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Robert Hass
Photo by Robert Hass collection

by Reed McManus
Environmental Expression Through Art Session

The former poet laureate of the U.S. lets us in on his little secret: Some of our youngest children have very old souls. Robert Hass's organization, River of Words (ROW), ostensibly promotes the environment and arts to kids through nature exploration. But that's grant-funding language that doesn't hint at the power uncorked when kids are encouraged to open their eyes to the natural world, pen or pastels in hand. Consider the timely poem Hurricane, written by then 13-year-old ROW participant Chelsea Bagwell of Lafayette, Louisiana, in 2003:
 
It's like living in a movie
We stare off the porch
The wind tugs the great oak
By its golden hair
Trees dance in the wind
Skies gray
Like moldy bread
Our palm trees
Lash their arms
Grabbing the earth
Leaves and twigs
Like mosquitoes
Everywhere
Destruction-
The earth paved with
Oak, birch and pine-
Signs strewn
Here and there
Another of life's storms.

"Beginner's luck," Hass chuckles, clearly as proud as a doting father. In fact, honing such powers of observation are the central purpose of the ROW program. Borrowing heavily from ecologist and writer Aldo Leopold, Hass urges students to "think like a mountain." As a young game warden, Leopold had not known how to think about nature; his job was simply to eliminate predators. But when deer populations exploded and habitat was destroyed, Leopold came to realize that he had to think patiently, over time, like a mountain.

And there's no better place to start putting Leopold's ideas into practice than the classroom, with environmental education. What Hass calls "hands-on, place-based, taste-and-smell education" is nothing short of "nature literacy."

Wherever the ROW program is taught, it's structured around the local watershed: Kids learn where a raindrop starts and ends its life in their region. It's a simple construct,  but one that never fails to unearth new ways of understanding the world. A young poet in a poverty-riddled neighborhood of Washington, D.C. along the polluted Anacostia River grappled with the question of what kind of raindrop he would want to be. Not one that fell on a dog's back, he concluded, because  it could be licked off. Or one that fell atop a fence, because it could fall off and get hurt. No, the best raindrop would be one that landed in the gutter, because it could "flow home real fast." That observation, Hass points out, reminds us that the environment means safety.

In an age when industrial civilization has all of human health in its hands, Hass says, it's essential that we train the next generation to be "connected to the pulse of things." Says Hass: "You can't make change in the world if you don't know what's around you." 

For more information about River of Words, go to www.riverofwords.org.

-- 09/10/2005 Sat
4pm