We spend a lot of time talking about future generations in this class, and rightly so. For at least one future generation—namely the next one—is already here. And they’d be very peeved if Secretary Watt told them that they didn’t exist.
They can’t remember this country ever being at war, never saw a man walk on the moon, and dimly recall the drought years as the time when they weren’t allowed to flush the toilet. They are the children of the 80s. They are the people who will be in their late twenties at the turn of the millennium when most of us will be distressingly middle-aged.
I got to know a few members of this future generation during my six months as a guide at the Hidden Villa Environmental Project. The HVEP is an 11-year-old environmental education program run out of the beautiful 2000-acre Duveneck Ranch in Los Altos Hills. Elementary school children from second through sixth grades are brought to Hidden Villa for all-day field trips. Trained volunteer guides, mostly college students and community members, take small groups of children exploring on the farm and hiking in the mountains.
People often ask me, “What exactly do you do with those kids at Hidden Villa?” I try to answer with all-encompassing phrases like “develop an ecological awareness” and “stimulate an appreciation of the natural world,” but those dull and stilted labels don’t come close to explaining what Hidden Villa is all about. What do we do with those kids? We pet banana slugs, pick through coyote scat, wade in creeks, spin wool, hug trees, cast tracks, tell stories, make tea from wild mints along the trail, coax baby lambs over to be petted, run down (and sometimes up) steep mountain trails, get muddy, get kissed by a snake, eat miner’s lettuce, turn over a compost pile, play games and ask lots of questions. And why do we do it? Because we care about exposing this future generation to environmental ways of thinking now, while they are children with open minds. Because we want to share with them the beauty and wonder we find in nature. And because, quite simply, it’s a lot of fun.
It doesn’t take many days as a guide to realize how badly needed places like Hidden Villa are. The 10-year-olds of today are disconcertingly out of touch with the earth. They have little conception of where their food is before it appears in Safeway, where water is before it runs from a faucet, and where gasoline is before it magically appears in gas stations. Milk comes from cartons, meat from neat plastic packages, and fruit and vegetables from mysterious far-away factories. I once asked some third-graders, while standing in the barnyard with a fresh cow-patty at our feet, “How could you turn this manure into a strawberry milkshake?”
Silence. At last 8-year-old Brian offered, “Put it in a blender and add lots of chemicals and food coloring and stuff.”
I’ve been earnestly told that brown cows give chocolate milk, that rabbits lay eggs, that pigs eat mud, and that sheep make cotton. After a day spent discovering the origins of hamburgers, eggs, pork chops, and butter, one logical child asked where the bread animal was.
But the best farm story belongs to Lynne Stietzel, one of the HVEP’s three full-time staff members. While she and her group of kids were visiting Summerday, our placid Guernsey milk cow, two boys of about 8 burst into uncontrollable giggling. Lynne asked what was so funny, but all they could do was to point to Summerday’s four pink fleshy teats, helpless with laughter. Finally, one of them managed to say it. “He’s got four of them!”
Hidden Villa, however, is a lot more than just meeting farm animals. With over 2,000 acres of mountainous oak woodland, riparian forest, chaparral, and grasslands to roam, we spend a lot of time hiking. For many children, it’s the closest thing to a wilderness experience they’ve ever had. Some inner-city children are as frightened of walking on a sunny trail as I would be walking around their neighborhoods at night because it is such a totally alien environment to them.
But such fears can be overcome. I’ve taken East Palo Alto children on an “alone walk,” which meant they had to walk about 200 yards down a wooded trail by themselves. My quietest boy volunteered to go first and met me at the end with a huge smile. “That was neat!” The next child stopped on the trail only 50 yards away from us and barely out of sight, yelling that he was scared. “Keep walking—I was scared too, but I made it,” called out the quiet child and he coached the apprehensive boy the rest of the way.
Other times simple ignorance is a greater obstacle than fear. During a windy afternoon spent with MountainView fourth-graders, San Francisco, over 30 miles away, was clearly visible from our mountain trail. Ecstatic, I kept repeating how lucky we were to have such a smogless view. Finally, one of the children politely asked me what smog was. They had no idea—they’d never been up high enough to look out over the Bay Area and notice the brown clouds under which they lived.
But nearly all of the children, whether used to such experiences or not, are wonderfully appreciative of this chance to escape from school and hike in a beautiful area.“This is the most fun day of school I’ve ever had!” said 9-year-old Lenny. “We haven’t even learned anything!” Or so he thought until I reminded him of all we’d seen and talked about that day. “Oh, yeah…” He had naturally associated learning with toil.
That’s why Hidden Villa is, first and foremost, meant to be fun. We don’t make children memorize scientific names of all the plants, and we don’t insist that they ignore the red-tailed hawk flying overhead during a lesson on decomposition. We do insist that they use their eyes, ears, noses, skin, and, most of all, their heads. Very little dogma is handed down at Hidden Villa. Our job is not to propagandize any particular attitude as being right or wrong, but to help children think about their own ideas and values—an approach which leaves a far deeper impression. It also allows for personal discoveries. Eleven-year-old Candace turned to me wide-eyed, holding the little circle of paper she had made from recycled paper pulp. “Wouldn’t it be neat if we got up every morning and made the paper we needed for the day, and then used it over again when we were through? Then we wouldn’t have to cut down any more trees!” she said wonderingly.
Astonishing things can happen when the adults shut up and let the kids do the talking. I once asked the seemingly innocent question of some third-graders: “What would you do if you owned Hidden Villa?” Cedric replied enthusiastically that he would take a huge bulldozer and level the mountains, and then build an enormous playground. This produced a chorus of “no’s” from the rest of the children. “You’d kill all the trees!” protested Nicole. “So what? What do I care about these trees?” he replied. “They give us air.” “They’re pretty.” “They’re homes for all the animals,” chimed in several children. “Well—I’d plant more trees after I cut them down,” amended Cedric. “Do you know how long it takes a tree to grow?” demanded Nicole. And so it went until eventually, the rest persuaded Cedric to keep these mountains wild.
The attitudes of parents can tremendously affect the children, of course, and sometimes socioeconomic differences come through. When I asked East Palo Alto children what they were going to do with the plastic baggies they’d put their sandwiches in, they all said: “Wash them out and use them over again.” Wealthy Los Altos Hills children answered the same question with a blank look and an off-hand, “throw them away, of course.”
But children with similar backgrounds can have wildly different attitudes. Second-graders from Stanford’s faculty housing area had one reaction to every bug, worm, spider, and other creepy-crawly they saw—“Ugh! Let’s kill it!” Sixth-graders from the same school spent a half-an-hour on their knees with magnifying lenses looking at all the critters, plants, and minuscule spider webs in approximately one square foot of ground. The adult along with us, meanwhile, got very bored, because she refused to look.
Often the parents who come along appear to need Hidden Villa education more than the kids do. While playing a rowdy game with some fifth-graders in a creek that helped demonstrate the water cycle (and got us delightfully wet in the process), I mentioned how precious fresh water really is, and how we might think about wasting less of it. The children were listening raptly until a father on the shore piped up, “But don’t worry. Technology will take care of all that.” I was speechless. Later I took him aside and we discussed compaction of aquifers and drawbacks to large-scale desalinization. He went away still convinced that those fearless men in white coats wouldn’t let us down. “There’s lots of hydrogen and oxygen around. If worst comes to worst we’ll just make water,” he said confidently.
Not all children of the eighties are environmental angels. There are kids who spend six hours a day with a TV, who would rather have ridden a motorcycle up a hillside than walked, and who would frankly prefer having a MacDonald’s waiting for them at the top of Elephant Mountain. These kids think the farm animals smell and banana slugs are gross (their favorite word) and sitting on the ground for lunch is dirty. After a day with such children, one begins to wonder just whom we are trying to save the wilderness for.
But there are far, far more kids who more than make up for these, who are so sensitive and caring and wonderful that after a day with them, one goes home flushed with hope and convinced that, with people like this in our future, things can only get better. “We need wild places to go to,” answered a sixth-grader when I asked him if he thought it was a waste to have all this unused land. “Building houses and streets and things here would be the waste,” added a girl. “This is the opposite of a waste.” “The land belongs to all of us,” wrote a boy as he sat in Windmill Pastures looking at Hidden Villa’s unspoiled mountains. “It’s up to us to love it and take care of it and all the plants and animals here.”
And children have a special ability to create magical moments. I once had some fourth-graders kneel down and look for the newest baby plant they could find—one that looked like it just popped up this morning. I then read them the following poem by Marcie Harris:
Fueled
by a million man-made
wings of fire
the rocket tore a tunnel
through the sky
and everyone cheered.
Fueled
only by a thought from God
the seedling urged its way
through the thicknesses of black.
And as it pierced the heavy ceiling of
the soil
and launched itself into outer space
no one even clapped.
The children stared at their tiny seedlings in silence. And then they gently began to applaud.
Gale Warner
Transcribed with permission, Earth Island Journal,Vol. 1 #4; May 7, 1981