MD's new Environmental Literacy Requirement

Maryland has just become the first state in the nation to require an Environmental Literacy Graduation Requirement. This is wonderful. The details have yet to be refined and made public but the initial reports indicate that these studies are not to be add-ons but integrated into the construct of today's curricula.

This should mean that the requirement can be met by teaching math through measuring nutrient and pollutant levels in our water; teaching history through the development of industry and how it conceived of and treated natural resources; teaching literature through books that capture our evolving attitudes to wilderness and cities. Whatever we teach, it needs to be both conceptual and personal.

Such learning is indispensable not only to transmit knowledge but to evoke caring.

Wendell Berry wrote:

"People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know."

In Berry's read of human behavior, to value something means that we may eventually desire it for ourselves, to consume it for our own use or claim it for our own possession. To love something, however, is to want to let it be, to celebrate it as it is. How much more do we care about the world when we know the names of the trees (not just what they do for us), when the peepers come out, where our rivers are born and where the deer nurse their young.

It is this double knowing of the whole and the particular, the expanse and our home, the all and the one, that will drive us not just to appreciate but to preserve the earth.

(Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: an essay against modern superstition. NY: Perseus Books, 2000. p. 40).