If you are interested in environmental education or informal learning environments, such as botanic gardens, I invite you to read the essay Navigating Nature, Culture and Education in Contemporary Botanic Gardens in Environmental Education Research by Dawn L. Sanders, Amy E. Ryken and Katherine Stewart. Increasingly, humans are an urban species prone to ‘plant blindness.’…
Trip to Vashon Island This week was spring recess at the University of Puget Sound so I spent two days on Vashon Island to catch up on work and to enjoy some down time. During the 15 minute ferry ride from Tacoma to Vashon Island’s Tahlequah terminal I took in the beauty of Commencement Bay.…
I invite you to read an article entitled Teaching and Learning in Nearby Nature about my Learning in Nearby Nature course. Abstract How can we engage the tension that environmental degradation and meaningful remediation efforts co-exist in the same space? In this documentary account, I describe a weekend mini-course I developed and taught to support…
In Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s book The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild, she describes experiences with everyday wildlife in her Seattle neighborhood. Haupt documents her observations of and/or interactions with a variety of wildlife including coyotes (or their tracks or scat), raccoons, opossums, moles, pigeons, crows, chickens, owls, songbirds, trees, and other humans. Reading the…
Park systems work to manage human behavior in nearby nature to create shared public space, to protect wildlife, and to reduce safety risks. The signage along the Tacoma waterfront reflects these themes. The contrast between the signs, pictured above, made me chuckle and also inspired me to look more closely at the signage aimed at…
For the past month I’ve been observing broods of Canada geese on my walks along the Ruston Way Waterfront in Tacoma, Washington. The groups of goslings are always with two or four adults (sometimes more) and spend most of their time eating or resting. Occasionally I’ve observed the goslings, always flanked by adult geese, swimming…
As a part of my 2015 sabbatical project I developed a new course, Learning in Nearby Nature. I’ll be teaching the class later this month and I look forward to exploring nearby nature sites with Puget Sound students. Here is the description of the course and a brief preview of the sites we will visit.…
This week I’ve been walking along the Ruston Way waterfront and observing how the high tide changes the landscape. A combination of rain and high tides had led to flooding in low lying areas around the Puget Sound. The waterfront parks and beaches have become much narrower or covered in water. Below are photos I…
In my ongoing survey about the Ruston Way waterfront, visitors expressed concern about car traffic and the potential for increased traffic due to the residential and commercial development at Point Ruston. Some visitors also expressed interest in closing Ruston Way to create bike and pedestrian pubic access. Suggestions included closing the road on weekend mornings or one…
In The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert Mcfarlane’s highly descriptive writing paints a visual picture of walks taken in England, Scotland, Palestine, Spain, and the Himalayas. As Mcfarlane notes, walking paths offer, “not only means of traversing space, but also ways of feeling, being and knowing” (p. 24). Pilgrims have used paths and…