So, when a high school English teacher assigned me Robert Frost, I felt affirmed. I discovered words for feelings I had that made these feelings deeper. My neck tingled when I read “Birches,” about a wandering boy who climbed birch trees until his weight bent them down, and they bowed gracefully to the ground together. I didn’t read it as one may now, as some form of wonton domination; I saw a boy seeking comfort in the balm of nature.
From there, we followed the classic English class curriculum to read Emerson, Thoreau, Wordsworth, to visit the moors of Wuthering Heights and the wide waters of Moby Dick. We read of bygone worlds, where the lone outposts of humanity burned with wicks and whale oil. With fewer distractions and somehow less to do, we were invited to purposefully meander through these spaces, impelled by Thoreau’s invitation: “The saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.”
I never feared nature then—it was still something reliable and “out there,” beyond the mark of humans. Still, I knew I was deluding myself. I knew that, in truth, I was wounded by longing for a world that was already vanishing. Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature came out in 1989, when I was starting college, when the Exxon Valdez spill happened, and it became a little harder to hear the babble of the brook.
Now I am an adult and I teach English for a living. When kids arrive in my class, what have they learned about nature? In my own lifetime, we have lost two-thirds of the world’s wildlife and the human population has more than doubled. My students are damaged, hopeless, and pissed. They will inherit this depleted earth. They will have to convince adults to change this. The sacred ground of Wordsworth and Frost that I knew has been ripped from under their feet. We can’t ask them to immerse themselves in something they’ll never have. So, what are we supposed to teach them now?
Lessons in Nature
Amazingly, the most commonly read books in high school have remained the same; none of them are from the 21st century. Jay Gatsby keeps reaching out for the fresh green breast of the new world, and we’re still taking kids on field trips to Walden Pond. We hope for transcendence when they board the coach bus, drive past their local pond, contend with the Boston beltway, and merge into the half a million people who pilgrim there each year. When I went with students in 2017, there was a drought, the shoreline looked scroungy, and their journaling session was punctuated by trucks backing electric boats down the launch ramp. We wanted our kids to channel the year 1845, before Thoreau’s cabin was just a pile of rocks, but they knew something was off.
There is a case for classic literature, but there also must be some cognizance that we are living in a different world, with different students. Gen Z is more concerned about the climate crisis than any other issue. They worry about the state of their planet, though a 2020 Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that just 29% of teens are optimistic about it. “I feel like generally there’s a lot of hopelessness among people my age,” Croix Hill, a 16-year-old junior at Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans, told Education Week. “When talking about it, people are just kind of like, ‘Well, whatever. We’re not even gonna have a planet in 50 years, so it doesn’t even matter.’ ”
All the while, we are shouldering more of the climate crisis onto our students, and we need to provide more tools of resilience in the literature we assign them to read.
I work at a school that encourages a responsive, interdisciplinary curriculum. With a history teacher, I was able to devise a class called “People and the Planet,” which started with Gilgamesh and Genesis and went through Doris Lessing, Isabel Allende, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Robert D. Bullard, and David Wallace-Wells. We look at the varied connections people have with the land and its animals. We still teach Frost—we have to remind students of the balm of nature. But we also must put things into context. There are the mountains, and there is mountaintop removal. There are the iridescent fish and the oil that spills over them, making rainbows. There is sea grass that bends like green flames and hypoxic water.
With so many schools entrenched in their district’s bureaucratic machines, which themselves are beneath the bluster of book banning and politically charged board of ed meetings, climate education is too often omitted. It’s this very distancing from the concerns of nature that has inadvertently brought nature closer to us. It reminds us in howling and crashing and burning episodes that have already changed us even though we refuse to change ourselves.
So how about this: What about framing the curriculum around what we are going to do to live on this planet together? This isn’t just a pedagogical trick; it’s the very basis of our survival, and it invites considerations of air, water, animals, economics, and ecosystems that center real, vital issues of equity and social justice. It reminds students that they live in a community far larger than their affinity groups. In our landscape of victimhood, there is no wider victim than the Earth. And we are not its saviors; the best we can do is listen and respond.
Nature is in the lone tree pumping out leaves on a busy corner, in the vernal pond that’s been dry for years, in the forest that is burning again, in the bird that may have lighted on a classroom windowsill as students stare at the world beyond. Because nature is almost always so quiet (except when it is violent), we must hear what it says. What other choice do we have?