MEEA's Mission

The Maine Environmental Education Association (MEEA) facilitates and promotes environmental education in Maine through the sharing of ideas, resources, information, and cooperative programs among educators, organizations, and concerned individuals. MEEA is built on the strengths and contributions of our members. For more information about MEEA and to join our organization please visit our webpage.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Upcoming EE Event at the Frontier Cafe in Brunswick ME

The Cathance River Education Alliance
and Project Learning Tree are excited
to be part of Frontier’s programming
of PLAY AGAIN during Earth Week,
Thursday, April 26th at 8 PM

PLAY AGAIN is an award winning documentary directed by Tonje Hessen Schei, produced by Meg Merrill, and edited by David Bee. The soundtrack includes music from Icelandic band Sigur Ros and singer Kimya Dawson.
At a time when children spend more time in the virtual world than the natural world, PLAY AGAIN unplugs a group of media savvy teens and takes them on their first wilderness adventure, documenting the wonder that comes from time spent in nature and inspiring action for a sustainable future.
This film encourages individuals, families, schools, and communities to examine their relationships with both screen technology and nature, and inspires them to take action to reconnect children to the natural world.
With multiple showings Thursday, April 26 - Sunday, April 29, this is Southern Maine’s chance to check out the film that has been making its way into school programming across the state. Following the opening Thursday night 8pm screening will be a post film Skype Q&A discussion with Outreach Coordinator Greg Lemieux as well as discussion hosted by the supporting groups. The Cathance River Education Alliance and Project Learning Tree will have displays that raise awareness about their organizations and will be there to answer questions.
“We love what we know. If we don’t know about our nearby nature, or have a connection, it will certainly be more difficult be for policies that are good for our environment to occur in the future. It is because people played outside and appreciated their wild spaces that we now have a variety of policies, protected spaces, and trails for future generations to enjoy. “Play Again” helps cultivate this important discussion.” – Rick Wilson

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

MEEA Conference Closing Session Thoughts...

Hello MEEA Members and Friends-
As we promised at the MEEA conference here is the list of ideas we generated at the closing session when we were visioning in small groups a future for Maine's children and action steps to take to get to this future (of environmental literacy) that we are imagining and, as environmental educators in Maine, trying to help this future become a true reality...

Please continue to post and comment about your thoughts and add information that we might not have captured from the closing session.  MEEA will continue to look back on these thoughts and ideas as we shape our organization in the future.

Thank you for your input and your ideas...lets keep the conversation going so we stay connected to one another and through collaborative EE efforts increase the effectiveness and the validity of the good work we are doing in Maine!

Here were the ideas generated:

  • In the future we believe that kids need to be encouraged to become systems thinkers-that we need to demonstrate to kids how to facilitate conversation and think about problems from multiple perspectives.  We need to create authentic, inquiry-based learning experiences for our students.
  • We need to continue to facilitate unstructured connections to nature...these connections are as important as deep curriculum (addressing nature-deficit)
  • We need to address a feeling of dis-empowerment in our youth and provide them opportunities through service learning to take action and feel empowered to make change in our world. --changing the pervasive sense of entitlement to a sense of empowerment!
  • MEEA needs to continue to work to connect educators with each other and to share the work we are doing with the general public so they are aware, educated themselves, and see the amazing things already happening in Maine--we need to share our stories!
  • We need to respect the diversity we have in our state (respecting personal experience, background and social history and others' "starting points" in regards to nature)
  • We need to include young people as partners, collaborators and ambassadors for change-they must feel important and valued in order to be empowered.
  • MEEA needs to continue to create a list of "unusual suspects" for collaboration and then to reach out to them.
  • Recognize the power of our stories and interpersonal connection: in regards to collaboration and creating partnerships to encourage people to get outside this is paramount
  • Be mindful of the difficulties of making connections in a rural state (with very spread out population centers) ... be inclusive of Northern Maine and also recognize the cultural differences between the populations and their differences in points of view on nature.
  • We need to use the local colleges and their energy and expertise more in our collaborative EE efforts
  • We need to use social networking more effectively to share our stories and make new connections
  • We need to encourage multi-generational involvement in education with Maine's children
  • We need to encourage community-based research and problem solving
  • We need to find a way to help teachers and non-formal educators share resources so that the lack of money and materials is not what is preventing high quality EE from reaching our children
  • We need open forums where we focus on solutions not on causes and student summits to role model good practice and empower youth.
  • Continue to grow quality place-based education.
  • We want to encourage our youth to become change makers in their communities.
  • We need to remember as environmental educators that we are role models and we need to lead by example (food choices, energy choices etc)
  • In collaborations we need to be respectful and aware of different time frames for invovled parties (i.e. not collaborating with teachers in summer months etc)
  • We need to make sure we don't take the FUN out of learning-learning should be social, entertaining and real!
  • We need to remember the importance of evaluating the work we are doing for effectiveness and also to work on teaching students to be self reflective and to self evaluate
I hope I captured the essence of the conversation...let's keep discussing this online!

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

The New York Times: Nature Deficit Disorder

Hello MEEA Members...thought this commentary in the NYT might be interesting to you!

NYT nature-deficit article 

Nature-Deficit Disorder


Timothy Egan
Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

Mount Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains.Rick Scibelli, Jr. for The New York TimesMount Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains.

TUCSON — Your day breaks, your mind aches for something stimulating to match the stirrings of the season. The gate at the urban edge is open, here to the Santa Catalina Mountains, and yet you turn inward, to pixels and particle-board vistas.
Something’s amiss. A third of all American adults — check, it just went up to 35.7 percent — are obese. The French don’t even have a word for fat, Paul Rudnick mused in a mock-Parisian tone in The New Yorker last week. “If a woman is obese,” he wrote, “we simply call her American.”
And, of course, our national branding comes with a host of deadly side effects: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes, certain kinds of cancer. Medical costs associated with obesity and inactivity are nearly $150 billion a year.

This grim toll is well known. Cripes: maybe surgery is the answer, or a menu of energy drinks and vodka (the Ann Coulter diet?). Count the calories. Lay off the muffins. Atkins one week, Slim-Fast the next. We spend more than $50 billion on the diet-industrial complex and have little to show for it (or too much).
But there is an obvious solution — just outside the window. For most of human history, people chased things or were chased themselves. They turned dirt over and planted seeds and saplings. They took in Vitamin D from the sun, and learned to tell a crow from a raven (ravens are larger; crows have a more nasal call; so say the birders). And then, in less than a generation’s time, millions of people completely decoupled themselves from nature.
There’s a term for the consequences of this divorce between human and habitat — nature deficit disorder, coined by the writer Richard Louv in a 2005 book, “Last Child in the Woods.” It sounds trendy, a bit of sociological shorthand, but give the man and his point a listen.
Louv argued that certain behavioral problems could be caused by the sharp decline in how little time children now spend outdoors, a trend updated in the latest Recreation Participation Report. The number of boys ages 6 to 12 who engage in some kind of outdoor activity, in particular, continues to slide.
Kids who do play outside are less likely to get sick, to be stressed or become aggressive, and are more adaptable to life’s unpredictable turns, Louv said. Since his book came out, things have gotten worse.
“The average young American now spends practically every minute — except for the time in school – using a smartphone, computer, television or electronic device,” my colleague Tamar Lewin reported in 2010, from a Kaiser Family Foundation study.
You can blame technology, but behind every screen-dominant upbringing is an overly cautious parent. Understandably, we want to protect our kids from “out there” variables. But it’s better not just to play in dirt, but to eat it. Studies show exposure to the randomness of nature may actually boost the immune system.
Nature may eventually come to those who shun it, and not in a pretty way. We stay indoors. We burn fossil fuels. The CO2 buildup adds to global warming. Suburbs of Denver are aflame this week, and much of the United States is getting ready for the tantrums of hurricane and tornado season, boosted by atmospheric instability.
Last week, an Australian mountaineer named Lincoln Hall died at the age of 56, and in the drama of that life cut short is a parable of sorts. Hall is best known for surviving a night at more than 28,000 feet on Mount Everest, in 2006. He’d become disoriented near the summit, and couldn’t move — to the peril of his sherpas. They left him for dead. And Hall’s death was announced to his family.
But the next day, a group of climbers found Hall sitting up, jacket unzipped, mumbling, badly frostbitten — but alive. He later wrote a book, “Dead Lucky: Life After Death on Mount Everest.”
Still, having survived perhaps the most inhospitable, dangerous and life-killing perch on the planet, Hall died in middle age of a human-caused malady from urban life — mesothelioma, attributed to childhood exposure to asbestos.
Various groups, from the outdoor co-op REI to the Trust for Public Land, have have been working to ensure that kids have more contact with the alpine world than one lined with asbestos. And they don’t even have to haul children off to a distant mountain to get some benefit. An urban park would do.
This week, Michelle Obama appeared in the glow of spring’s optimism to kick off the fourth year of the White House Kitchen Garden, a component of her campaign to curb childhood obesity. If she is successful, it will be because people learned by their own initiative — perhaps at her prompting. A worm at work can be a wonderful discovery if you’ve never seen one outside of a flat-screen. But so are endorphins, the narcotic byproduct of exercise.
“Hope is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson. The First Lady supplied her own variation on the theme, with two powerful words that can go a long way to battling nature deficit disorder: “Let’s plant!”