Environmental Education is Inter-generational and Lifelong

Learning has always been a lifelong pursuit. But in these fast-changing times, it’s become even more important. Our Office of Environmental Education funds projects that educate and engage people of all ages in environmental issues and helps them find solutions to their communities’ most pressing challenges. And learning isn’t happening just inside the classroom. Senior citizens, kindergartners to college age students, parents, business owners, teachers, and other community members are learning, sharing ideas, connecting, and solving real-life problems together.

One of the Community Energy Action Team members presents his very own wind turbine at the 2015 Island Energy Conference in Portland, Maine.

Through an EPA Environmental Education (EE) grant the Island Institute created five inter-generational Community Energy Action Teams of K-12 students, teachers, school board members, and adult community leaders on islands off the coast of Maine. These teams have not only learned how to reduce their own energy consumption and switch to renewables, but they’ve also become adept at tracking energy usage, teaching others in their communities, and planning for future energy and dollar savings.

Community Energy Action Team members, student participants from the local community, the Fox Islands Electric Coop staff, and the Island Institute Community Energy group gathered together to learn about wind power in action.

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries’ Sustainability Yours program received an EPA EE Grant that has reached teachers, university students, pre-K to high school students, students’ families, and local residents in communities across several states. Through small sub-grants, this program has given underserved immigrants and tribal members in New Mexico a voice in the development of the state’s environmental literacy plan for K-12 schools. Students at the University of the Ozarks restore wildlife habitats and work to revive a nature preserve for youth programs. And K-12 students and staff in Sulphur Rock, Arkansas work together to increase their school’s recycling efforts so much that they have been able to buy new playground equipment with the money they earned.

Volunteers of all ages participated in the IDAH2O Island Park Workshop in June 2016 to learn how to do water sampling, on their way to becoming Master Water Stewards.

The IDAH2O Master Water Stewards program also used an EPA EE Grant to develop a network of 150 trained and certified volunteers who conduct assessments of local water bodies and collect valuable water monitoring data. The program partnered with the Coeur d’Alene Tribal Departments of Education, Natural Resources, and Lake Management to teach volunteers about the best science available for the study of water. The IDAH2O Master program also created educational, how-to seminars to promote lifelong learning and outreach to schools. This added teachers and students to the network of multi-generational citizen scientists working together on the project.

IDAH2O has rich, ongoing partnerships with several Idaho Master Naturalist chapters that enables cross-organizational citizen science and cross-pollination of ideas among its multi-generational Master Water Stewards.

The multi- and inter-generational nature of these and many of our Environmental Education Grant projects has fostered environmental stewardship in communities across the nation. Every community needs its citizens to use their skills, knowledge, and experience to solve problems in ways that protect the local environment. Confronting environmental challenges requires all of us to work together to protect the health and welfare of our planet. That’s EPA Forward.