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 the community's history and its future and may help inform better future development to include.

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's 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 with, at their own levels, current local problems whose immediacy make them seem less black-and-white than issues seen from a distance. The intent is for them to fact gather and 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.

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.

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 work plan. 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!

Budget

Cost

If you would like to publish and distribute your story to large audience using quality materials, the costs can be thousands of dollars. For example, an environmental story published in Florida and distributed to 2,300 students and teachers cost approximately $22,000-just for the editing and publishing! On the other hand, if you plan to only publish your story on line, costs can be quite low; however you may not reach all of your intended audience.

Published Environmental Story:

Researching the story $0

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: Can range from 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. Make sure to check with your local planning department to see if they can provide maps.

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.

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 is listed on the Chesapeake Science on the Internet for Educators (CHESSIE) website- www.bayeducation.net.

Creating an Environmental Story

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. Explore the City of Albuquerque's Educating For A Sustainable Community: A Process Manual How to Create Your Own Community's Environmental Story for great tips on writing your own environmental story. Then visit their website to see the finished product.

Source: Albuquerque's Environmental Story and the Process Manual