding of global change must begin with understanding of a particular place. Thomashow argues that only by rooting students firmly in knowledge of a specific place can you give them the framework required to move freely from the scale of microorganisms to the scale of global change. Similarly, understanding of change over time begins with a study of the geology, forest succession, and human use patterns of a particular place.
Imagination as Scientific Tool
You perceive global change by observing physical, local change — for example, changes in the timing of migration or, as Natalie Cleavitt discovered, changes in the kinds of trees that liverworts can grow on. You then connect that observation, through a series of linkages across different scales of time and space, to global patterns. It is that kind of observation that makes global change personal–not just an abstraction. It emerges with more substance than the Dow-Jones Industrial Average.
Making those linkages across different scales requires more than knowledge: It requires imagination. In Bringing the Biosphere Home Thomashow explores a variety of ways in which active use and training of imagination must be part of teaching students to perceive global change.
For example, imagination is a necessary element in storytelling, and construction of narratives is, in turn, an essential part of being able to reconstruct the natural history of a place or region over time. Imagination is also the key ingredient in the construction of metaphors and images. How else can we understand something like the ozone hole, making it personal and comprehensible, except through images and metaphors?
Imagination takes a different form as observers struggle to understand the world through the framework of other species. For example, Thomashow talks about E.O. Wilson’s drive to collect and systematize all knowledge of wolf spiders. Putting together the big picture emerging from all the data about wolf spiders ultimately required trying, as much as possible, to enter the species space of the spider. The result of this intense imaginative effort was empathy, insight, and respect. It was an imaginative act as well as a scientific one.
As is true of teaching students to fly through space and time, training students to use their imaginations in ways that lead to insight and to sharpened perception requires training grounded in the plants, animals, and ecology of a particular place.
Wonder, Doubt, and Hope
Being able to perceive and understand the living systems in some particular place surely involves a lot of biology, chemistry, geology, and ecology. Learning to extend perception to scales that are both larger and smaller than what you can readily observe in the field and learning to think about systems working over different spans of time requires science, mathematics, and imagination. But Mitch Thomashow argues that training young people to perceive global change requires more than science, math, and imagination.
Thomashow tells of a trip he made to the volcanic mountains surrounding Mexico City that are the destination of every monarch butterfly living east of the Rockies. Fluttering from milkweed to milkweed captured by wind currents, fluttering through fields, back yards, and across highways, the monarchs travel thousands of miles, all coming to this place. Thomashow writes:
“After about an hour of hiking, you enter the realm of the monarchs. At first, you don’t notice anything different, except a thicker, darker forest. Then someone points to a large oblong mass, drooping off a tree. … On closer glance you realize that these structures are the forms of hundreds of huddled monarch butterflies, nestled together for evening warmth in the high mountain forest. … You realize that the air is filled with butterflies, dropping from the sky after a feeding foray, preparing for sunset. Orange wings flutter throughout the forest. You observe the enormity of the colony. There are thousands and thousands of butterflies in this special grove of Oyamel firs–butterflies from all over North America. The butterflies drip from the trees into your heart … In observing the orange brilliance of the monarchs, in contemplating their remarkable passage, in the presence of their awesome confluence, in considering their fragility and resilience, you are overwhelmed with wonder.” [pp. 56-57]
Wonder is essential to sustaining lifelong commitment to inquiry and to disciplined, scientific perception. Encountering wonder can happen in many ways, particularly in a place such as we live here at Schoodic. It can happen in a kayak when surrounded by porpoises, when watching the mating flight of eagles, when looking closely and carefully at a colony of bryophytes in the forest, when looking at the stars. Enabling students to encounter the world in a way that creates wonder is a key step in training them to become dedicated observers.
But, as Thomashow notes, the training of a careful observer must temper wonder with doubt. Even as the commitment to scientific observation arises out of engagement with nature, the practice of science depends on detachment. So, training young people to be sensitive observers of global change means helping them find the way to balance wonder and doubt, engagement and detachment. In short, we need to train them to be fully human, in the finest, fullest sense of our understanding of human capacity.
A consequence of teaching the discipline of detachment alongside the commitment emerging from wonder is that the student must face the possibility of loss. Writing about his encounter with the monarch butterflies, Thomashow is also fully aware that the preserves that are the destination for all the monarchs are “islands in a sea of encroachment,” threatened by development, eroded mountainsides, and even illegal logging of the trees in the monarch’s forest preserve. He knows that, if current trends continue, “the monarch butterfly may face its doom within a few decades.”
The coupling of wonder and awe with potential loss can lead to despair and indifference. Providing a meaningful alternative to despair is a critically important part of training young people if we do, indeed, hope that they will continue to grow in their ability to perceive global change. Global change, particularly change in the midst of a mass extinction event, involves loss. The student must have a way to accept the possibility of loss; otherwise he or she will turn away from engagement in perceiving change. Thomashow illustrates this with a quotation from Scott Russell Sanders’ book, Hunting for Hope. Sanders’s son says:
“You make me feel the planet’s dying and people are to blame and nothing can be done about it. There’s no room for hope. Maybe you can get by without hope, but I can’t. I’ve got a lot of living still to do. I have to believe there’s a way we can get out of this mess. Otherwise what’s the point? Why study, why work — why do anything at all if it’s going to hell?” [p. 67 in Thomashow]
Because children come to the educational program with different religious beliefs and backgrounds, hope will come in different forms for different people. But, within the framework of studying global change, it is important that the foundation for hope builds on the same concepts and principles that make up the foundation for perceiving change: the ability to observe closely, the ability to juxtapose radically different scales of space and of time, and the ability to imagine. Hope emerges from taking the long view. It is an essential part of training children to perceive global change.
Teaching Perception of Global Change
It should be clear from this review of Mitch Thomashow’s Bringing the Biosphere Home that he has written an ambitious book. It is about biology and ecology, but also about history, ethics, and the human condition. He makes a persuasive case that teaching young people to perceive global change is about much more than giving them the scientific tools and facts. We must also help students form connections to the world around them so that they care enough to commit to careful, sustained observation — observation that challenges each student’s intellectual and imaginative capability to span great ranges of space and time. We must also help students develop ways to sustain hope in the face of a lot of bad news.
Put another way, if someone is not aware of the sixth mega-extinction, it could be because he or she does not have mastery of the facts or of the techniques that are necessary to make such an abstraction real. We can address that problem by providing place-based scientific training that will allow the observer to juxtapose global scales with local observation.
Or, it could be that the sixth mega-extinction is invisible because observer is not sufficiently connected to the natural world, and so does not bother to make the investment of time, thought, and imagination required to perceive global change. We can address that by creating situations in which the student can develop a sense of wonder, leading to connection and commitment.
However, even given solid scientific skills, coupled with wonder and commitment, it could be that a student cannot “see” the sixth mega-extinction because he or she has no way to confront so much bad news. For this student, what is needed is a more vigorous basis for hope. We help the student achieve that foundation by showing him or her how to combine love of place, wonder at the mystery and power of life, and the ability to move beyond changes in the current time-scale to look at the bigger picture, over longer time.
What is striking about this combination of educational activities—acquisition of core knowledge, mastery of tools that span different scales, encounters with wonder, disciplined skepticism, and an outlook founded in hope–is that it comprises an educational program that embraces both the sciences and the arts. It is an educational program that nurtures the full, complete development of the student’s humanity.
It is not just about teaching about global change. We are also educating the whole person.
Schoodic as the PLACE for Global Change Education
The core element in this educational program is “place.” The educational experience and the emotional development both grow from attachment to a particular place and from engagement with the living systems, and their history, that make the place what it is.
The Schoodic Education and Research Center, located here in a quiet, beautiful part of Acadia National Park, surrounded by the waters of the Gulf of Maine, provides educators with important opportunities to foster such engagement and attachment. There are, of course, the physical facilities at the Center—the lodging, meeting, research, and classroom space. In other words, Schoodic is not just a park and a natural setting. It is also a fully-functioning residential educational institution.
As important as the facilities are, they are just tools. What is important about Schoodic is that this educational setting is part of Acadia National Park. The Park’s Schoodic District, where the Center is located, provides a wide variety of opportunities to observe natural systems, from seacoast to wetland to boreal forest. There are more than 2,000 acres, comprising a range of habitats to support place-based education. The Schoodic Peninsula is a richly diverse, flexible outdoor classroom.
In addition to the opportunities for place-based learning provided by Acadia National Park, there are the opportunities associated with the work of professional scientists who are conducting research in the Park. The Schoodic Education and Research Center, working closely with Acadia Partners for Science and Learning, supports a broad variety of research activities, including wildlife research, species inventories, studies of the ecological impact of invasive species, research into air and soil chemistry, watershed research, and modeling of change in the Park ecosystem. This work provides students with a broad variety of research problems as well as opportunities to learn from practicing scientists.
Finally, given the access to educational facilities the variety of habitats and instructional opportunities, and the community of working scientists at Acadia, perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the Park on the Schoodic Peninsula is its ability to generate awe and wonder. As Thomashow and others note, awe and wonder can emerge in many settings, from a backyard garden, a local pond, or a small city park. But as anyone who has visited here knows, Schoodic has the kind of presence and beauty that shakes a person from their usual habits of looking and feeling. It is the kind of place that brings the natural world to the forefront in the visitor’s mind. It is also the kind of place that, as one comes to know it better, inspires ever-deeper wonder and respect.
This ability to make students interrupt normal routines, watch more carefully, and engage more deeply might be Schoodic’s most powerful asset in the effort to help students become perceptive observers of global change.