Finding the Rivers: Poetry in Ecological Education

Colin Cheney
Bachelor's of Arts in Environmental Studies
May 2001

The work of this thesis emerged from the lines of a poem by James Wright, "Beautiful Ohio." The poem is a meditation upon a waterfall of sewage spilling into the Ohio River, wherein Wright finds the human inhabitants of the riparian community of Martin's Ferry embodied. He writes,

And the light caught there
the solid speed of their lives
in the instant of that waterfall.
I know what we call it
most of the time.
But I have my own song for it
and sometimes, even today,
I call it beauty.

Wright's poem becomes the means through which he is able to draw himself into the ecology of his community, re-envisioning his relationship with the ecosystem he inhabits. If poetry, as Wright's poem suggests, has the potential to illuminate the problem of the human relationship to environment, as well as point toward a way of healing this relationship, how might poetry be treated as such in a pragmatic environmental studies setting? This work explores the ground that this question opens. The opportunity arose to explore how the environmental ethic of "Beautiful Ohio", and the practice of poetry itself, could be translated into a praxis of environmental education in Providence schools, in the Rhode Island River of Words (ROW) project. The practicum of River of Words, allowed for the exploration of poetry as a pragmatic means of delving into the problems in our inhabitation of our home, moving from theory into praxis. This central question this work explores is: what does poetry serve to bring to a place-based environmental education curriculum?

The work first explores the pedagogical and philosophical foundations for pursuing an education of the environment through poetry, drawing upon educational theorists, environmental educators, and poets. This leads into a discussion of the curriculum created and implemented through the Rhode Island River of Words project. As part of a Learn and Serve project, ten River of Words teachers taught in classrooms in two Providence High schools - Hope High school and the Moses Brown school.

By first looking into the poems written by the students in the project -poems that arise from spending time studying and exploring local river systems -the work looks into how the project served to promote ecological thinking and attentiveness and concern for place. The poems serve as the greatest testament to value of this narrative approach to environmental thinking, as they reveal a varied and rich awareness of ecological cycles, mindfulness of changes along a river over time, and a deepened temporal understanding of the Providence river systems and their use. The work closes with reflections and evaluations of the project and pedagogy, drawing upon student reactions, teacher comments and the students' own creative work. The final pages outline recommendations for the River of Words project, and for future humanities-based projects in the Center for Environmental Studies. The arc of this work reveals what an experiential approach to environmental issues accomplishes in enriching a study of local ecosystems - making the environment of personal concern and interest, using personal narratives and experience as the groundwork for eliciting broader environmental concern. Through poetry, one student wrote, "awareness becomes less passive observation…. when I write about it, I became more engaged & involved with it directly." Another noted, "every time I see those surroundings I will think of the poem and the instance of when I was writing it." The act of writing poetry becomes a way for students to be actively involved in the cycles of their ecosystems, writing themselves into the stories of their community.

It fell in the rain
and then seeped into the ground
finding the rivers. - Ben