Acceptance Speech from Richard C. Bartlett Award Winner, Debra Weitzel
The following words were delivered by Ms. Weitzel upon her receipt of the award on November 15th, 2007 at the NAAEE Conference in Virginia Beach, VA....
Thank you to the Foundation and the selection committee for this very special honor. And thank you to everyone here who teaches students about the environment or supports those who do.
I believe every student, elementary through high school, should be required to take environmental studies courses that help them to understand the function and interconnectedness of all earth's systems, its resilience, and its fragility, most of all courses that instill an environmental ethic that informs and influences their decisions as citizens of planet Earth.
When I attended Wisconsin Dells high school, no one told me Aldo Leopold's shack where he wrote, "A Sand County Almanac" was ten miles south. No one told me that John Muir's boyhood farm was 10 miles the other way.
The month before I graduated from high school in May of ‘70 Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson sponsored the First Earth Day celebrations. It was the first time I'd heard of Leopold or Muir or anything like an environmental ethic.
With this rich environmental heritage in Wisconsin one would expect that our schools are all teaching environmental principles, especially since the State Legislature in 1990 mandated that environmental principles be infused into all subject areas. Unfortunately, this mandate is not enforced and even the State Standards were initially written without environmental concepts. Thankfully, pressure from schoolteachers and the College of Natural Resources at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point succeeded in getting environmental standards included.
The Science Department at Middleton High School, where I teach, considers Biology, Chemistry, and Physics as the core sciences that students should take as prerequisites for other upper level courses . . . environmental studies included . . that is until we had our little chat.
While I agree that the "core" science subjects are important, especially for those college bound students interested in the sciences or medicine, for most students graduating from Middleton High School, it won't matter if they know that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius when they want a cup of soup or how much that boiling point is elevated when adding salt to the soup. And it won't matter that light travels at 300,000 km per second when they flip open their cell phone for the 100th time that day.
But it might make a difference in their lifestyle or their voting choices if they understand the ecology of the Earth systems, the environmental footprint of their choices and the mechanisms of social change.
It is this need for an integration of ecology and sociology that prompted me to develop an environmental course with the social studies department. I wanted my students to not only understand the science, but also, armed with that knowledge, how to bring about change.
With this in mind my students get their hands dirty in prairie restoration projects and planting rain gardens, they work side by side with scientists on research projects and then rub shoulders with civic leaders who act on the results of their research to bring about positive change.
Needless to say, one of my greatest pleasures is in writing an academic letter of recommendation for one of my students who has chosen a career in Natural Resources or related environmental field. Most of the time though the letters write themselves.
Thank you again for all you do to support environmental education. And thank you for this honor. It is very special to me.