The Appalachian trail: an environmental classroom.

Abstract

Given recent observations about the detrimental effects of alienating children from nature, there should be a similar concern for addressing such effects in college students. "The Literature and Cultures of the Appalachian Trail" is a course that blends work inside in the classroom and outside on the trail as an answer to the effects of what Richard Louv has labeled "nature deficit."

"We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy."

Henry David Thoreau, "Natural History of Massachusetts"

Introduction

With all of the recent attention on the possible social effects of the alienation of children from nature, one wonders about the ways in which such alienation may affect university students. More than half a century ago, Aldo Leopold, in proposing his Land Ethic, suggested that perhaps the most serious impediment to the evolution of such an ethic is that "our educational and economic system is headed away from rather than toward, an intense consciousness of the land" (223-224). Recently, Lowell Monke, a former teacher of computer skills to elementary school children, critiqued the computer for inhibiting our ability as humans to learn from the nonhuman world. Monke writes that

   Western pedagogy has always favored abstract
   knowledge over experiential learning. Even relying on
   books too much too early inhibits the ability of children
   to develop direct relationships with the subjects they are
   studying. But because of their power, computers drastically
   exacerbate this tendency, leading us to believe that
   vivid images, massive amounts of information, and even
   online conversations with experts provide an adequate
   substitute for conversing with the things themselves.
   (28)

Maybe the most noticed of recent work highlighting the potential deleterious effects of sequestering our children in front of computers or televisions is Richard Louv's. He writes that in a society that imposes on its children "an artificial environment for which they have not evolved," eventually "children and adults alike would suffer from what might be called nature-deficit disorder, not in a clinical sense, but as a condition caused by the cumulative human costs of alienation from nature, including diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses" (71).

Louv suggests the possibility that not only children but adults as well may suffer in significant ways from the changes our electronic technology has occasioned in the way we learn. His observations seem important to me because universities by and large don't require that graduating students be ecologically literate. We don't require our graduates to know anything about the environment where they live and attend classes, nor do we ask them to be familiar with environmental laws that protect the air and water we all depend on for life.

In my own classes I have asked my young-adult students not to use CD players and cell phones on various outings associated with their coursework, since being out in the woods, even for only part of a day, gives them the chance to listen to natural sounds rather than the buzz and hum and roar that surrounds them the rest of the time. I was amazed to discover the predominance of the I-Pod on a weeklong kayaking trip with students last spring, and I am concerned about all of the students--a vast majority of those in my classes--who are hooked into recorded music or cell phones more than they are to their own thoughts. How can students care about a world that they walk through tied to technologies that distract them from that world? And how should such a concern influence the ways we approach the task of teaching our students, even in disciplines that seem more focused on culture than nature?

The Plan of the Course

I grew up in Washington County, Maryland, where the Appalachian Trail follows the county's eastern boundary as it snakes along a ridge known as South Mountain, so the Trail has occupied a small corner of my consciousness for most of my life. It was, however, the popularity of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods in 1998 that convinced me that a course on the culture of the trail might be able to draw enough students to make it worthwhile. Moreover, the Trail as subject offers a unique opportunity to talk about issues of ecology and wilderness preservation as part of the context for understanding the history of a region as well as the AT, a cultural institution that has achieved legendary status. The Trail has the potential of representing what Gary Snyder has called "the culture of nature"(645), a phrase used to suggest an ideal balance of human concerns with nature, something that everyone who has written about the Trail, including Bryson, quickly understands and features to one degree or another in their work. After all, the Trail is a phenomenon of the East and its path winds near some of the most densely populated areas in the United States. It represents both the significant role that nature has played in American culture and some of the best and worst of the ways our culture has interacted with nature.

I proposed the course as an English Department Senior Seminar, a course intended to be a capstone to a student's work as an English major at Penn State. Offering the course as a seminar keeps the enrollment small enough to permit me to include an experience on the AT as part of the course. Class reading and discussion about the AT are complemented with a substantial section hike--one that would take us from the headquarters of the organization that manages the Trail, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, through Maryland to the Pennsylvania border, a distance of a little more than forty miles.

I needed, though, to find a workable way to deal with the immense variety of issues, ideas, and information the AT represents. Bryson's popular book had to be included, but I also looked into other thin-hiker narratives and found that there were several to choose from. I discovered Robert Alden Rubin's excellent On the Beaten Path: An Appalachian Pilgrimage and Adrienne Hall's Journey North: One Woman's Story of Hiking the Appalachian Trail, both so new when the course was first offered in spring 2001 that only expensive hardbacks were available for my students. No one complained, though, and many students preferred the authenticity of the accounts of Rubin and Hall to Bryson's somewhat contrived account of his experience on the Trail.

These stories of hiking the AT seemed necessary to introduce the class to the subculture of the thru-hiker, but they were not enough to constitute an entire course, so I looked to David Emblidge's Appalachian Trail Reader, which provided readings to focus the class on literature of the region (from William Bartram to James Dickey), or the history and sociology of Appalachia, AT history and backpacking skills, environmental issues associated with the AT, and a rich variety of other topics, even excerpts from the trail registers found in the Trail's shelters. The Reader is also arranged geographically, which facilitated my organizing the course as a metaphorical thru-hike of AT culture around which I could weave the thru-hike narratives. And this was a literature course, too, that I wanted to include writing from the region not directly related to the Trail, from selected poems of Whitman and Frost to Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. The course was as diverse as the Trail itself, and discussion ranged from high culture to low culture to subculture over all sorts of intellectual and real terrain.

But I was also dissatisfied with the fragmented sense created by the brief selections in Emblidge's anthology and by the pressure inherent in the geographical arrangement to represent the entire geography of the trail in reading assignments. So, as the course evolved through a couple more versions over the next four years, the organizational focus shifted away from geography to the act of walking the Trail. Such an adjustment seemed justified by the centrality of the hiking experience to the course, especially as that experience is realized in our own section hike, and by the importance of understanding the thru-hiker subculture as central to the complete AT experience. I chose to begin the latest iteration of the course with Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking, a wonderful cultural history that covers everything from the physiology of walking to the surreal experience of the postmodern walking city, Las Vegas. Adrienne Hall's book was replaced with Kelly Winters's compelling story of her thru-hike as an exploration of sexual identity, Walking Home: A Woman's Pilgrimage on the Appalachian Trail, and Mic Lowther's Walking North: A Family Hikes the Appalachian Trail, an account of Lowther's discovery of the most important reasons for hiking the AT through his experience on the Trail with his wife and ten-year-old daughter, was added. Finally, I included Larry Luxemberg's classic collection of stories of AT thru-hikers, Walking the Appalachian Trail.

This refocusing has allowed for a bit more concentration on issues associated with the interaction of hikers with the environment. Solnit, for example, places emphasis on the physical act of walking in a culture where physical being is largely ignored, and the other books raise specific questions about our culture's conceptions of time, wilderness, community, success, and gender; the rewards of living a simplified life, the value of human experience in nature, etc.

The Class Hike

David W. Orr has written about the problem contemporary higher education has in offering "anything like a coherent, ecologically solvent worldview" because "students are fed through a conveyor belt of requirements, large classes, deadlines, and general busy-ness"(153). Such circumstances lead to a specialized education that often does not encourage students to understand their place in the world nor to appreciate how such an understanding relates to their health and the health of the place in which they live. "Man is in the world and his ecology is the nature of that inness," Paul Shepard wrote. "He is in the world as in a room, and in transience, as in the belly of a tiger or in love" (56). I have tried to design a classroom course that underscores reading about the difficulties and joys of discovering the "inness" of our relationship in the world. However, what makes such an understanding real is taking the class outside for a hike.

As Ron Hellstern, a former chair of the Elementary and Secondary Education Commission for the North American Association for Environmental Education has said, "Being outdoors offers a whole variety of opportunities you don't get in a standard classroom (quoted in Bogo, 28).

Like the reading and other classroom assignments, my approach to the class outing has evolved over time. The goal, though, has always been to give students the richest experience of the Trail possible in a long weekend (from Thursday to Sunday). I have also tried to do the trip as inexpensively as possible to make the course affordable for my students. With help from the college in renting a van to carry equipment, car pooling among students, and sharing gear the trip doesn't cost students much, unless they opt to buy new boots or equipment or to rent gear from the university's outing club. After the first trip, when unprepared students shivered through the early spring night in flimsy sleeping bags and struggled with ill-fitting backpacks, I learned to encourage students to borrow or rent gear that would make the entire experience more enjoyable to them, and checked their gear over to make sure it would do the job.

In fact, I learned a great deal from that first hike that has had a positive impact on subsequent versions of the course. For instance, I learned to get detailed health histories from students and to comb through them for signs that a student might not be able to complete the hike. Descriptions of the AT through Maryland suggest it is the easiest stretch of the entire 2100-mile footpath, but a forty-mile walk in four days is demanding for most people even without packs on their backs and roots and rocks to walk on and over. I learned to seek the help of experienced outdoors people, men and women, to help teach the group the skills needed to be safe and to lead while we are on the Trail. And most of all I learned that contingency and surprise are part of such experiences, just as they are part of life. When I had to end that first trip half way through because a student with kidney stones had to be rushed from the trail to the hospital, the students themselves turned the experience and the challenges it presented into a part of the trip and the course. On the second trip, a couple of students caught up in a conversation, actually got lost, and were unable to find their way back to the wide and well marked AT. These students knocked on the doors of several wary country people until they found a sympathetic soul who thought he knew where we might be camping and took the students there to rejoin us. On the latest trip a student decided she couldn't go on after the second day of hiking, but strategically placed "escape" vehicles allowed us the opportunity to drive her to the shelter for that night and then return to the beginning point for that day and complete the entire day's walk. The point is that one can always count on the unexpected in a way that is not possible in the controlled setting of the classroom.

More than that, though, the trip has always been a way for students, like Thoreau at the top of Mt. Katahdin, to understand what it is to be physical beings inhabiting a physical world (94-95). For Thoreau, the experience brought him to speechlessness and for my students the effects are similar. The weekend collects their attention and turns it toward their own sore feet and shoulders, the presence of morning cloaks and barred owls, and the play of sun off of distant limestone ridges. It also reveals to them the noise of the railroad yard in Brunswick, Maryland, or the sound of the Mason-Dixon Dragway that seems to dog hikers for miles when the race track is open, or the incongruity of walking this "wilderness" path on a footbridge that crosses I-70 while drivers of cars and semis honk their greetings. Above all the experience demonstrates the growing scarcity of wildness in ways that a classroom experience alone can not.

Conclusion

Jack Turner, in his consideration of the place of wildness in our world, asks how we are to live so as to be incorporated by that world, "in this place, in these times," suggesting that "in many inner cities, here and in the developing world, people no longer have a concept of wild nature based on personal experience" (91, 82). My answer to the effects of what Louv calls "nature deficit" is not all of the answer, but it is a worthwhile beginning By returning our alienated students to a wild setting, by reintroducing them to their physical selves as they function in a physical world, we plant a seed that may flower into a healthy relationship with the natural world or even a true practice of the wild.

Works Cited

Bogo, Jennifer. A Million Snowflakes, 500 Elk, 10 Moose Droppings, 4 Coyotes, and a Bird Nest in an Aspen Tree." Audubon, 107 (January/February 2005): 27-30.

Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper Collins, 1998.

Emblidge, David, ed. The Appalachian Trail Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Hall, Adrienne. Journey North: One Woman's Story of Hiking the Appalachian Trail. Boston: Appalachian Mountain Club, 2000.

King, Stephen. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. New York: Pocket Books, 1999.

Leopold, Aldo. "The Land Ethic." A Sand Counry Almanac: And Sketches Here and Now. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949, 201-228.

Louv, Richard. "Nature Deficit: Is ADHD research overlooking the green factor?" Orion, 24 (July-Aug. 2005): 70-71.

Lowther, Mick. Walking North: A Family Hikes the Appalachian Trail. Seattle: Elton-Wolf, 2001

Luxemberg, Larry. Walking the Appalachian Trail. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994.

Monke, Lowell. "Charlotte's Webpage: Why Children Shouldn't Have the World at Their Fingertips." Orion, 24 (September-October, 2005): 24-31.

Orr, David W. The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Rubin, Robert Alden. On the Beaten Path: An Appalachian Pilgrimage. New York: Lyons Press, 2000.

Shepard, Paul. "Ecology and Man--A Viewpoint" The Ecological Conscience: Values for Survival. Ed. Robert Disch. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970, 56-66.

Snyder, Gary. "The Rediscovery of Turtle Island." The Great New Wilderness Debate. Ed. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998, 642-651.

Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Thoreau, Henry David. "Ktaadn." The Maine Woods. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Turner, Jack. The Abstract Wild. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996.

Winters, Kelly. Walking Home: A Woman's Pilgrimage on the Appalachian Trail. Los Angeles: Alyson Publications, 2001.

Robert E. Burkholder, Penn State University

Burkholder is Associate Professor of English at Penn State University, University Park.