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PR AND environment education materials
The widely accepted definition of public relations is that it is the business of generating goodwill toward an individual, cause, company, or product (www.motto.com/). According to the Public Relations Society of America, public relations helps our complex society reach decisions and function more effectively by contributing to mutual understanding among groups and institutions. It serves to bring private and public policies into harmony. Public relations serves a wide variety of institutions in society such as businesses, trade unions, government agencies, voluntary associations, foundations, hospitals, schools, colleges, and religious institutions.
To achieve their goals, these institutions must develop effective relationships with many different audiences or publics such as employees, members, customers, local communities, shareholders, and other institutions and with society at large. The managements of institutions need to understand the attitudes and values of their publics in order to achieve institutional goals. The goals themselves are shaped by the external environment.
Examples of the knowledge that may be required in the professional practice of public relations include communication arts, psychology, social psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and the principles of management and ethics. Technical knowledge and skills are required for opinion research, public-issues analysis, media relations, direct mail, institutional advertising, publications, film/video productions, special events, speeches, and presentations.
Public relations are generally thought to be the purview of corporations; businesses that want to inform their customers about the beneficial efforts they make to, in our case, improve the environment. Those efforts may center on their reduction of pollution from either manufacturing or distribution operations or their support of various environmental organizations whose programs improve environmental conditions. The forest industry in the Americas conducts very sophisticated public relations outreach activities that inform the public of the value of their forests, the sustainability of their management techniques, and the pollution reduction efforts they have made to lessen the global impact of their business operations. The relatively recent introductions of certification standards in the forest industry by the American Forest and Paper Association and by the Forest Stewardship Council, which go beyond public relations in terms of certifying the wood products sold in market, are also used by companies as a part of their public relations efforts.
Environmental Education
Environmental education is the teaching about the natural and built environment to provide real-world context for learning by linking the classroom to the students’ community, according the Environmental Protection Agency. Students are engaged in hands-on, active learning that increases their knowledge and awareness about the environment. Because environmental education encourages inquiry and investigation, students develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and effective decision-making skills. Environmentally literate students become citizens who are able to weigh various sides of an environmental issue and make responsible decisions as individuals and members of their community. Quality, standards-based environmental education improves everyday life by protecting human health and encouraging stewardship of natural resources.
Environmental education in the Americas has also grown increasingly sophisticated as the population has become more environmentally aware. The American Forest Foundation’s Project Learning Tree (PLT), the long-time environmental education program, has grown substantially in its breadth and impact since its inception. As the practice and public attitudes about forestry have changed, so has the PLT curriculum. American Forests has built an environmental education program around its geographic information system tool for calculating the value of nature, CITYgreen. This learning tool centers on teaching concepts of math, computer science, GIS, ecology, and community service. Combining learning on a variety of subjects represents the future of environmental education: using real-world situations as teachable moments.
This new direction for environmental education has led to the formation of new organizations whose mission is to educate America’s youth about the environment and their role in its health. The first Earth Day in the United States in 1970 launched a new era of educating students about the environment. These educational efforts were no longer relegated to the science curriculum, instead branching out into social sciences, civics, economics, and government courses as well.
This increase in our knowledge base of the environment and the recognition that environmental quality impacts all aspects of human life has created a much better informed populace and one that is willing to support environmental improvement activities – through both monetary contributions and voluntarism.
The Nature-Deficit Issue
One of the newest concepts in the environmental education arena is the idea that our children are suffering from a nature-deficit disorder. (This term plays off the widely recognized disability in children called attention-deficit disorder.) Coined and popularized by Richard Louv (2006) in his book, Last Child in the Woods, nature-deficit disorder describes children who have limited interaction with the natural world. Louv cites many reasons for this disconnect, including the often false perception of high crime rates that keep children in-doors, the growth of computer use and video games that keep children attached to their computers or gaming consoles, and perhaps even social and economic trends that necessitate that both parents work, thus limiting parental time to expose children to nature.
The irony is that with much more environmental education being taught in the schools, with more sophisticated knowledge about the environment, fewer and fewer children are actually being exposed to nature in the outdoors. The environment then becomes something one does not experience but instead learns about on television or on the computer.
The net result of this nature deficit may be a loss of a green workforce, people who want to work in the natural resources field. With more than 50 percent of the US Forest Service eligible for retirement, personnel experts are concerned about the ability to fill professional, scientific positions to carry the agency through the 21st century and beyond.
The other major effect of this “disorder” is a lack of understanding about where humans get their food, their clothing, materials to build their homes, etc., and therefore the effect of our consumption of natural resources and the health of the planet. Without being cognizant about the source of these essentials for human life, the concern is that this generation will disregard our effect on the earth’s health at a time when we especially need to learn to lessen that impact.
Several researchers have focused their attention on the effects of a lack of nature experiences on childhood development (Kahn, 2002; Kellert, 2002; Pyle, 2002; Rivkin, 2000; and Sullivan and Kuo, 1998+). Most of these researchers have been concerned that children’s access to nature is rapidly diminishing, as is author Louv. Their research has looked at whether there are improvements in self-image, self-confidence, and even attention deficit in children and found, in general, that nature play and outdoor play dramatically improve children’s learning and developmental challenges. One study even found that the greener a girl’s view is from her apartment, the higher she scored on standardized performance measures. (Boys showed no such relationship.) (Faber Taylor et al, 2001).