For SHAWCO last Monday, my coordinator asked me to design and deliver a lesson on wetlands. Fine, I thought–how hard can it be? Put together the relevant facts, get some diagrams and maps, and you’re good to go. But as I quickly learned, a concrete grade school classroom is different from a college lecture hall, and my excited rambling about hydric soils and wattled cranes aroused little interest.
Before you start talking about natural habitats, it’s also helpful to have a few key concepts in place–like evolution. At one point I began talking about a coelacanth, which led to a discussion of how it got to be that way.
“Have you guys heard about natural selection?” I asked. “Charles Darwin? How humans evolved from monkeys?” Blank stares. I plunged on. “So, a long time ago, everything was just made of cells…”
I have no idea how much they got out of that discussion. Luckily, the lesson was only an introduction to something that would hopefully make it meaningful: a trip to an actual live wetland. Most of the Cape Flats actually used to be wetlands, until strip malls and townships covered them up.
Edith Stevens Wetland park is not much to look at. On a rainy, cold Saturday, it appears to be just the space between three highways, with some broken down boardwalks threading through a sea of brown, tufty grass. But an enthusiastic and knowledgeable staff brought it to life for the kids with owl pellet dissections, taxidermied mammals, and live snakes–beats the hell out of a few old National Geographics.
And in ways they couldn’t necessarily see, Edith Stevens is a special place. It’s got a medicinal herb garden, and an all-access vegetable garden, and a small but expanding bird club, all free to the public. Unlike the glitzy game reserves with their often prohibitive entrance fees, Stevens belongs to people too.
“That’s the difference with a community park,” the friendly and vivacious education director told me. “When kids swim out to the island to steal the birds’ eggs, I can’t be mad at them, because they’re hungry. All I can do is say ‘don’t you know how toxic that water is?’”
That’s why environmental education is more complicated here. Before you can instill a love for earth’s creation, you have to make sure people have enough to eat, which is a much knottier proposition.
