Albuquerque's Environmental Story
Albuquerque's Environmental StoryWhat it is? Why it was written?
Educating for a sustainable community was a concept spawned in Albuquerque in 1975 when Hy and Joan Rosner, newcomers to New Mexico, invited local community volunteers to contribute their varied expertise towards producing a teacher’s resource book in environmental education. Albuquerque’s Environmental Story (AES), printed in 1978, was motivated by an increasing disquiet with the City’s mushrooming growth and the effects such expansion could have on the quality and supply of water, open space, the waste disposal systems, the built environment and the area’s general quality of life.
It was soon apparent that AES was more than a teachers’ resource book, that it could serve as a basis for a unique environmental education program for use by the general adult community as well as the schools. Development of the book and the program involved an all community effort to identify basic elements that promote and support sustainability. Individuals, schools, government, the business sector, and public interest groups worked together to conceptualize, identify, create, and implement a shared vision designed to conserve natural resources, promote historic preservation, and celebrate diversity in both the natural and human worlds. What emerged was a holistic overview of the region’s natural, human, cultural, built and economic environments. Essentially, AES had the effect of teaching inhabitants of all ages-its present and future voters and decision-makers – that our quality of living and our future sustainability depend on each of us. To continue to enjoy the community most people cherish, it will be necessary to have the widespread, responsibility involved support of a citizenry which understands how the human and natural systems function, and recognizes that economic well-being is inextricably linked to the conservation of our natural resources.
The hands-on interpretive approach of the book is designed to heighten readers’ awareness, enhance their capacity to enjoy the beauty surrounding them, and develop a sense of social and environmental stewardship. AES is interdisciplinary and stresses critical thinking. It is structured to add relevance to, and inherently augment the teaching of basic skills for young students.
The authors deal with the basic problem of adding environmental education to an already crowded curriculum by making it possible to infuse these materials easily into the existing required curriculum. Educators who have used the book have found this an approach that promotes awareness, knowledge, valuing, and responsibility, while making the prescribed curriculum more interesting.
AES establishes a bridge between Albuquerque today and tomorrow and profiles such environmental topics as air, water quality, solid, and hazardous waste, energy, historic preservation, the built environment, transportation, neighborhoods and downtown redevelopment. Most are applicable to many US communities.
Climate, vegetation, wildlife, and terrain are studied and discussed along with an exploration of the area’s ethnic, racial, socioeconomic and neighborhood groupings. Readers develop a sense of place and become aware of shared commonalties in the problems and aspirations that underlie the differences they perceive in language and culture. This helps establish a base for mutual understanding and cooperation.
The focus is on Albuquerque’s mix of natural habitats and human culture. Its subsequent replication, The Dade County Environmental Story and The Florida Key’s Environmental Story, deal with South Florida ‘s similar mix. Its premise is that indeed people of all ages, not only young people in school, learn to understand how they interrelate with their own home, school, neighborhood and city, and how they will be developing a larger awareness, an extension of valuing and concern which will help them recognize interdependencies, and see the tie-ins between personal and community survival.
Readers learn to understand how a responsible approach to their immediate surroundings can help provide a clean, attractive, habitable place to live. This establishes a meaningful knowledge base for developing an environmental ethic and extrapolating their conservationist concern beyond narrow political and personal boundaries. Young readers, future voters, decision makers and careerists are being taught to make informed and objective cost/benefit evaluations on local issues and are also learning to sometimes accept short term economic discomfort, recognizing that ultimately, they, with the rest of their community, will probably be better off.
Readers of all ages are challenged to deal, at their own levels, with current local problems, whose immediacy make them seem less black and white than issues seem from a distance. The intent is for them to fact gather, learn to understand that the well-being of their home, its immediate surroundings and the people living there are inextricably related to the environmental health of their city, their state, their country, and in fact, the whole world.
Taught to recognize that they are part of an interdependent human and natural web, readers hopefully will emerge as a new generation educated to question prevalent attitudes and values, protect and respect diversity wherever it occurs in natural and human communities, and modify behavior in conformity with an ethic which sees people as a part of the natural world, not its masters. If the work has a bias, it lies in the belief that educating a new breed of environmentally literate, concerned and responsible citizens is essential to the survival of humankind and Planet Earth.
(Up to Introduction, Back to Appendix, On to Replicating Albuquerque's Environmental Story)