As I approach age fifty, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify the roots of my environmental philosophy.  I am no longer sure what beliefs took hold when I was playing in the woods as a kid and what made sense only after reading the great naturalist writers in my 30’s and 40’s.  Still I would think that with nearly a half century to think about this important part of my life, I would have a clear sense of my environmental perspective, but it continues to be a fuzzy aspect of my whole philosophy of life.

Early Connections to Nature  
I do know that nature has always been important to me.  I credit my earliest connections with nature to fishing.  At Wiberg Point in Door County’s Peninsula State Park there is a pier that sticks out into the bay of Green Bay, and from age five on I remember spending entire days fishing for perch there.  In recent years, overfishing and environmental degradation have decimated the perch population, but back then “jumbo perch” were plentiful, and when the perch came near to shore I caught more fish than I could keep. 

Not everything that I did during that time was environmentally correct.  I would catch leopard frogs by the milk carton full and eat their puny little legs.  I would catch so many perch that I’d toss a dozen or more into the sky to see if the gulls could pick the fish out of the air.  Still it was an important part of my environmental maturation process.  Henry David Thoreau wrote that kids should be free to hunt, fish, trap, and generally destroy little parts of nature, because the education that occurs with this personal connection to the wild justifies the damage that occurs.  According to Thoreau (1975, p. 386), most of this kind of kid, “if he has the seeds of a better life in him,” will stop his destructive ways to become a poet, naturalist, etc…   I feel that Thoreau accurately described my situation, and I suspect that many strong environmentalists feel that these statements apply to them as well. 

I continue to fish, and I continue to eat some of the fish that I catch.  So long as I eat meat, I feel some responsibility for maintaining a personal connection to the animals that supply that meat.  I am not out butchering chickens and beef cattle, but cleaning a fish is a reminder that my food comes from creatures that I have chosen to kill for the pleasure of a varied diet. 

My love of nature led to a bachelors degree in Resource Management and to my series of jobs as a naturalist.  I was a naturalist at the Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary in Green Bay, Wisconsin.  I also was a volunteer staff member at the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian.  The pinnacle of my environmental education career was as director of an environmental education center in the redwoods of northern California.  It was after the California job that I began my Ph.D. work in order to teaching environmental themes at the University level.

Environmentalism and the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
I came the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in 1993.  In terms of environmental education and outdoor recreation, my timing was poor.  It was in 1993 that the University severed its ties to Norskedalen, an environmental education center in Coon Valley.  It was just before my arrival that the Recreation Management program chose to lessen its outdoor recreation course offerings in order to strengthen the curriculum in recreation administration and outdoor recreation.  While the decision makes very good sense in terms of preparing students for careers in recreation, teaching in the outdoors is the reason that I pursued a Ph.D. and chose to teach recreation at the college level.  As result of the de-emphasis on outdoor recreation in the core recreation curriculum, I find other outlets for my environmentalism.  One obvious choice is the teaching of Rec 202 Outdoor Recreation Skills.  Here I get to teach a handful of outdoor recreation skills and get to spend time in natural settings with students.  A second outlet is the environmental studies minor.  I helped to develop the minor about six years ago, and I served as the minor’s first director.  No longer the director, I continue to serve on the minor’s board, and I get to teach an environmental studies course once every second or third year.  Spring 2003 I taught the senior seminar in environmental studies.  The highlight of that course, at least for me, was to undertake a small conservation project for the Aldo Leopold Institute near Baraboo, Wisconsin.  The institute owns property that includes “the Shack,” the rustic cabin once owned by environmentalist Aldo Leopold.  Events at the Shack are chronicled in one of the classics of American environmentalism, A Sand County Almanac. 

My Environmental Philosophy

Connection to place is an important part of anyone’s personal environmental ethic.  As such, it makes total sense to me that the three literary guides for my environmental ethic come from three sources that are tied closely to my personal geography.  The first source is the book I just mentioned above, A Sand County Almanac.  Leopold wrote the bulk of this book in southwestern Wisconsin, which is my current home.  The second source is the writings of John Muir.  Muir, like me, grew up in Wisconsin and ended up in northern California.  I followed Muir’s personal path for several years, but unlike Muir, wound up back in Wisconsin.  The third source of my environmental ethic is Chinese philosophy, especially the Tao perspective on nature.  Obviously I am not Chinese, but I lived two years in Taiwan, taught environmental education there, and while in Taiwan, met the woman who is now my wife.  One of the odd, yet common occurrences in our La Crosse home, is that my wife and I read side by side in bed.  Manyu, a Chinese woman, is reading the Bible, and I, about as Midwestern American as a person can be, is reading the Chinese Tao Te Ching.  What is wrong with this picture?

If I had to put my personal environmentalism into a single statement, it would be, “Nature is my education and my spiritual foundation.”  I realize that much of environmentalism is not nature and wilderness, but is urban pollution, overpopulation, nuclear waste, genetic engineering, and war, but the heart of my environmentalism is linked to natural areas.  For years, my philosophy was the land ethic of Aldo Leopold.  The Land Ethic said that our actions must take nature into consideration in all endeavors of life.  Humans generally do good job of considering family, community, the nation in their ethical behavior, but ignore the non-human.  The Land Ethic says to ignore nature is immoral.  Leopold also said that only way for a person to develop a Land Ethic is to spend time in natural areas.  He also said the best way to experience nature is through recreation – and the sole purpose of outdoor recreation as a profession is to provide people with intimate experiences with nature.  The final words of A Sand County Almanac is “Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity in to the still unlovely human mind. (Leopold, 1966, p. 295)”  That summarizes well my reason for being a recreation professional.

Although Leopold wrote somewhat philosophically in his writings, he was very much a scientist.  His writings sometimes lacked the spirituality that I felt in my own experiences with nature.  While it often takes two or three days into an extended adventure for this to occur, it is in wilderness where I feel most content, most at peace, and most in connection with something larger than myself.  I cannot say that I see God, but I know that I become part a living entity.  Emerson and Thoreau would call this transcendence, and I would agree.  John Muir tells a story where is returns from a day hiking in nature, and then passes threw the poorest section of San Francisco on his way home. He is carrying an armful of wild flowers and tree boughs, and when the kids in the street see this bouquet, they beg for a flower or a branch, knowing full well that Muir is going to tell them to go away.  When Muir actually starts giving out his collection of plant life, the kids become excited and happy.  Muir’s comment on this event is that so long as even the roughest street kids of the city know the beauty and purity of nature when they see it, there is some hope for the world (Muir, 1954, p. 312).

The final literary source of my environmental ethic is Tao philosophy.  This is one area of my philosophy that I know came as an adult, because I have been reading Chinese texts such as Tao Te Ching (1989) and Chuangtze (1968) only the last fifteen years.  The unique aspect of this Asian look at the nature-human relationship is that nature and humanity need each other.  I always knew that humanity needed nature, but never considered the other way around.  In fact, I generally thought that nature would be better off if human beings did not exist.  According to the Tao perspective, however, it is human beings that understand the lessons of nature and therefore love it in a way that would not occur otherwise.  According to the Tao, humans complete nature.  Even though nature probably does not care whether humanity loves it, the idea that nature needs someone to interpret it, to understand the universal truths that it holds, is appealing.  What are these lessons?  What is the lesson of walking a long winding trail to the top of mountain?  What is the lesson of canoeing and seeing a deer around the bend in the river?  What is the lesson of watching a muskrat sleeping on the roof of its home because the high water of spring has flooded out its den?  For me, the trail says that journey is more important than the destination.  The deer reminds me that I should experience life slowly and gently; otherwise I will miss experiencing things.  The muskrat reminds me that I must leave the comfort and security of my den on occasions; to do otherwise is to live out of habit.  Are these the right lessons?  According to the Tao, the lessons of nature cannot be put into words; they must be experienced and personalized.  As I put them into words for this paper, the statements sound cliché.  To say that the journey is more important than the journey is cliché.  The feelings, however, are genuine.  They only sound corny when I try to put them into words. 

References

Chuang Tzu.  (1968).  The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (Burton Watson, trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Lao Tzu. (1989). Tao Te Ching (John C. H. Wu, trans.). Boston: Shambhala.

Muir, J. (1954).  The Wilderness World of John Muir (Edwin Way Teale, ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Thoreau, H.D.  (1975).  The Selected Works of Thoreau.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin.