Considering I grew up in a large urban city, my environmental education was a bit more extensive than one would expect. However, in retrospect, it was still not much. Throughout middle school, we were taught about the typical reduce, reuse, recycle, while also focussing a lot on pollution and the depletion of the ozone layer. I remember going on a field trip, where my class picked up trash around the area. Although I now realize this program was most likely set up for the purpose of reputation boosting, it was still significant to me. As Doug Larkin states in his article, “…teachers can develop student’s naturalist intelligence and critical consciousness by building on the ways they actually experience the world” (56). This experience helped me appreciate my neighborhood’s unique sense of nature and learn to care for it. Additionally, the reading “Exploring Our Urban Wilderness” by Mark Hansen made me realize that when I was younger, my view of the nature in my city was relatively negative and that it took a lot to alter that perspective. Overall, most of the things I learned in grades k-12 were just the surface level of environmental education. As discussed in chapter 1 of Bigelow and Swinehart’s book, everything is connected, yet many of my peers and I did not get a full education on the environment until we took a designated class for it.
