Forest Fest: Reflections on An Environmental Education

Ever since my initial viewing, in first grade, I just could not wait to be a big fifth grader and participate in that culminating experience of Lower School: Forest Fest. Today, here I am, living on the edge of the rainforest, in many ways a dream that I thought would never come true. I’m here to admit it, Forest Fest got me. I took very deeply to heart all the information about the incredibly diverse rainforests with their species, as well as the incredibly rapid rates of logging. I even still remember some of the songs, whether written by students (its too bad there are no pictures or performances up here, only the lyrics), or sung every year like “Yanamamo”, the integral traditional opening based on an Amazonian tribe and complete with accompaniment by xylophone and glockenspiel; “Subsidized Stumps,” the popular stand-by with matching hand-motions (sample lyrics: "I said don’t cut down that tree, its part of a higher plan and if you do you’ll have to deal with meeee, I said don’t cut down that tree…"); and, of course, the deeply moving “Tree of Life”:

I am a very old tree I grow in brazil,
I have stood for a thousand years and I am standing still
Friendly delicate epiphytes find lodging on my bark,
their swinging ways do me now harm and they escape the dark

(chorus)
We are part of the tree of life and we cannot live without it,
We are part of the tree of life and we’ll perish if we doubt it

All of us need someone else, can anyone deny it?
None of us can live alone, its suicide to try it

Etc. (It’s better if you know the tune)

The level of detail I can remember from this seminal event 12 years ago is amazing, considering the fact that I can barely remember what I learned last year in college (just kidding Mom and Dad, well, sort-of). Additionally, I can very distinctly pin-point my cognizance of the environment in peril and the need of my active participation to help “save” it from this 5th grade Spring curriculum. It should perhaps be noted Forest Fest was no small undertaking; it was instead the culminating musical extravaganza of an entire spring semester dedicated to an integrated learning experience focused on the rainforests, both tropical and temperate.

Returning to the larger question, however, how many members of our 5th grade class are out now, actively participating in a campaign to “save the rainforest,” as cliché as that sounds? Perhaps just me. But even if I am alone in this endeavor, 1 out of 90, those are still pretty good odds. What’s more, I’m sure that this type of environmental education did not fall on deaf ears. How many from our class of over-privileged Philadelphia suburbs have an “environmental conscience” (whatever that is) of some sort? A good number, I would venture to say.

Unfortunately, “environmentalism” seems to have long been the strong-hold of the same subset of people that went to my K-12 private day school. Even at Harvard, the EAC or “Environmental Action Committee,” a group of which I was a proud member, was undeniably under-diverse. The lack of diversity in environment-related causes seems to be generally accepted and expected, but I don’t see why. Granted, I can think of a few arguments for why this is: minority groups or those from less-fortunate backgrounds have other, more pressing issues to worry about than the environment, so they want to take care of those first; only once they have eliminated these other problems of social-equality will they be able to fully participate. I also think that a strong sense of environmental responsibility is often highly related to a personal love of being outside and spending time in nature, which makes perfect intuitive sense. For those from the inner-cities, experience with nature is often harder to come-by, especially during formative early years.

Despite all this, however, I think it's time for a serious change. The problems of the environment run deeper than being a “crunchy granola tree hugger,” and the traditional perception of having the luxury to care about the environment. The environment is intimately linked with health and poverty, and an examination of those problems really cannot be taken out of their larger context. Furthermore, given current climate projections, I really have to wonder what issue is more pressing than the environment? Will it matter if we fix all the other problems if we no longer have a habitable world to live in? You may think I’m being an over-reactionary alarmist, but as anyone who has taken a good hard look at the climate data knows, the numbers are scary.

Finally, in the world of climate change models, one of the only things agreed upon is that the world’s poor will share the greatest burden of the changes to come. This is for a number of reasons. Geographically many of these poor countries are simply located in areas that already suffer somewhat more volatile weather events, and as extreme weather events rise those countries will be disproportionally affected. Additionally, for people already living on the edge, a change in weather patterns, creating say, a devastating drought or flood, will cause much more harm than in those countries with healthier populations and more developed infrastructure. Although this disproportionate burden is widely acknowledged, not nearly enough seems to be done, in my opinion, to mobilize social activists outside of the traditional category of “tree hugger.”

I don’t know where this long ramble really brings me. As with most interesting questions, there is no easy answer. A small part of the solution, however, may lie in the lesson of Forest Fest; the implementation of environmental education curriculum in schools across the country to capture the hearts and minds of children from all walks of life, the way mine was captured.