Bedford residents Maureen Oates and Janet Powers are lifelong environmentally conscious people.
Their childhoods featured regular outdoor life – Oates at the beaches and in the forests of San Diego county and Powers with summers in the Adirondacks.
Oates, a high school biology teacher who became involved in environmental education projects in the 1970s, worked with both science and social studies teachers at all grade levels and was for seven years the Director of Education for Maine Audubon Society before her retirement.
Earth Circles
Six years ago, Lisa Rubin, then the director of religious education at First Parish in Bedford Unitarian Universalist, felt the need for an education program that featured UUs’ Seventh Principle, Living in harmony with nature. She recruited me to help develop Earth Circles, with Janet Powers as co-developer. Over the years we composed six units:
- “Water at Work”
- “Visiting Nature”
- “Soils and Seeds”
- ‘’The Fruitful Garden”
- “Acquiring Energy” and finally,
- “Climate Change”
Why Earth Circles?
Simply put, all things both living and non-living on Earth are in continuous interaction with each other and feed back into each other with sustainable results when interactions are in balance. It matters that there is a lack of understanding of the workings of the planet by too many adults. It follows, then, that it matters what we teach our children. The basic resources for the survival of life are water, air, soil, and sun. Plants, growing in the soil use water and carbon dioxide from the air and energy from the sun make the carbohydrates that are the food for animal life. A by-product is oxygen going into the air.
How these components interconnect and interact, how we use them as individuals and collectively is the basis for lessons in Earth Circles. The goal is for kids to develop both an understanding of simple science concepts related to the working of our planet and a caring that generates a sense of personal responsibility for their own habitat and for conditions and peoples in other places on Earth.
All lessons include activities that bring concepts to life and help to develop caring, with follow-up discussion of the concept in relation to UUs’ Seven Principles. An example is Lesson 3 in the Earth Circles unit, “Water at Work,” which involves kids in exploring groundwater with a model they can manipulate and then discussing what they learn. This lesson is suitable for an adult audience as well as for kids.
Water at Work
Many of us now carry a bottle of water with us everywhere we go. It is good for our health and may avoid problems from a contaminated water supply when we travel. The fact is that public water supplies in the U.S. are regulated by law, with regular inspections required to ensure public safety. Bottled water is not regulated. However, water in bottles comes from the same sources as public water supplies. Bottled water companies can tap into groundwater sources that supply communities with well water, with a financial arrangement with a town for access to that town’s groundwater.
It is reasonable to ask, who owns the groundwater? Groundwater is like an underground river. It depends on rain or snowmelt seeping into the ground to keep its volume up. It moves along underground without regard for political boundaries on the surface. Thus, if a bottled water company proposes to a town to buy water rights to its groundwater for, say, 500,000 gallons per day, the town may say, “No! We need our water supply!”
What does the bottled water company do? It may go to the next town upriver, make the same proposal, and have it accepted. The depletion of the water supply for both towns would result. Questions of both understanding and caring apply here.
Does the bottled water company realize the consequences for local water supplies, or does it not care when its profit potential is on the line? Does the same question apply to the second town? How do the residents in both towns feel when their water supplies dwindle? What can they do about it? It matters that adults often do not understand the workings of the world around them.
Another aspect of the proliferation of water bottle use is the number of plastic bottles disposed of both into landfills and also directly into the environment. Hundreds of thousands of plastics form floating “islands” in the ocean. Thousands of empty bottles go into local landfills every day. A local town (Concord, MA) has banned the sale of bottled water in the town because of concern about the number of plastic bottles going into their landfill. Unaware residents simply buy their bottled water in nearby towns and may throw the empties “away” as usual. Regulation needs to address what goes to the landfill.
Conservation Education vs. Environmental Education
Conservation education focuses on the preservation of wild places such as forests, rivers, lakes, wetlands as wildlife homes, and as resources to be managed for human needs. Environmental education focuses on the connections among all of Earth’s resources, how they work together in balance to provide a healthy environment for all of life including humans, and how individual activity/group activities affect the overall well-being of whole populations.
A century ago, H.G. Wells remarked, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” Even that long ago, thoughtful people were concerned about the impact of industrialization and growing populations on the well-being of our home planet, Earth.
Even earlier, President Theodore Roosevelt had asked, “The time has come to inquire, what will happen when our forests are gone?” In response, conservation education about protecting wildlife and its environment became a requirement in much of public education.
After World War II, a growing concern about the impact of ever-more-complex technology on the world around us led to an environmental movement to address growing problems. Conservation education became environmental education.
Another quote from the past goes back to Julia Fletcher Carney, a contemporary of Longfellow’s in the mid-1800s, a female poet whose work often is attributed to other male writers, “Little drops of water, little grains of sand, make the mighty oceans and the pleasant land.”
Carney’s simple couplet tells us that individuals matter, that masses of individuals acting together can result in major outcomes. It brings to mind these questions: “Does it matter what we know if we don’t care?” and conversely, “Caring passionately, can we be effective advocates if we lack a strong knowledge base?”
The environmental movement has many passionate advocates who are well aware of the problems affecting our planet and therefore our lives, but how well do we (they) understand how our planet functions?
Do you want to learn more?
If you would like to learn more about the Earth Circles curriculum, please email [email protected] and The Citizen will put you in touch with Maureen Oates and Janet Powers.
The Bells at Hopedale Unitarian Parish
At a meeting of the Parish, June 5, 1904, our Minister, Rev. Lewis G. Wilson, urged the desirability of a chime of bells in the church tower. On June 5, 1909, just five years from the first meeting, the chime committee reported the required amount to have been raised and the Parish voted to purchase a chime of bells. They were installed and dedicated in 1910 and were restored in 2010.
The bells are eleven in number, the largest, or tenor bell, being in the key of E. The list includes bells representing the following notes: E F# G# A A# B C# D D# E F#
All are carefully tuned to harmonize with each other and the chime is placed in a framework designed especially to fit the bell tower, with the bells located so as to give the best effect when played. The total new weight of the bells is about 9200 pounds and with the framework and mountings about 13,000 pounds. Listen to our bells being played.
Click this link to read a full description of the Church’s physical plant
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