What is Environmental Education?

Environmental education deals comprehensively with both human resources and conditions and natural resources and conditions. Its purpose is to develop knowledge of our total environment, understanding of how to be effective in helping to solve problems, and motivation to work toward their solutions.

Nature education attempts to make a person aware of and appreciative of nature's wonders for their own sake. Conservation education attempts to develop wise management and use of our natural resources. Both of these forms of education are more resource-oriented than people-oriented; both are more subjects than methods. Outdoor education uses the outdoors to enhance a school's existing curricula, whether science, social studies, mathematics, or art. Outdoor education is a method, and as such, goes far beyond nature and conservation education in helping a student appreciate the value of objects, both natural and altered, in the world around him.

Environmental education is much more comprehensive than nature, conservation, or outdoor education, primarily because it is human-oriented and more directed toward helping people understand ourselves and our interrelationships and interdependence on our total environment (natural, altered, human and historic). Its methods include the application of traditional course studies in language and fine arts; the physical, biological, social, and consumer sciences; mathematics; and technologies.

At The Roving Nature Center, a wide variety of resources and equipment are all used as tools by a staff of enthusiastic educators, who are also competent naturalists, ecologists, and conservationists, to teach people about themselves in their unique interrelationships with their surroundings. Programs are human-oriented so that individuals who have no interest in identifying birds or flowers come to realize that they are part of a complex, interwoven world, in which their very existence has either a positive or negative effect on everything around them, which in turn, affects their own quality of life.

The Roving Nature Center provides expertise and assistance to educational institutions, municipalities, and other organizations in environmental education methods, resources, and programs. The Center is America’s first fully mobile environmental education center, bringing the resources, equipment and staff of a reputable environmental education facility to any indoor or outdoor site.