Why is the Environment Important?
That the environment influences children s behavior is a well-established maxim in early childhood education. As children engage in their environment, they adapt their intellectual tools to meet new situations or challenges, integrating thought and action. Both their mental and their physical processes are the means by which children achieve new understandings and developing skills.
Or more specifically: How important should it be to us? Why is the environment important? First of all, lets dispense with a popular ingrained perception. The environment is not some remote wilderness refuge, or some unspoiled patch of ground that has miraculously escaped development. The environment is your front yard and the city park down the street even the street itself. It is the weedy undeveloped lot next to a skyrise, and the huge rolling farmland down a country road. It is the frigid mountain stream and the polluted waterway flowing past a major port city. And yes, it is the threatened national forest and the delicate coral reef most of us will never see, even as we champion its continued existence. In short, the environment is not some place out there, it is everything, all around us, everywhere. Understanding this, it becomes a lot easier to appreciate why the environment is important. Humans are selfish by nature, despite our best intentions to look outside ourselves; its h
