Post-graduate Traveling Fellowship Recipient Essay -- Environmental Ec

Post-graduate Traveling Fellowship Recipient "With every step, you are met by the most bizarre and wonderful forms," she told me. I have never heard someone talk about nature in the way that my host mother in France did. She has not been able to return to what she calls "the jungles of Madagascar"-her birthplace-but images of wild and beautiful greenness have never left her mind. In Madagascar, there are two hundred thousand different species of living things; ninety-three percent of them are endemic to this island. Wide-eyed lemurs and bright red Fody birds can be found nowhere else in the world. Nature has made of Madagascar an isolated and thriving sanctuary for flowers, frogs, and monkeys different from those created elsewhere. This island is a place of magic and wonder. Yet while the baobob tree-locally called the monkey bread tree-once dotted the landscape of Madagascar, it is rapidly being deforested to make way for agriculture. Indeed, each year, thirty percent of Madagascar's land is burned or reburned. This practice not only threatens the habitat of unique wildlife; it is turning the country into an eroded and uninhabitable wasteland. The need for subsistence in this poverty-stricken nation has led many people to conceive of the immense natural resources of the island for their economic value alone. Yet if forestry and agricultural practices are to be sustainable, and if the magic and wonder of Madagascar are to be preserved for future generations, the Malagasy will need to conceive of their natural environment in a different way. Only through direct contact with environmental reality can students develop a real appreciation and understanding of nature that leads to a sense of stewardship and a desire to protec... ...n Antananarivo, these university students will assume director's roles and the program will thus expand to include more interested children. Upon my departure, these directors will completely take over and urban environmental education in Antananarivo will continue. Through public service, I have come to see the role of teacher as a creator of possibility. Through my proposed urban environmental education program in Antananarivo, Madagascar, I hope to create the opportunity for urban kids to have frequent and direct contact with ecological processes through which experience they might come to see their environment in a new and more sustainable way. In the end, my hope is to create the possibility that my host mother's children and her grandchildren might one day see "the jungles of Madagascar" where she was born and experience the magic and wonder she describes.