Nature journaling in school gardens is a unique way to engage students in the natural world, providing time to notice, wonder, and observe through writing and drawing while engaging in environmental and sustainability learning. With the number of school gardens increasing in the United States, educators can benefit from understanding what students experience while participating in garden-based learning activities so they can adapt their teaching to fit the educational needs of their participants. School garden studies typically focus on measuring academic and health outcomes and nature journaling studies typically focus on educator experiences with one classroom. We facilitated a nature journaling study with four elementary classrooms in a public, Title I school in the desert southwest to explore student experiences while nature journaling in their school garden. Our findings show that nature journaling provides opportunities for students to engage in sustainability literacy by helping them to develop a sense of place in their school garden, inspire environmental stewardship, and practice systems thinking right outside their classrooms.
The widespread environmental degradation characterizing the Anthropocene is a call to address a deteriorating human-nature relationship. For much of history, humans have been deeply connected with and in respect of nature both physically and psychologically, and this bond can be renewed. Doing so is especially important for future generations, as modern youth have less opportunities to experience the natural world and more opportunities to experience the virtual world. A lack of nature connectedness in our youth has clear implications for sustainability and underscores the need for interventions aimed at reconnecting youth with nature. Primary and secondary education is a particularly valuable leverage point for such interventions, and nature-based school landscapes may be a valuable tool in strengthening the human-nature relationship and reconnecting youth with nature. While studies have indirectly linked garden-based learning and connection with nature in youth, research has not yet directly explored the relationship between the two.
My research explores 12th grade students attending Desert Marigold School in South Phoenix. Desert Marigold practices Waldorf educational philosophy with the school’s garden as a primary teaching tool and recreational space. I used arts-based methods to give students an opportunity to visually communicate their perspectives of the school’s landscape through photography and artistic renderings. Students then verbally described and discussed their media in a series of group interviews. Data were then coded and analyzed for themes of connection with nature expressed in the literature. The results illustrate that students connect with nature in a variety ways through the school’s landscape, demonstrating potential for enhanced sustainability outcomes in education.
As a solution to this problem, I created an after school program to provide staff and myself additional time to implement such curriculum and expand the depth of knowledge that students are exposed to. This positive additional time to the educational day, was able to come to life through a grant that I wrote and received to transport students from their elementary school to a local greenhouse. At the greenhouse, I was able to create a series of lessons focused on the resources needed for gardens and plant production. Through these lessons, I utilized inquiry based lesson plans to provide me with a template that was unique from typical lessons taught at school. Through these hands on experiences in our club, students were able to work at their own pace and learn about resources, soil, water, pollinators, and parts of a flower.
Tracking the environmental impacts of production, use, and disposal of products (e.g., goods, and services) have been an important issue in the global economy. Although Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a widely applied method to track these environmental impacts and support policies, it has certain limitations and an isolated way of evaluating the environmental impacts with no consideration of social and economic impacts and mechanisms. To overcome the limits of current LCA, three mechanisms have been proposed in the literature: (1) broadening the indicators by including social and economic indicators in addition to the environmental impacts; (2) broadening the scope of analysis from product-level assessment to national and global levels; (3) deepening the assessment by inclusion of more mechanisms to account for interrelations among the system elements, uncertainty analysis, stakeholder involvement, etc. With these developments, LCA has been evolving into a new framework called Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA). Practical application of LCSA requires integration of various methods, tools, and disciplines. In this study, a comprehensive literature review is conducted to investigate recent developments, current challenges, and future perspectives in the LCSA literature.
According to the review, a high number (40%) of LCSA studies are from the environmental science discipline, while contributions from other disciplines such as economics (3%) and social sciences (9%) are very low. On broadening the scope of analysis, 58% of the studies are product-level works, while 37% quantified the impacts at national level and achieved an economy-wide analysis, and only 5% of the studies were able to quantify the global impacts of products using LCSA framework. Furthermore, current applications of LCSA have not considered the rebound effects, feedback mechanisms, and interrelations of the system of interest sufficiently. To address these challenges, we present a complete discussion about the overarching role of systems thinking to bring tools, methods and disciplines together, and provide practical examples from the earlier studies that have employed various system-based methods. We discuss the importance of integrated system-based methods for advancement of LCSA framework in the following directions: (1) regional and global level LCSA models using multi-region input-output analysis that is capable of quantitatively capturing macro-level social, environmental, and economic impacts; (2) dealing with uncertainties in LCSA during multi-criteria decision-making process and expert judgments in weighting of LCSA indicators; and (3) integration of system dynamics modeling to reveal complex interconnections, dependencies, and causal relationships between sustainability indicators.
The ways in which we travel—by what mode, for how long, and for what purpose—can affect our sense of happiness and well-being. This paper assesses the relationships between measures of the sustainability of transportation systems in U.S. metropolitan areas and subjective well-being. Associations between self-reported happiness levels from the Gallup Healthways Well-being Index and commute data were examined for 187 core-based statistical areas (CBSA). We also supplement this quantitative analysis through brief case studies of high- and low-performing happiness cities. Our quantitative results indicate that regions with higher commute mode shares by non-automobile modes generally had higher well-being scores, even when controlling for important economic predictors of happiness. We also find that pro-sustainable transportation policies can have implications for population-wide happiness and well-being. Our case studies indicate that both high and low scoring happiness cities demonstrate a dedicated commitment to improving sustainable transportation infrastructure. Our study suggests that cities that provide incentives for residents to use more sustainable commute modes may offer greater opportunity for happiness than those that do not.