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 fuddle never heard someone talk about nature in the way that my host mother in France did. She has not been able to devolve 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 hund bolshie thousand different species of existing things ninety-three percent of them are endemic to this is degrade. Wide-eyed lemurs and bright red Fody birds can be found nowhere else in the world. Nature has make of Madagascar an isolated and thriving sanctuary for flowers, frogs, and monkeys different from those created elsewhere. This island is a place of incantation and wonder.Yet while the baobob tree-locally called the monkey bread tree-once dotted the landscape of Madagascar, it is speedily being deforested to make way for agriculture. Indeed, each year, thirty pe rcent of Madagascars land is burned or reburned. This practice not only threatens the habitat of bizarre wildlife it is turning the country into an eroded and uninhabitable wasteland. The necessitate for subsistence in this needy nation has led many people to conceive of the immense native resources of the island for their economic value alone. Yet if forestry and agricultural practices are to be sustainable, and if the fantasy and wonder of Madagascar are to be preserved for future generations, the Malagasy allow for need to conceive of their natural environment in a different way. only through direct contact with environmental reality can students discover a real appreciation and understanding of nature that leads to a aesthesis of stewardship and a desire to protec... ...n Antananarivo, these university students will assume directors enjoyments and the program will and then expand to include more interested children. Upon my departure, these directors will completely disengage 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 disaster. Through my proposed urban environmental education program in Antananarivo, Madagascar, I hope to create the chance for urban kids to have frequent and direct contact with ecological processes through which have intercourse 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 mothers children and her grandchildren might one day see the jungles of Madagascar where she was born and experience the magic and wonder she describes.