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Script of Mr. Brookes's Lecture, #5 |
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Reporter admin ,
Date 20040405
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TAKANO Takano
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I am currently conducting research on environmental and outdoor education in the U.K. You could say that I am doing research on this environmental education that Andy mentions may not suit Australian ways of thinking or concepts. However, I have no intentions of bringing ideas or ways of thinking from the U.K. to Japan. On the contrary, the more I learn, the more I realize the importance of education appropriate to place.
There are many points in Andy¡Çs talk about Australia that overlap with Japan. Or, if we consider his talk from the position of people living in urbanized places, there are close similarities.
It seems that many of you are active in environmental and or outdoor education, doing research in the fields or planning to in the future. It is possible that methods and ways of thinking that don¡Çt suit a particular place can lead in different direction than that of which we intend. Today, I think Andrew is asking the core question of why we carry out environmental and outdoor education.
What interested me in Andy¡Çs talk is the social aspects of outdoor and environmental education. Andy also points out that environmental and outdoor education can connect local communities with nature in their immediate surroundings. He has a unique perspective that suggests something different that outdoor activities and science field trips.
Another thing that impressed me in his talk was the difference between bush walkers from the old days and people that enter the bush today. Andrew points out that bush walking can be a process of creating relationship between self and the environment. For example, people may meet once today but if we continue to meet a second and third time, we will grow to know one another much more. Don¡Çt you think that this is true of our relationship with our natural environment? The more we know the more our relationship changes. I think he presented the meaning of repeatedly coming to know the same place time after time rather than having one¡Çs relationship with nature be a one time event.
There is also the difference between the old bush walker who comes to know a region through experience and the bush walkers of today that rely on technology and import activities from elsewhere. I think this is a comment that will hit the hearts of many who are involved in environmental and outdoor education. Of course it would not be strange if many of you disagreed with this notion. I would like to use the following time to carry on in debate.
Question 1
I have worked for the Ministry of Forestry for over 30 years and I hope to start working in a company that deals in eco-tourism. I hope to deepen students¡Ç understanding the problems of the devastation of tropical rain forests by seeing the current situation in the forests for themselves. I want to offer this kind of learning experience. Hearing your lecture, I find it difficult to find consistency with what I am doing. However, I do feel the same in that I think we will be unable to protect environments unless we work closely with local communities.
Andy
It would be impertinent of me to make any evaluation of such an activity knowing so little. But the kind of questions I¡Çd be asking myself about such an activity without making any assumptions about what the answers might be, would be: ¡ÈWhy did the activity have to take place there? Perhaps it could take place somewhere closer¡É ¡ÈWhat kind of things were learned from the activity and whether those things could be learned in another way?¡É and ¡ÈWho in the community or perhaps in the world would be best people to have that particular knowledge of that particular forest?¡É Perhaps that may be some people from Japan. Perhaps it is not. Those are the kinds questions I was thinking about when I was giving the examples.
Question 2
I am currently involved in the comprehensive study of the environment. ¡ÈBush¡É, ¡ÈUrban¡É and ¡ÈPrimitive¡É, are written on the white board but we have cities, suburbs and primitive nature. What are the biggest differences in environmental education the further we move away from urban areas?
Andy
I didn¡Çt say very clearly that the example of bush walking shows in a small way people having some knowledge of some places that there are other place that people don¡Çt have knowledge of and perhaps there is a need in the community for some people to have a different kind of knowledge other than the kind of knowledge that can come through bush walking. This line of thought leads to quite a complex program for how people need to understand particular environments rather than a simple idea that environmental education is all just one thing. Thank you for that question, because I think rural areas probably need quite different activities.
Question 3
In your talk the word ¡Èlocal¡É came up several times. However the bush and urban areas are completely different. Do you think urban area children can actually come to feel the bush as ¡Èlocal¡É? Do you have environmental education activities in cities using parks?
Andy
The example of bush walking showed that urban people aren¡Çt necessarily just urban people, that they feel themselves as belonging in several places. They live in the city but they also have an ongoing relationship with somewhere else. That is different in terms of the knowledge people have and what they feel from people who visit places just once as a tourist, which is not to say that visiting place just once might also have some value. I am just pointing to the difference. So I think it is possible for urban people to have some kind of relationship with places other than the city.
About programs in parks, I¡Çd be worried if in a democracy like Australia that people who decide the future of this very complex, very special continent have all of there ideas about nature formed from the television and city parks, where the trees and plants have come from Europe or from globalized industry. I think it is necessary that in the community there is actual experience of particular places as well as the things that of course you can learn from parks such as principles of ecology or even care for the environment of cities.
(Ms. KUBO Naoko, who simultaneously translated for Andy¡Çs lecture as a volunteer, cooperated a second time to create an accurate Japanese text. Mr. SAITO Motonori also supported us in recording the question and answer portion of the lecture. Thank you!)
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