Other Resources

What is an Environmental Story?

An environmental story is a written account of your community’s environment.  It can be used to help citizens relate caringly to their local natural and human environment.  It is designed to be a guide to an area’s natural and human systems--past, present, and future.  Although it is often intended to serve as a teaching companion, it can also be a useful reference for youth leaders, parents, new community members, historians, and environmentalists of all ages. 

The environment, which is approached holistically, is defined to include the natural, cultural, built and social aspects of the surroundings that impact on our lives.  A community environmental story establishes a bridge between today and tomorrow, and profiles such environmental topics as air, water quality, solid and hazardous waste, energy, historic preservation, the built environment, transportation, neighborhoods and redevelopment.

Why Should I Create the Environmental Story of my Community?

A primary objective of an environmental story is to foster a mindset in a community’s citizens that can lead to a sustainable future.  The hands-on interpretive approach is designed to heighten awareness, enhance citizens’ capacity to enjoy the beauty surrounding them, and develop a sense of social and environmental stewardship.

An environmental story is interdisciplinary and stresses critical thinking.  It establishes a bridge between your community today and tomorrow and profiles such environmental topics as air, water quality, solid, and hazardous waste, energy, historic preservation, the built environment, transportation, neighborhoods and redevelopment.  Climate, vegetation, wildlife, and terrain are studied and discussed along with an exploration of the area’s ethnic, racial, socioeconomic and neighborhood groupings.  Readers develop a sense of place and become aware of shared commonalties in the problems and aspirations that underlie the differences they perceive in language and culture.  This helps establish a base for mutual understanding and cooperation.

Readers learn to understand how a responsible approach to their immediate surroundings can help provide a clean, attractive, habitable place to live.  This establishes a meaningful knowledge base for developing an environmental ethic and extrapolating their conservationist concern beyond narrow political and personal boundaries.  Readers are taught to make informed and objective cost/benefit evaluations on local issues and also are learning to sometimes accept short-term economic discomfort, recognizing that ultimately, they, with the rest of their community, will probably be better off.

Readers of all ages are challenged to deal, at their own levels, with current local problems, whose immediacy make them seem less black-and-white than issues seem from a distance.  The intent is for them to fact gather, learn to understand that the well-being of their home, its immediate surroundings and the people living there are inextricably related to the environmental health of their city, their state, their country, and in fact, the whole world.

Taught to recognize that they are part of an interdependent human and natural web, readers will emerge educated to question prevalent attitudes and values, protect and respect diversity wherever it occurs in natural and human communities, and modify behavior in conformity with an ethic that sees people as a part of the natural world, not its masters.

Top

Developing Your Goals and Budget

Documenting your community’s environmental story can be expensive depending on your goals.  Develop your goals independently from your budget, but keep in mind that in the end the amount of money available to you will influence the product that you create.

Budget

Paper: $4.00-$40.00 per ream depending on the quality of paper
Printing: Three cents to a dollar a page depending on if you are printing or copying it yourself or having it done professionally and depending on the number of colors used in the fact sheet
Photos and graphics: Free (your own or royalty-free photos and graphics) to expensive
Maps: Free to expensive depending on if you are using publicly available maps, making one yourself, or paying a contractor to make one
Research: Free (your own time and sweat) to expensive (paying a contractor to do the research)
Postage: Only if you plan on sending your fact sheets out by mail
Web site hosting: A fact sheet can be integrated into your web site for free if someone in your group has web expertise.  If you want to have a professional design and host your fact sheet, it could cost a few hundred dollars.

Top

Financing
The options available for paying for the development, printing and distribution of your environmental story vary depending on your intended audience.  If the story will be distributed to the general public grants are often available from public and private environmental grant sources.  Grantors include the Chesapeake Bay Trust, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Pennsylvania’s Growing Greener Program, the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fund, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Small Watershed Grants Program.  Your local government also may help pay for its publication. 

If your intended audience is students and teachers, additional funding sources become available.  A list of funding sources for the Chesapeake Bay region are listed on the Chesapeake Science on the Internet for Educators (CHESSIE) website – www.bayeducation.net.

Goals

Your goals for creating your environmental story can be quite broad, or very specific.  When developing your goals, think about the audience you are targeting and make sure to develop your work plan accordingly.  Some example goals include:

• Raising public awareness about the treasures and threats to their watershed;
• Teaching students about their local community to develop their knowledge base and environmental ethic;
• Documenting the history of your community and watershed for future generations;
• Educating local elected officials about their local environment so that they can make better decisions based on the costs and benefits to the ecosystem

Again, keep in mind your goals and audience in determining your workplan.  For example, if your goal is to teach students, you may want to involve them in the creation of your environmental story.  There is no better type of learning than experiential learning! 

Top

Creating a Timeline

Creating an environmental story is a time consuming process.  From start to finish you should give yourself a minimum of one year.  The amount of time it takes to put together your story will depend on how dedicated your project team is and the complexity of your community’s history.  Below is a sample timeline from the process of developing the Monroe County, Florida Environmental Story

• June 1988 - The Monroe County Environmental Education Task Force (EETF) decides to take on writing of the Monroe County Environmental Story (MCES) after hearing of a similar project in Dade County, Florida.  A small group for the EETF formed a project committee and chose a person to coordinate the writing of the MCES.  Major decisions were made by this core group.
• July-August 1988 - The EETF studied copies of previous environmental stories and the environmental story process manual created in Albuquerque, NM.  A list of possible Ad Hoc Committee members, key people in the community, was complied.
• Sept. 1988 - The group met with the superintendent of schools to explain the project and gave a presentation of MCES to the Monroe County School Board.  It received total approval and radio and newspaper publicity.  A letter then went out to potential Ad Hoc committee members.  
• Oct. 1988 - The group wrote a hand out explaining the MCES project and compiled a list of potential contributors.   It also sent out form letter to potential contributors with a participation form.  
• Nov. 1988 - First Community Planning meeting held.  The superintendent gave the welcome address, then a general introductory session and a group meeting followed.  Four areas were set up – one for each of the four sections of the book and participants joined the group of their interest/expertise.  MCES project committee members chaired each of the six groups.
• Dec. 1988 - Plans were made for section meetings.  Letters to potential contributors were sent announcing section meetings.
• Jan. 1989 - Sections meetings were held, the outline was refined and the writing topics were assigned.
• Feb. – April - The first articles from the sections were received.  Letters were sent to writers of the articles and to the writers who had not yet sent articles. 
• April 1989 - Spring meeting/social was held for updating progress.  Participation forms were made available for newcomers. 
• May 1989 - Peer review guidelines were written.
• June 1989 - Summer Teachers’ workshops were held to modify worksheets and activities.
• July 1989 - Meetings held with writers, peer reviewers.  Editing and word processing took place with periodic updating.
• Early 1990 - The group charted its progress and updated its mailing lists.  It began to meet with photographers and artists.  Through these meetings it made charts and located photographs.
• April 1990 - Prepared a MiniBook – a sample of articles that will appear in MCES, in order to help obtain funding.  Worked hard to obtain for funding through phone, and letter writing campaigns.
• September 1990 - Started a publicity campaign.  The EETF put out a monthly newsletter giving progress of the MCES.  Additionally the monthly meetings were covered in the press to generate support.  The group designs a booth about the project for educational conferences.

Top

Creating Your Environmental Story

Getting Started

The first meeting of the advisory committee should provide a primer on community environmental stories to those on the committee.  Ideally, committee members will have already been provided with a copy of an already completed environmental story and will have made themselves familiar with the concept.  After providing background on the book, you should assess the interest and commitment on the part of those present and determine if the idea is appropriate for your local area.  If the group is interested in going ahead with the project, the group should set meeting dates and a timeline for various steps involved in writing an environmental story.

Top

Future meetings should cover brainstorming and deciding on content of a book.  This will include developing a general outline for the book.  An important part of this process is identifying the natural areas to be included, selecting the communities or areas for “Sense of Place”, and determining the environmental concerns important to your area.  Based on the projected outline for the book, the advisory committee should determine leadership for the preparation of the book including coordinator(s); senior writer(s); editor(s); and artist(s).

Furthermore the group will need to identify possible sources of funding and in-kind support.  In addition to the possible grantors listed in the “Financing” section, you may want to contact your city planning department and the local public school system for “in-kind” contributions (writing, word processing, duplicating, editing, proofreading, photographs, maps, graphics).

If your group does not have tax-exempt status, you should work with a local non-profit group that has tax exempt status to receive and administer grants.  The usual fee for performing this task could be waived as an in-kind contribution. 

Preparation of the Dade County Environmental Story was well advanced before any funding was secured.  A small private foundation, contacted during the initial planning stage expressed great interest in the book and indicated intention to commit $5,000 when the project was closer to becoming a reality.  No further attempts were made to secure funding until approximately one-fourth of the manuscript had been written.

At that time, a grant of $7,000 was obtained from the Florida State Department of Education to prepare a camera-ready manuscript.  This money was spent for editing, illustrations, and adaptation of the activities in AES.

An additional State Department of Education grant of $10,000 was received the following year to meet the cost of printing 2,300 copies of the book.  The $5,000 was received at this time and was applied toward printing.

Top

Developing the Manuscript

The first step of creating your environmental story is to outline the contents of the book.  In doing so you should decide on the subjects and number of the sections to be included as well as their order in the book.  Perhaps the easiest method is to use a previously published environmental story as a guide and select and adapt subsections or sections from these manuscripts.

Next you should select writers for each of the sections and subsections of the environmental story.  Contact key governmental agency personnel, university faculty, non-profit and community leaders, and other concerned and involved citizens who have expertise in the various subjects to be covered.  Explain to them the project and ask that their efforts be made as in-kind contributions.  Provide each of the writers with your outline as well as already published environmental stories to use as a model.  Also give the writers written overviews of the length, scope and purpose of the articles they have been asked to prepare. 

If you will be using your environmental story for educational purposes, ask teachers with expertise in science and social studies to adapt the environmental story activities for classroom use.  Because teachers are generally not well paid, consider offering a small stipend to those who express interest.  If possible, plan for this work to be done during the summer months when school is not in session.

After selecting your writers, set deadlines for them.  Allow two or three months for writers to complete their portion of the story and contact writers periodically by telephone to determine their progress.  Deadlines are important, but should remain fluid.  Writers may have personal issues to deal with (remember they are volunteering their time) or a section may turn out to be more complicated than was first envisioned.

After the writers’ first drafts are in, arrange for peer review of their work.  Ask the writers to provide possible reviewers so that they are sure to receive advice from experts that they respect.  If possible, have authors of other sections of the environmental story review each other’s work.  This will provide for some consistency in the document’s language and format from section to section. 

After each of the authors’ drafts is peer reviewed and returned to the author for approval, the entire document should be edited and rewritten.  Editing at this point should be limited to changes in length and to correction of obvious errors.  It is not necessary to completely standardize the document’s style.  Once the document has been edited, obtain written and dated approval from each author for the section that they wrote. 

Once approval has been obtained, you should word process the manuscript.  This includes putting the entire manuscript in a standardized font and point size.  Ideally authors will use a standard word-processing program so that editing will be simplified.  You can then build a table of contents from the headings of the different sections and chapters as well as an index of key words.  Of course you should spell and grammar check the document using the word processing software!

Top

Including Illustrations

Illustrations, maps and photos make the document more visually appealing and provide information that is sometimes difficult to convey through text.  It is crucial to include illustrations to keep the document from appearing dry and sterile.  

The first step is to solicit recommendations for illustrations from your authors and advisory committee.  They may have excellent ideas and some may wish to provide their pieces.  Additionally, you should ask your local museums, universities, historic preservation societies, planning departments, and other public agencies for photos and illustrations – they can be an invaluable resource! 

General photographs and illustrations of wildlife and nature can be found on the internet.  Some of these sites will require that a royalty be paid to the artist, however some government websites provide free high-quality photos.  You should always site the source of the photo that you have used!  Illustrations such as old woodcuts that are royalty-free can be obtained from books found at your local bookstore or online.

For some items, you are not going to be able to find ready-made artwork.  In these cases, solicit the help of a local college or high school art class.  Other items such as maps also must be specially made.  Ask your local planning department or department of environmental protection if they have mapping software and if so, ask them to create the special maps that you need.

Preparing the Camera Ready Manuscript

If you are going to print copies of your manuscript, there is more work to be done!  You must now select the cover design, the layout of your manuscript, the type of paper stock and font type to be used.  Solicit donations of paper from local businesses if possible, or try to arrange for a sizable discount on paper.

You must also solicit printing bids.  Don’t just select the printer with the lowest bid.  Consider if they have done similar previous work and ask their clients for an evaluation of their quality of work.  If possible, find a printer who will offer a substantial discount as an in-kind contribution.

Top

Preparing the Manuscript for Other Formats

The layout of a book is not always conducive to publishing on the internet or on a CD-ROM.  Some additional work may need to be done to prepare the manuscript for publishing in these formats. 

First, photographs, illustrations, and maps that needed to be very high quality and detailed for a printer must now be dumbed down.  High quality graphics take a lot of space and load on the internet very slowly.  Additionally, the detail possible on a computer screen is not as great as is it is in published form, so there is no need to have very high quality illustrations. 

Reading a manuscript on the computer screen is also not the same as reading a printed version.  Computer screen pages tend to be wider than they are long (the opposite of most books) giving the reader the perception there is more text on an on-line version of a manuscript.  For this reason you should consider breaking up your manuscript into shorter pieces and including more graphics to keep the document interesting.  Furthermore, you should give the reader control of what they read by providing links to sections of the manuscript and back to the table of contents.  You can also make the document more interactive by providing links to additional information that you were not be able to include in the manuscript. 

Distribution of the Manuscript

You should decide to whom and how you plan to distribute the books and/or CD-ROMs when you are developing the goals of the project.  Your ideas should be further honed with any grantors and partners.  Make sure to provide a book or CD to each person who contributed to its creation.  You also must arrange for a storage facility for your books and CDs until they are fully distributed.

In addition to mailing out the environmental story, when possible, provide public meetings and workshops for your target audiences.  The meetings should provide your audience with an introduction to the project and give them a tour of what the document has to offer.  This process will familiarize them with the manuscript and its benefits and make them more likely to use it.  This is especially important when distributing books or CDs to teachers!

 Top