Boiled down, here are the five leading positive impacts from apple-a-day nature-based learning1 in schools:
🌿 1. Improved academic performance
🌿 2. Increased mental and physical wellness
🌿 3. Enhanced social emotional & 21st Century skills
🌿 4. More equitable learning experiences
🌿 5. Stronger emotional connections with more-than-human nature (and derivative environmental stewardship behaviors)
Given my audience/clients – typically educators – I spend most of my time focused on the first four.
I don’t know why though.
For me, #5 has always been at the heart of it. Of course an argument could be made for the primacy of any of the items on the list. We need students to feel well – mentally and physically – to have strong academic performance. We need students to build healthy relationships with others and to collaborate with people who are different from themselves to foster more equitable learning experiences. We could go on all day about what’s more important even while we agree it’s all important. Which is part of why apple-a-day nature-based learning is so awesome – since it makes headway on the whole list.
Still, if I were forced to weigh in on the chicken-eggness of this list, I believe #5 is where it starts. If we are in harmony with more-than-human nature – and feel a sense of agency and ability to act with reciprocity, I believe the other positive impacts will follow.
And today I’m feeling nervous about how #5 happens, even though I just wrote about an example from my daughters Clara and Nora.
Eek!
Murky
When I look at the trail through soap scum on the bottom of the tub with each scrape of the bucket, I am reminded about agency. And hope. About action. And love.
I feel a bit slimy too as my hand brushes against the mucousy film lining the basin.
I think about what drives us to become stewards of more-than-human nature – to take actions rooted in love and reciprocity. About when love alone yields awareness and stewardship and gratitude and action. And when it’s not enough.
I know love is what we need, and I worry it’s not all we need.
All of this is reflecting back at me through murky water.
Toilets
Our toilets at our rental house in Nairobi flush 7.5 liters (2 gallons) of water with each flush – though I recently sank a jar in each toilet’s tank to displace a liter and Eric lowered the floats a bit – so we’re probably at about 6 liters per flush now. The average American family of four uses 400 gallons of water per week, with 70% (280 gallons) of that dedicated to indoor water use. 27% (108 gallons) often goes to the toilet alone. Baths use another 30 gallons each, though we tend to draw shallow baths.
With this in mind, our tub generally contains stagnant bathwater tinted umber from the red Kenyan soil in which my kids play all day. Before I flush the toilets, I fill a bucket with the old bathwater. I close the lid, remove the tank’s cover, set it on the lid. I flush. Then I heave the overfilled bucket (worrying someday I will slip a disc doing so!), always sloshing some on the floor, and pour the sudsy water into the tank refilling it for the next flush. This has become our homemade greywater recycling system.
Beyond reusing bathwater and reducing our volume per flush, I still remember and abide by (as does my family) the signs hung on the bathroom stalls at my summer camp advising, “If it’s yellow let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.” Plus, as demonstrated when Nora (age 3.75) got home from ballet the other day and went straight into the grass to strip off her leotard and tights to pee in our yard, some (*cough* all) of our family members are known to “nature pee” from time to time.
It’s safe to say each of us is generally below the U.S. average of ~5 flushes per person per day.
Where does action come from?
The mellow-yellow practice has been with me since I was 11 years old. Nature peeing is a skill I have used for decades after years of my life spent in big outdoor spaces. And we have (too successfully) developed this skill in our daughters during our many family camping excursions and we are trying to walk it back a bit as they are now too comfortable “dropping trow” anywhere.
The homemade greywater system is new since moving to Kenya where our water comes from Nairobi Water and Sewerage Company only on Sundays to fill our tanks. Sometimes, during dry periods, and other times without apparent reason, the pressure is so low it doesn’t fill our tanks. If we run out, we have to pay for a noisy, diesel-belching bowser to deliver water so we can drink, cook, clean, and shower. This inconvenience is a valuable perspective, though it pales to the hardship faced by the 3 billion people (and rising) who face regular water shortages or the 2 billion people who don’t have safe drinking water. In spite of our weekly water woes, we are not part of that number.
Forcing Agent
The specter of running out of water and what a massive pain in the ass it would be for our household is part of what prompted my zealous water conservation behaviors. That was the immediate threat that jolted me into action this time.
It’s not entirely new for me to be “water wise.” In college, I would pee in the shower (sorry dorm-mates!) because I read it was a good way to conserve water and I was living in drought-stricken California. I also militantly turned off the water during my showers in a get wet – turn off water – shampoo – turn on water – rinse – turn off water – suds and conditioner – turn on water – rinse – turn off water routine. This was a big sacrifice for me because a hot, high-pressure shower is one of my very favorite things. And, since we’re being honest here, I have mostly returned to my hot, high-pressure showers (though sometimes – more frequently lately – I remember to have a bucket in the shower with me to catch some of the water running off my body before it goes down the drain – which also gets used for flushing toilets).
Our bucket flushing regime — coupled with other efforts — has been quite effective in reducing our water use. Since we’ve instituted it, we’ve been able to avoid the dreaded water truck all but once. Meanwhile we see them regularly at our neighbors’ houses. And, as someone who has always been fairly frugal in many dimensions of my life, I feel quite satisfied when I can “feed two birds with one scone,” getting some extra mileage out of dirty bathwater (and assuaging some of my guilt when I use reclaimed shower water).
Agency & Action
When I was around 10 years old, my mom got me the book 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do To Save The Earth. As promised by its title, it provided me with a lot of things I – as a 10-year old – could do. I loved it.
50 Simple Things quickly became my most dog-eared reference. With all of my developing type-A focus, I checked off each action taken. I wish I still had my copy. I remember it having things like turning off the lights and shutting off water while brushing teeth and whatnot. The “3 R’s” surely made an appearance.
I felt so empowered taking those actions. And most of the things remain deeply ingrained habits to this day.
Love
Type A-ness notwithstanding, I think I was such a fervent adherent to my 50-Simple-Things bible because I had formed a deep connection with more-than-human nature from early days. This connection was nurtured in the raspberry brambles at the end of our street and wildflowers at our bus stop, the woods behind our house and the waters of Lowes Creek where I would go on day-long excursions “to the Mississippi” in pursuit of soft shell turtles (and avoiding snapping ones) and watery adventure. I remember going to my best friend Ali’s house where we would wander to a small copse of trees on the hills behind her home. We set up full fledged kitchens – mimicking what we thought were practices of American Indians – grinding sandstone pebbles using larger stones we could palm with our little hands. We’d press the pebbles into a fine powder by crushing them in depressions in bigger, harder counter-sized boulders. We were preparing cornmeal with our manos and metates.
My deep, abiding love for Mother Nature was permanently etched into my veins on canoe expeditions through Camp Manito-wish YMCA, starting with 3 days in northern Wisconsin and setting me on a path that included leading 40 and 50 day backpacking and canoeing expeditions in the Alaskan and the Canadian Arctic.
One simply cannot spend that much time rocking in the earth’s cradle – seeing the actual curvature of the Earth on the horizon – in the most graceful, simple, and harmonious watercraft ever built (a canoe, of course!) and not feel a profound sense of awe and wonder and perspective and humility.
I have never felt so strong and so small as I did (and do) when I spend time immersed in so-called “wilderness” environments. As fraught as the concept of wilderness remains, I love the raw, unfiltered context in which I meet more-than-human nature and can see her more clearly and respond to her signals and terms.
I love more-than-human nature in a deep-in-my-bones way that can makes me ache and grieve. And feel the deepest of joys.
It’s the jars that bother me, though.
Recently, the ache was my own doing when I realized the jars I sank in my toilets displace responsibility even as they make a material difference — and they come from something other than love.
They got me all conflicted about my own motivations. And about what it takes to grow nature champions. About what it takes for any of us to take basic actions to “save our planet.” To live in reciprocity with more-than-human nature.
It wasn’t love that drove me to place those jars. It was a combination of pragmatism and self-interest.
I know this because, amongst the 50 Simple Things, I thought about the jars for more than 3 decades without taking action until now.
Did I think my mom would be annoyed that I was fiddling with our plumbing? Hardly. She never got mad at me for my environmental activism. Despite her version of camping remaining “being at the Ramada Inn with no towels,” my mom has always been a nature lover too. She tended her gardens with equal parts love and fervor and engaged my brother and I in extricating weeds. Our home regularly featured on Eau Claire’s garden tours.
She loves cut flowers. Alstroemerias (my dad-joke-Dad calls them “I’ll-still-marry-ya’s”) are her fave. In a first derivative bucolic Wisconsin stereotype, her aunt and uncle lived on a farm and she and her siblings had a horse named Flash who they would ride when they visited. Even where they lived right in town in Marshfield, Wisconsin was rural by most standards and all four siblings were voluntold to work in Grandma’s garden and join the canning operations that marked the change of seasons.
Even my dad, a man whose time outdoors was spent behind a mask wearing a catcher’s mitt in his youth – then holding other peoples’ golf clubs – then his own – still loved to chop firewood long after it was necessary, heating (partially) our big forest home with a wood burning furnace in our basement. He snowblowed (snowblew? Ahh! 🤦🏻♀️) passages in our yard for our Shitzsu and Bichion to manage their winter bathroom forays and he directed the snow on our driveway into a huge pile that my brother and I hollowed out for forts. He wouldn’t have stopped me from doing the jars either.
Did I just never get around to it? Did I not believe in it?
Those excuses fail the sniff test too. I was far too obsessed with tackling as many of the 50 Things as I could.
This has gotten me all bound up. The bathwater feels murkier after my jar episode.
Love alone just wasn’t enough. But love was there. So one thing is still clear: human love for more-than-human nature is essential. Existential. It is part of the answer, even if it’s not the whole of it.
When we know
So what can something as basic as apple-a-day nature-based learning in schools possibly hope to do about this? How can reading under a tree or going on a literacy scavenger hunt for objects that start with n-n-nests, needles, nuts make any difference, especially when I’ve spent weeks on end immersed in the wilderness and I still sometimes need a forcing agent to take basic actions?
I’m not totally sure about the whole of it.
Here’s what I do know. We won’t act with compassion for something or someone(s) to which we do not feel connected. Here the research is on my side (again): early emotional connections to nature drive stewardship behaviors. Apple-a-day nature-based learning in schools is one viable way to grow those connections.
So, in spite of my worry about what else we need, let’s get to the good work of fostering emotional connections with nature and stitching visible seams to reinforce the often invisible web holding us together. Let’s get started with regular doses of apple-a-day nature in schools. We know how. We can do it now. It matters.
And let’s not forget the jars either. When we know better – when we know what else is needed beyond love and how to make that happen too – let’s do better.
❤️ Becca
Nature-Based Learning (NBL) = learning outdoors or bringing elements of nature indoors for learning.
Apple-a-day NBL = modest actions incorporating nature that become part of the daily routine.