As environmental education becomes established in school curricula, the debate over what should and shouldn't be taught heats up. 

By Ted Williams

Tomorrow--June 8, 2000--will be Mark Twain Day at the Auburn, Massachusetts, middle school, and science teacher Mark Blazis has just reminded me that opportunities for environmental education are everywhere one looks. In celebration of this literary occasion, his seventh graders will participate in frog-calling and frog-jumping contests. (Twain wrote about a jumping frog, didn't he?) Today the class is practicing.

"Deeper, deeper," Blazis urges, rewinding the tape he made by slogging through local swamps on spring and summer weekends and shoving a Sennheiser directional microphone in the faces of the 10 species of frogs and toads native to Auburn. "Now listen."

"Baarooooom!," declares the real bullfrog, and a chubby redhead--suddenly very serious--tries again.

"Put him down," shouts Blazis with a grand flourish to the girl he's assigned to record the names of contestants. The kid slaps his buddy a high-five and returns to his desk. Blazis punches the fast-forward button. "Who wants to do the Fowler's toad? He sounds like a dirt bike." As the kids listen to this vocalization they flip to page 24 of A Field Guide to the Amphibians and Reptiles of Auburn and Southern Worcester County, researched, written, and illustrated by Auburn middle-schoolers. So far Blazis's students have published field guides to herps, birds, bird songs (an audiocassette), butterflies, arthropods, mammals, fish, marine beach life, wildflowers, ferns, and the school arboretum. Illustrations have to be accurate, so they're assigned to the best artists, but there's a research, typing, layout, or writing job for everyone else. The field guides pay for themselves, selling for $15 each.

The frog contests are well attended and hugely enjoyed by parents, press, and faculty. "Hold your frogs by the legs so you won't squeeze their organs," instructs Blazis at the jumping contest. A green frog wrenches free of a fist and, amid shrieks and laughter, leaps into a seated student's skirt. Presently all frogs are held in the middle of a circle painted on the parking lot. None may be touched once the race starts, and when it's over, each must be released precisely where it was captured. A green frog is the first to cross the painted line; two other greens tie for second. But to Blazis's delight, third place is claimed by an American toad, a species known for torpor.

On weekends during spring and fall, some of these students rise voluntarily at 4 A.M. to assist in a neotropical-bird study called The Rainforest Connection. Blazis does the banding, but his students open and close the mist nets, weigh and measure the birds, record data, and do the releasing. Then, in February and April, he completes the connection by taking the kids on field trips to the Amazon. But he doesn't leave it at that; he shows them how deforestation and habitat fragmentation in North and South America are causing these "tropical jewels," as he calls them, to vanish, impoverishing us and our planet. At the frog-calling contest Blazis had declared: "I'm not sure your grandchildren will be able to see or hear these animals. You know where they live. I showed you their habitat. We want you to save it so your grandchildren can enjoy them, too." His willingness to tell his students the truth about environmental degradation, to show them the reasons for it, and to urge them to take effective, responsible action is what distinguishes environmental education from environmental information.

Environmental education in America has come a long way since it began, circa Earth Day 1970. Fifteen states require it in elementary and secondary schools. About 150 colleges and universities grant degrees in environmental science, and an additional 400 conduct environmental-education programs. Still, environmental education is unfocused and uncoordinated--a starving waif vulnerable to opportunists. In 1994, the most recent year for which data is available, only 13 percent of secondary-education majors and 14 percent of elementary-education majors were required to take a course in environmental education. At last count only three states required it as part of teacher training.

Today teacher and student examinations include few if any questions related to the environment. So frazzled educators--increasingly teaching to standardized math and reading tests--tend to ignore environmental education, treating it as one more distraction from the main business at hand. "Historically, it has been a stepchild," says Tamar Chotzen, the National Audubon Society's senior vice-president for education and centers. "Real conservation is thought of as public-policy work or land acquisition or land management. Same thing on the education side, where environmental education is viewed as fluff. If we can show that it helps students do better in school--and research demonstrates that it does--I think we'll get significantly further."

To people who love and understand wildlife, the kind of learning I saw happening at the Auburn middle school is as good as it gets. In 1992, for example, Mark Blazis was named Nature Educator of the Year by the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History, an award that was presented by Peterson himself. But property-rights, wise-use activists are pretending that environmental education is a form of "brainwashing" that is threatening American freedom, and if they get their way, it will be replaced by environmental information. 

In Arizona, for example, this element circulated horror stories after the state began requiring environmental education through grade 12, in 1990. A scholastic aptitude test was reported to have been "written by the Rainforest Action Network . . . the entire test." (The organization denies any involvement.) Another story had it that second graders at Tucson's Canyon View Elementary School had been assigned to write protest letters to the local newspaper about a housing development. ("What, pray, do these young writers live in?" demanded two of the attackers--Michael Sanera and Jane Shaw--in The Wall Street Journal.) Actually, the kids had been upset when bulldozers suddenly appeared in their outdoor classroom and began knocking down saguaro cacti. They'd learned that the plant was disappearing from Arizona, that it was the state flower, that it could live for two centuries, that it was special. Teachers had made a "T chart" to present both sides of the issue. Then, when the kids had asked how they could make themselves heard, they'd been told that one option was to write letters to the editor.

In 1995 ultraconservative Arizona state representative Rusty Bowers (now a state senator) used these stories, along with a tale about how his son had been made soft on coyotes, to hatch a law that did away with mandatory environmental education. The law also: replaced a board of professionals with one spiked with people representing special interests, and including Sanera; precipitated the elimination of the state environmental-education specialist; and rerouted funding from the state education department to the land department. Optional environmental education is happening in the state, but it is sometimes supplemented with programs such as "Cotton Field Trip in a Box."

The groups mounting the national attack are called "think tanks," but a more accurate moniker would be "holding tanks." They include the George C. Marshall Institute, the Political Economy Research Center, and the ringleader, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, whose findings and pronouncements on environmental issues echo those of the extractive industries and corporate polluters that help fund it.

According to the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, based in Oakland, California, a major problem with environmental education today is indeed brainwashing--but brainwashing by the very industries funding the attack. For example, the video Aquarium Without Walls, which Exxon distributes to schools, makes the case that offshore oil production is good for the marine environment because fish are attracted to the legs of oil rigs. ("It's nice to know those aquariums without walls are out there providing homes for King Neptune's creatures.") In a Shell video called Fueling America's Future, the return path to nature is portrayed as a road over which one drives a gas-swilling 4x4, stopping to fill up at Shell stations. Chevron's video and teacher's guide on global warming pretend that there is great doubt about the danger of greenhouse gases. Dow Chemical--which gave us DDT, Agent Orange, and dioxin--has distributed a video called Chemipalooza, in which dancing teenagers sing about nature's glorious chemicals.

Gregory Smith, a professor of education at Lewis & Clark College, in Portland, Oregon, makes this observation: "Dollar-strapped schools often have few resources to devote to the purchase of new environmental-education materials. Teachers are instead forced to rely upon a burgeoning selection of industry-developed and distributed materials that suggest, for example . . . that increasing levels of atmospheric carbon [could] enhance plant growth (from an activity book distributed by the American Coal Foundation)."

The messiah for the attack on environmental education--and the person in part responsible for the stories used to sabotage Arizona's program--is Michael Sanera. Trained not in environmental education but in political science, Sanera bounces from one polluter-funded, right-wing think tank to the next, taking with him what he calls his Center for Environmental Education Research. (At this writing he and it are ensconced in the Washington, D.C.–based Competitive Enterprise Institute.) He is smart and eloquent, with a fine sense of what sells. In front of mainstream audiences he sounds calm and reasonable, but when addressing potential financial supporters, he takes on a different persona. The Seattle Times quotes him as proclaiming that environmental education in this country is monopolized by "radical greens" and that "young people are taught to be hostile to free enterprise and private property." After Sanera informed me he'd been misquoted, I passed along this information to Linda Shaw, the reporter who wrote the Times story, so that she might set the record straight. But Shaw faxed me a fund-raising letter signed by Sanera in which those very words appear.

The attack started going state to state only after it had stalled at the national level. The first target--still under fire--was the National Environmental Education Act of 1990, which mandates that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) fund and encourage environmental education. According to Sanera, it is "an abomination to give education responsibility to an advocacy organization--like having the NRA teach kids about guns." But the EPA--which is not an advocacy organization--promotes guidelines that encourage schools to teach students how to think, not what to think. Published by the North American Association for Environmental Education, these guidelines are commonly used, apparently even by Sanera, who says they are his standard for measuring the frightful bias of school textbooks. But in 1996, when drafts of the guidelines came out and before they became popular, he called them "worthless gruel." Now he charges the EPA with violating the guidelines by promoting "community action skills--EPA-ese for teaching political activism," and he claims that the agency's mindset is what has been degrading textbooks. But the EPA doesn't create, approve, or edit textbooks.

Sanera's arrival in a state is followed by a rash of op-ed complaints about the alleged deficiencies of environmental education, a study of textbooks, then model legislation submitted to right-wing elements of the legislature. This past spring, a law he has been promoting that requires environmental educators to "not include instruction in political action skills nor encourage political action activities" was accepted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (a group of state lawmakers that prepares model bills for state legislatures). According to Sanera's "mission statement," he intends to replace environmental education with environmental information--that is, ensure that America's students "receive unbiased environmental information which is based on sound science and economics" and "develop the critical-thinking skills needed to make informed decisions about complex environmental issues."

During our 70-minute phone conversation, Sanera referred to himself as a "scientist" perhaps a dozen times, and yet his articles and books depend almost entirely on anecdotes. This is a surprising approach for a scientist, because anecdotal research is not science at all but hearsay and happenstance. Using anecdotal research, my Bahamian fishing guide--angry about a 200-pound green sea turtle I'd made him release--was able to deduce that the species is "not endangered" because he sees "lots of them around Andros Island." 

Even if Sanera's anecdotes were true, they would be meaningless, because there is no method of determining whether or not they are typical. But the ones I looked at didn't check out. For example, still posted on the web site of the Center for the New West--one of his previous keepers--is his report that kids in Arizona were taught "how to picket Burger King." Sanera lives and works in Arizona, but when I asked him who taught this terrible lesson and where, he was unable to tell me. In The Wall Street Journal, Sanera used the anecdote of a distraught six-year-old who had informed her mother that "they killed trees to make my bed." He wrote that "the child's comment led her mother, Nancy Bray Cardozo, to take a second look at what her child was being taught," submitting the tale as yet more evidence that the kind of environmental education being encouraged and funded by the federal government is poisoning the minds of American youth. "Do we need federal support to perpetuate this kind of 'education'? " he demanded. "We don't think so. We think that parents want their children's environmental education to be based on good science."

But good scientists eschew assumptions and check secondhand information. When I asked Sanera if he had spoken with Cardozo, he said that he hadn't. He'd only read her article in Audubon. Had he bothered to contact her, he would have learned that the main problem she had with her daughter's environmental education was that there wasn't enough of it, and that what she most objected to was material provided by Weyerhaeuser. "When I wrote the piece, I thought it was pretty clear that I was pro environmental ed," Cardozo told me. "He took my statement completely out of context and twisted it around for his own purposes. Really, he got it backwards. It was very disappointing."

Perhaps Sanera's most ubiquitous anecdote, which he trots out as an example of how "facts frequently take a backseat in the environmental education our children receive at school," has appeared in The Las Vegas Review Journal, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Washington Times, and the book Sanera and Jane Shaw co-authored, Facts Not Fear: Teaching Children About the Environment. A nine-year-old named Melissa Poe had written George Bush as follows: "Mr. President, if you ignore this letter, we will all die of pollution and the ozone layer." If Sanera had placed the facts in the front seat and contacted Poe, he'd have discovered that she'd learned about the alleged threat to her life not at school but by watching a sappy television melodrama called Highway to Heaven.

Facts Not Fear, now in its 2nd edition and 11th printing, has sold 68,000 copies. Clearly, the nation is paying attention to it. At the end of each chapter parents and teachers are provided with questions and answers for kids. Question: "Are there too many people?" Answer: "No. The Earth's 'carrying capacity' is enormous." Also offered as fact: Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide in the air "causes more luxuriant growth, larger flowers, and greater crop yield"; acid rain "may be beneficial for some agricultural crops and trees"; and "the question of whether DDT does hurt the reproductive ability of bird populations is still not completely resolved." Don't worry about endangered species, because they're alive and well in zoos; don't worry about forests, because timber companies are planting monocultures of super-trees.

"If you stand up to Sanera a little, he just topples over," comments the National Audubon Society's Naki Stevens. "When the environmental community did not respond in Arizona, he succeeded in dismantling the state's environmental-education program. On the other hand, when grassroots networks and coalitions sprang up to challenge his junk science and ideological agenda [in Colorado, Washington, Wisconsin, and Iowa], they were successful." In May, Stevens and her colleagues began organizing an Audubon-led coalition to defend and strengthen environmental education. It will "inoculate" states against polluter-funded snake oil, but it will be proactive, too, encouraging grassroots support for environmental education.

It's a mistake, however, to suppose that the attack is being repulsed or that it has succeeded only in Arizona. When I asked Sanera what he considered his greatest triumph, he read me a passage from an article in E Magazine: "Sometimes it seems that the environmental-education agenda has been reduced to responding to Sanera's broadsides." Indeed it does.

As I talk to environmental educators around the country, I get the impression that Sanera has it right about his big success. Most of them seem goosey, quick to assure me they do not and should not encourage advocacy or, as Sanera puts it, "teach political-action skills." But why? That's not teaching children what to think; it's teaching them how to become engaged citizens--precisely the sort of lesson polluters and their hirelings want to derail. If we don't encourage public involvement, how can we expect children to progress from caring about the environment to doing something about its destruction? Are their best interests and the best interests of the nation really being served by tricking them into believing that the people they learn from and emulate are passionless drones devoid of opinion or that it is somehow unprofessional to have convictions and act on them? Is it really an "abomination" for the EPA to advocate a healthy environment and, at the same time, fund environmental education? After all, aren't we all in favor of our natural surroundings? What sane and sober human would not advocate the protection of human habitat? The next time a developer hacks out a subdivision near Canyon View Elementary School, I'll bet he leaves some of the saguaro cacti.

Perhaps Michael Frome, one of America's most respected environmental educators and authors, says it best: "Education, with only a few exceptions, is about careers, jobs, success in a materialistic world, elitism, rather than caring and sharing; it's about facts and figures, cognitive values, rather than feeling and art derived from the heart and soul; it's about conformity, being safe in a structured society, rather than individualism, the ability to question society and to constructively influence change in direction. A change in direction is critical and imperative. . . . Our most precious gift to the future, if you will ask me, is a point of view embodied in the protection of wild places that no longer can protect themselves. Conservation education thus must enlist not only rational recognition of the problem but human concern, distress, and love."

The important lesson taught by Mark Blazis on Mark Twain Day was not what each frog native to Auburn, Massachusetts, sounds like, but that all of them are special, worth paying attention to, worth defending, even if the fight gets ugly and scary. As I watched the happy kids in Huck Finn–style straw hats learning to love frogs and the places frogs abide, I had no doubt that they would one day inconvenience some developer who wanted to drain one of Auburn's few remaining swamps. But there's another possibility: Maybe they will educate him the way Mark Blazis is educating them. And maybe some of Auburn's future developers will think like the inspired educator who speaks frog and speaks for frogs and teaches that frogs and everything else we share this tired old planet with are priceless and irreplaceable. 

Editor-at-large Ted Williams is an activist. And proud of it.

What You Can Do

TEACH OUR CHILDREN WELL Three programs are setting the pace for objective, science-based environmental education in North America: Project WILD (301-527-8900; www.projectwild.org), Project Learning Tree (202-463-2462; www.PLT.org), and Project WET (406-994-5392; www.Montana.edu/wwwwet). But of our 2 million elementary and secondary teachers, only 93,000 a year are being trained in these programs. Get this training into your school district. If teachers balk, volunteer your help; in fact, volunteer it anyway. Remember, knowledge is far less important than enthusiasm. It's okay to learn with the kids; it's even okay to make mistakes. But get them outside into nature. Otherwise, says Mark Blazis, "it's like trying to teach them what ice cream tastes like without giving them any." --T. W.