Nature Centers were new when we built our Trailside Museum. We were preceded in Southwest Ohio by the Burnett Woods Museum in Cincinnati and we were paralleled by the development of the present Dayton Museum of Natural History. We are indebted to both of these for ideas and inspiration. In 1956 the National Audubon Society asked me if it would seem competitive if they set up a Nature Center at Aullwood. I told them we need it-that each Nature Center would stimulate more. The newest now is the Cincinnati Nature Center. Not that we can say who caused it--but for years some of the sponsors of the Cincinnati Nature Center have been visiting the facilities of their predecessors!

Outdoor Education Center

It is good if children can spend a few hours in the woods, but it is better if they can come for a few days. After years of struggling for ways and means, we finally built the Outdoor Education Center in Glen Helen in 1956. This is a residential facility for school classes, for teacher education, for workshops and conferences. It receives around 2000 school children annually, coming from Cincinnati and Columbus and points between. In addition many church and other youth groups schedule week-end retreats and workshops here. Our staff conducts a thoroughgoing program of environmental education for the children. The conferences that have been scheduled here include the Outdoor Science Section of the Ohio Education Association, the Nature School of the Ohio Association of Garden Clubs, the Intercollegiate Outdoor Education Conference, and many others. In the summers it has hosted the Ohio Conservation Labor and the Miami-Antioch Outdoor Education Workshop for Teachers.

The real pay-off comes when some of the teachers and some of the schools that have used our Outdoor Education Center create Outdoor Schools of their own. Several suburban Cincinnati schools, which used to come to Glen Helen, such as this class here, now operate their own program at Camp Kern. The Centerville Board of Education has designed and built outdoor education facilities on their own property. The Tri-District schools, north of Columbus, do school camping at the 4-H Camp Ohio. Both Centerville and Tri-District teachers had attended Glen Helen workshops.

The credit for this vigorous growth of our outdoor education service for schools belongs to Mrs. Jean Sanford Replinger, who developed and directed our Center for ten years until her marriage two years ago.

Riding Centre

In 1957, eighty acres of former farm land in Glen Helen were leased for a program of horseback training called the Riding Centre, and a bridle trail was routed through a second-growth region of the Glen. Now there are three riding academys in the vicinity of Yellow Springs, and the Village's Open Space Plan enivsions bridle paths ringing the town.

Fighting off encroachment threats

During 1958 and 1959 Glen Helen was more severely tested than at any other time to date. Land that is undeveloped is vulnerable to engineering projects, such as highways, utilities, municipal services, or dams. The nearer the land is to an undisturbed natural condition the more vulnerable it becomes. On the economist's totem pole of "the highest and best use", the wilderness occupies the very bottom. Ten years ago the fact that biologists rated such resources as the most valuable of all was generally regarded as ludicrous. Today we are in a significantly better position. New rules by the Federal Highway Administration require State Highway Departments to allow citizens to participate more fully in the process of choosing highway locations. Furthermore, the Highway Departments must maintain a list upon which any public agency or advisory group may enroll to receive notification of new projects proposed.

This altered bureaucratic attitude has been forced by pubile pressure. The pressure has mounted as a result of struggles all across the country against the powers of the economic-engineering complex. These struggles have made news, and have had a powerful educational effect on the general public. Today we have a strong measure of citizen and voter support.

Glen Helen's struggle began in September, 1958, when a highway representative informed us of a plan to relocate U.S. 68 through a portion of Glen Helen, including the Yellow Springs School Forest. The Glen's Advisory Council, a statewide group of conservationists and educators, said we should fight. And we did. We appealed to all the schools and organizations that had used the Outdoor Education Center, to all the vistors that had signed the Trailside guest register;

to all the people that had attended our conference, and to biological and conservation and nature societies. Some of you here, I'm sure, remember writing letters on our behalf. Finally Governor O'Neill, and then his successor, Gov. Di Salle, each wrote assurance that another route would be found.

Nor was this our only struggle. Overlapping this, in 1959 and '60, we had to contend with engineering recommendations that a sewer trunk line and disposal plant be located in the forested valley of the Glen. Finally this alternative location was found outside.

The Glen Helen Association

These successes were hard-won, but they accomplished a great amount of publicity and education about the values of natural areas. Moreover, they left us with a large and enthusiastic body of supporters, who in 1960 organized themselves into the Glen Helen Association. The purposes of the Association are to protect Glen Helen, to promote the idea of community natural areas. and to generally advance ecologic education. It raises funds to strengthen the educational services in Glen Helen, and it sponsors an annual public lecture which has featured such conservationists Karl Maslowski, Stanley Cain, Harry Caudill and Charles Mohr.

The country common

We are fortunate that adjacent to Glen Helen is John Bryan State Park. Together we preserve 1800 acres in the upper Little Miami Valley, and this has attracted other outdoor agencies to our region. Within the park now are a 4-H camp and a State orphan's home camp. The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts bought land for camps adjacent to the Park. The Nature Conservancy raised the money to buy Clifton Gorge and then gave that splendid scenic and scientific preserve to the State. The Village of Yellow Springs has acquired land north and south of Glen Helen as increments toward a future green belt encircling the community. All these open space landowners have since 1962 been associated as a Committee for a Country Common, committed to the purpose of doubling the permanent open space reserve over what they started with, and of cooperating to help each other achieve the best protection and the best use of this beautiful region. A recent film produced by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development includes the Country Common as one of the methods of saving open space before urbanization takes over. Gathering momentum

To speak of a "trigger factor" that may be altering environmental relationships in Southwest Ohio is a rather ambitious metaphor. It suggests an explosive impact. These various endeavors at environmental education which I have been reporting to you have seemed to us at Antioch to be painfully slow in their development and always short of the mark. Yet as we review them we find a cumulative effect and a gathering momentum. I expect that others of you who have been engaged in environmental education have noted similar encouraging evidence. What is more, our several efforts have reinforced each other and tended to merge. The Miami Valley Project is a case in point, and probably would not have been possible ten years ago.

When Jean Sanford was struggling to attract teachers to her Miami-Antioch Outdoor Education Workshop, most teachers saw more future in taking summer sessions in chemistry or math. Now Jean's successors at our Outdoor Education Center, Harry Feldman, is again arranging summer instruction for teachers in Outdoor Education, through the auspices of the Dayton Miami Valley Consortium of Colleges. The credits for this summer course will be granted through Wright State University. Already the response to this proposal is most encouraging. The educational climate is changing.

In 1962 the fledging Association of Interpretive naturalists held one of their first meetings at our Outdoor Education Center, with 98 persons attending. Next week this organization returns to Ohio for a national meeting at Hueston Woods, with a probable registration of 350 persons.

In 1959 the young Ohio Chapter of the Nature Conservancy undertook the effort to preserve Clifton Gorge. As I have said, this has been achieved, and so have 12 other such projects across Ohio. But the Ohio Chapter has created more than nature reserves. It has created public understanding such that legislation is now being prepared to create a Natural Areas System to be administered by the State of Ohio.

One final example in testimony of this gathering momentum is the announcement by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources of its plan to designate the Little Miami as a Scenic River. Many conservation interests have cooperated through Little Miami, Inc., to support this purpose. I think this means that two very significant principles are becoming recognized. One is aesthetic: that government has a responsibility to safeguard important scenic resources. The other is practical: that flood plains are excellent and low-cost sites for nature and recreation, and on the other hand are dangerous and extravagantly costly sites for development, after all the expenses of protection are reckoned.

The research programs which our colleagues are reporting today reveal a wide variety of significant factors for the Miami Valley Project. The educational factor which I have described is helping to establish a psychological environment in which your scientific work can thrive. We have made this education our business in Glen Helen, and we are greatly relieved to realize that at long last we are but one of many centers of environmental education.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you very much. Could we next hear from Miss Buxbaum and then Mr. Schlesinger, and then we will put questions to all of you.

Miss BUXBAUM. The environmental crisis that now confronts us is the result of an ecologically unsound attitude toward life. This attitude has its source somewhere in the educational process. The remedy of the problem, however, also lies in the educational process.

Because formal education begins in elementary schools, environmental awareness should be introduced here along with reading and arithmetic. Montgomery County has the outdoor education program, which is now in its 7th year. It presently involves more than 60 schools and 5,000 children. This week the program is expanding into a junior high school as a pilot program. I have brought copies of the superintendent's report to parents with me for those of you who would like to take a look at it. It was issued about 3 or 4 weeks ago to the parents and faculty within Montgomery County.

In brief, the outdoor education program deals with what might be called experimental learning, based on the premise that kids learn from doing. It involves active learning rather than passive classroom listening. At present, the children spend a week at one of three rented rural sites with the principal, classroom teachers, student teachers, and high school students, or adults from the community who are interested in the program.

They learn forestry, astronomy, biology, map and compass study, and more. Ecology is usually taken up late in the week, for it is the terminal of all the other disciplines. As Joe Howard, the curriculum supervisor, says, "This is what ecology is all about. We can talk about man's abuse of his environment, but you don't get a real feeling for it in a classroom."

Unfortunately, each student must pay approximately $30 for the outing, and the rented sites are not well enough equipped to allow optimal use of the valuable time during which the kids are living their education. The 1971 Capital budget requests $494,000 for construction of a properly equipped facility on a 9.9-acre site in Rock Creek Regional Park. Also requested is nearly $69,000 for the cost of the land. This facility would be used for inservice training of teachers as well as a spot for the weeklong outings.

I question how long 9.8 acres of land will survive constant use by a county full of children and teachers. It seems faulty to spend such money and effort on a project with built-in obsolescence when a larger

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tract of land would surely have a longer relative life span. Use of any particular part of the land would be minimized and therefore less damaging. But the land is expensive.

Unlike many educational ventures, this outdoor education program could conceivably be expanded to accommodate students of all ages in the public school system if there were adequate facilities and educators. It takes money to prepare both commodities. Sites need to be acquired and teachers need to be trained.

But the teachers on the high school level need not be trained independently of the students. Our communities have many specialists in pertinent disciplines both in higher education as professors and researchers and in such institutions as the Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution, and private industry. City planners and architects would have a significant teaching role in many communities because of their proximity to the city.

Curriculum planning would have to be indigenous to the individual school. Once teachers were trained, they could perpetuate and improve their programs. Once high school students were trained, they could contribute to the efforts with primary school children. This would be a great help to the two student groups, for the high school kids would learn about communication with younger children and at the same time be compelled to understand more fully their subject. The younger children might grasp some concepts more fully as presented by an older student rather than a teacher.

The cooperative effort of student teachers and elementary educators would compel the participants to shelve their famous generation gap for the duration of the partnership in education. Chances are that it would never be brought back out of storage.

The time when high school students would do their teaching could conceivably be during the second half of their senior year. Most high school seniors will agree that secondary education lasts 5 months too long, for the end of the first semester is the point of diminishing returns. Senior slump sets in and production drops to drastically low levels.

Teaching need not be the only project of these second-semester seniors. This could be a time during which those interested students could choose to work in some other capacity than classroom listener and thereby further enrich their education. Second semester might become a time for liberal planning to encourage independent endeavor by the student-a kind of work-study program.

Graduation of seniors signals the big kick into the clutches of that mystical beast the real world without any idea of what to expect. Senior projects could be an intermediate step between the all too sheltering high school and the unnecessarily threatening real world.

Within the existing framework of high school academics, there are two aspects to environmental education. The first involves a general exposure that all Americans should have to the crisis we are now facing. This type of general exposure could well be incorporated into the social studies courses such as problems of the 20th century, sociology, and economics as they now exist. Because it is an attitudinal problem being dealt with, it conveniently fits into the framework of courses that study social trends due to economic, political, and historical conditions.

The other aspect of environmental education switches from the social to the scientific. It is in the scientific approach that the word "ecology" becomes meaningful and in the biological analysis that one gains insight into the intricacy of our ecological balances. This more specific instruction is where the excitement and long term challenge enter, but it is also the more difficult of the two sides to expose skillfully and accurately.

Students and educators must feel a commitment to environmental course work for the subject to come alive and be more than academic book learning. Ecology does, indeed, involve a voluminous amount of bookwork, but it must also become a way of life to be meaningful. Instructors of ecology, the science, must be specialists. We do not yet have enough ecologists to go around.

This is the point in my testimony where I shall bring in my experience last summer. I lived ecology for 5 weeks under the subsidy of a National Science Foundation summer study grant in Nevada. It was at Foresta Institute of Ocean and Mountain Studies.

Our purpose was to learn. The course material was rigorous, stimulating, and challenging. For the first 3 weeks, we had an hour of chores, several hours of lectures, about 5 hours of field research, and several hours of field data reduction each day. On several evenings, we had lectures by our Czechoslovakian and Chilean guest botanistecologists. Several nights we slept out in the field, gathering further microclimate data and trapping and observing the noctural mammals. Our schedules were always full, so there could be no tardiness or procrastination.

After this first period of acquiring a background in ecological principles and of learning to think scientifically, we all moved up to a large isolated estate on the shore of Lake Tahoe. Here new disciplines were added to the old. Here we acted for 10 days as individuals on original research projects. We worked apart, slept apart, and most often ate apart. Our instruments for investigation were simple and often selfdesigned and self-constructed. I learned about hearing, seeing, tasting, and feeling when I was alone on these several days.

And the staff was extraordinary. They were truly teachers. Each of them was a knowledgeable teacher in the classroom; each lived, worked, and learned with us, contributing equally to our Foresta community.

This 5 weeks of study was a total learning experience. I discovered things, made instruments, labored hard to learn my subject. The challenges became surmountable; the human relationships grew precious and permanent; and the academics were different from anything I had ever encountered in school.

Ecology came alive for me in Nevada because it became a way of life. For 5 weeks I was totally immersed in environmental awareness. An incredible amount of time was spent in our small library and lab, but the academics seemed incidental. The outside was always there on the other side of the door, waiting to let me expore it. It imposed no restrictions except that I respect it-so I did. There was a profound sharing there, for as nature gave me the priceless experience of finding my ecological niche in her system, I promised to return the gift. by means of that knowledge. I plan to be an ecologist. Before this summer, I felt no inclination toward science.