Realizing the Educational Potential of Ecological Restoration
As individuals it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the continuing media coverage of environmental problems, such as climate change, species loss, and overpopulation. As a result it is often profoundly difficult to imagine ways to contribute meaningfully to
- PDF / 448,910 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 504 x 720 pts Page_size
- 34 Downloads / 232 Views
Realizing the Educational Potential of Ecological Restoration Kern Ewing and Warren Gold
As individuals it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the continuing media coverage of environmental problems, such as climate change, species loss, and overpopulation. As a result it is often profoundly difficult to imagine ways to contribute meaningfully to environmental solutions. Ecological restoration, however, provides hands-on opportunities for everyone, from the general populace to experts, to come together, forging solutions, and making a difference. Ecological restoration empowers people. Ecological restoration has the potential to do things beside motivating people to coalesce behind environmental issues, such as changing the way they think about their relationship to the land, and making them want to learn about their surroundings. With its ability to unleash the energy and interest of people, ecological restoration is a perfect vehicle for education because it engages people in ideas and subjects they find innately interesting and personally important.
History of Ecological Restoration Education at the University of Washington As ecological restoration developed in North America through the twentieth century, it became clear that long-term successful efforts were an inherently multidisciplinary endeavor, including knowledge and practices from the arts and humanities as well as the natural and social sciences. During this time, interest in restoring damaged ecosystems arose in many different academic programs at the University of Washington (UW). Landscape architecture faculty and students applied design and construction principles from their field, those in biology and forest resources used ecological principles to craft solutions, civil engineering and aquatic scientists combined interests in restoring degraded streams, and so on. In the late 1990s a group of UW faculty began to look for ways to knit these interests together, strengthening educational opportunities for students from across the academic spectrum that were interested in applying their expertise to restoration. These efforts coalesced with the formation of the University of Washington Restoration Ecology Network (UW-REN) in 1998. The development of UW-REN was D. Egan (eds.), Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration: Integrating Science, Nature, and Culture, 347 The Science and Practice of Ecological Restoration, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-039-2_24, © Island Press 2011
348
p e r s p e c t i v e : r e st o r a ti o n -b a se d e duca ti on
initially supported with a grant from the UW Tools-for-Transformation program, whose charge was to foster efforts that would change the intellectual landscape of the university. The three-year grant supported the development and linkage of restoration interests across and within the three UW campuses (Seattle, Tacoma, Bothell). In recent years, the UW has promoted the opportunities that undergraduate students have to make a difference by taking hands-on, applied courses that solve real problems and address community
Data Loading...
