Homeschoolers: Good for the Environment

We try to get out each morning and walk a half mile down the road to the farm where live two cows and a pony. We often notice with disgust the trash that accumulates by the roadside. Some of the material falls from the garbage trucks that come through on Wednesday afternoons, but one of our neighbors clearly has a drinking problem since there is an abundance of nip bottles and beer cans strewn about in the grass verge.

In her usual sweet way, our middle daughter, one morning suggested that we come through the next day with a large bin bag and collect the trash. We had a great time finding and collecting the trash the next day (meanwhile Alice's Restaurant was looping in my mind). We speculated about how it came to rest on the side of the road (the garbage, not my mind), talked about the damage to the environment- plants and animals alike. We imagined that the bobolinks (an increasingly rare species due to the dessimation of our farms with grass crops) chirrupping above us were calling their thanks.

By the time we returned home, our lawn and leaf bag was full up and required two people to carry it. Now, we didn't save the world, just tidied up our little patch of road, but the exercise served to assure our children that they have the power to make a difference in their world, and that stewardship of our world begins with picking up what is right in front of us. The opportunity to DO is far more powerful than an Earthday Worksheet that will be filled in and taken home, probably dropped getting off the bus, and forgotten until a homeschooler comes along to collect it from the roadside on his daily walk.