Place-Based Education by David Sobel

As a librarian, unfortunately, opportunities to educate students in the manner described by David Sobel in his two excellent books never arise, but reading his books sparked two memories that are always with me:

1. I've always been a tree-hugger. I think that after I die, if I did come back to earth, it would most definitely be as a tree. This arboreal love developed during my teens, when I was a Girl Scout. My summers were spent living in the woods, setting up campsites, building lean-tos, digging latrines, and cooking over an open fire. One day when we were dismantling a campsite to move on, my counselor asked me to pick up a crushed milk carton that was on the ground. When I replied that it wasn't ours, she simply said, "Wherever you go in life, Barbara, always leave the place a little better than when you found it." This has been the guiding principle of my entire life.

2. In college, I took a year of geology with two inspiring laboratory professors. During my first semester, we took a trip to the Delaware Water Gap where, with miniature picks and chisels, we extracted fossils of trilobites and graptolites from the side of a mountain. It was exhilarating to find all these "real-life" fossils that looked just like the pictures in our textbook. The second semester, we went to Bronx Park where we saw first hand ancient rock formations, and found specimens of the rocks we'd been studying. As we passed one very large outcropping, my professor, noting that right in the middle of it were some large dog droppings, wryly commented, "These are a fine example of Manhattan schist."

Here it is some 40 years later, and I remember these forays into the wilds as vividly as if they happened yesterday. Imagine the impact we could have on our children if this were still done. Alas.

"Feed," an excellent young adult novel by M. T. Anderson, is about a future society disconnected from the natural world. Earth had become so overcrowded that people lived in layers, the highest being the only one in which people could see sky, and the lowest the only one where people lived with trees and grass. I recommend it highly.

To this day, I cry -- quite literally -- when I pass workers chopping down beautiful trees to widen our roads to accommodate more cars. Though I'm a single woman who likes to date, I chose to live in the suburbs (where there is a dearth of single men) rather than Manhattan after my divorce because I couldn’t bear to live without the smell of wet grass, newly blooming trees, and the sounds of birds. A tree-hugger to the end, I guess.