My thoughts on EE before coming to Merry Lea

I became interested in the environment due to an Interdisciplinary english class that lead me to my major. In the class we read a lot of nature writing that talked about a variety of issues and presented the environment in many different ways. To guide us in this, we also studied geography, ecology, biology, geology and history. Geography is what primarily caught my attention and according to many people in the field, I was a cultural geographer.

My mentor that I worked with is also a cultural geographer but with a background in biology. He is also a interpreter. I took classes with him in geography, nature and heritage tourism, and interpretation.

This background formed my thoughts on EE. I assumed that EE was kind of like Interpretation, but with an ecology and biology emphasis. I always view EE as including the environment as a whole. This included the cultures that surrounded it as well as the physical world. I guess this also meant that I looked at EE in more of a place-based education view.

While reading, I realized that I never really brought in the man-made things into my definition of the environment. I was only thinking the natural world. Anything man-made never crossed my mind. I always saw man-made things as a negative and thought there was no way that they could be included in the definition.

With my reading and thinking more about it, I am realizing that it plays a major part in the environment and in EE. How can we teach EE without including man-made structures and their effect on the natural world?