An Environmental Education Center in
New
Jersey: Two Views
E. DeAlton Partridge
Ernest Partridge
Journal of Environmental Education, Spring, 1982
On October 17, 1999, The Gadfly presented the first of a series of lectures at the New Jersey School of
Conservation, in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the
founding of the School. (That lecture is
here at this site). The Gadfly's father, Dr. E. DeAlton
Partridge (1906-1985), was the Founding Director of the School of
Conservation.
Twenty years ago, the future of the
School of Conservation was in doubt, prompting state educators,
alumni and friends of the School to lobby for its preservation.
These efforts bore fruit in 1982 when New Jersey Governor Brendan
Byrne signed a proclamation establishing the School "in
perpetuity."
In recognition of that event the
Partridges, pere et fils, published the following two
pieces in the Spring, 1982 issue of The Journal of
Environmental Education.
A Glimmer of Hope
E. DeAlton Partridge
President Emeritus, Montclair State College (1949-1964)
Founding Director, New Jersey School of Conservation
The Journal of
Environmental Education, 13:3 (Spring,
1982)
[In 1982 we received] the splendid news that the New
Jersey School of Conservation is ... secure to continue its work "in
perpetuity." In a world where he future appears dark for those who
are hoping and working for environmental sanity, the action of the
New jersey State Legislature to fund the New Jersey School of
Conservation in perpetuity truly offers a glimmer of hope. It may be
a signal to the rest of the nation, and perhaps even the world, that
if people care enough to take action, we may yet be able to preserve
this planet for future generations.
Those familiar with the history of New Jersey's funding of public
education can well appreciate the significance of this action of the
legislature regarding the School of Conservation. For decades, up to
the 1950s, New Jersey, with one of the highest per capita incomes in
the nation, was among the lowest in per capita expenditures for
higher education. There was no state university, and the state
teachers' colleges were meagerly supported. Young people who wanted a
chance for higher education had to seek it in other states. New
Jersey thus came to be called by some critics "the cuckoo state"
after the bird that leaves its eggs to be hatched in other nests. It
was in this atmosphere that the School of Conservation was launched
with the distinct understanding that there would be no public funds
available for support. The survival and growth of the school can be
attributed to the dedication and sacrifice of its administrators and
instructors and the support of certain state officials.
Today the New Jersey School of Conservation is sound and vigorous
and its future secure. To Director John Kirk and his splendid staff,
who have led it through crises and accomplishment to its confident
and productive present and toward its promising future, we extend our
greetings and convey our admiration and our gratitude. And we extend
our gratitude beyond to the 20,000 friends of the school who wrote
letters of support when the school was in great peril.
In a world that is faced with the "bang" of nuclear holocaust or
the "whimper" of progressive environmental deterioration - both of
which threaten human habitation on this planet - the New Jersey
action shines as a beacon of hope. That the legislature should move
unanimously to support the School shows what a continual program of
education for young and old alike can do to enlist dedicated support
for such an institution and for the principles it represents.
The establishment of the School of Conservation in perpetuity
comes at an auspicious time. The [Reagan][ administration
in Washington, which was elected with a mere majority of 52 percent
of the popular vote, claims a mandate from the people to set the
clock back on several decades of progress in natural resource policy
and environmental protection. While spending hundreds of billions for
more nuclear bombs and devices to deliver them, it is slashing the
resources of the Environmental Protection Agency and neutralizing the
effectiveness of the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land
Management. With the encouragement of the Department of the Interior,
mineral developers are looking greedily at wilderness areas, at the
western prairies, and the continental shelf.
The only effective long-term answer to this disastrous trend of
events is for the public to become concerned and to act to reverse
this trend. This, in turn, depends upon the kind of education
provided by the School of Conservation and other such institutions.
Such education can best be accomplished in the out-of-doors, where
people can encounter nature directly and thus appreciate the
relationships of the human species to the other forms of life on the
planet.
Apparently a significant and active number of New Jersey citizens
have acquired this kind of education and have voiced a different
mandate than the one claimed in Washington today.
Yes, perhaps there is a glimmer of hope to be gained from what has
happened in New Jersey.
Wapalanne: Contrasts and
Continuities
Ernest Partridge\
The Journal of
Environmental Education, 13:3 (Spring,
1982)
[In 1982] Governor Brendan
Byrne... signed into law a bill which allow[ed] the New
Jersey School of Conservation to continue in perpetuity to serve
environmental educators of the state, the nation, and the world. Many
readers of this journal will greet the news with great personal
satisfaction, for they have known the school as students, staff, and
visitors. The acquired insights and the dedicated service of the
quarter-million citizens and educators who have passed through its
doors are an enduring legacy of the New Jersey School of
Conservation.
In the 30-year journey that brought
it to this accomplishment, the school has undergone significant
growth and development. Yet the enduring features of the New Jersey
School of Conservation may bear the deeper implications of this
splendid achievement.
As a youngster, I was privileged to
be present at the beginning seasons of the school. Later, in 1963-4,
I began my college [teaching] career in association with the
school as the Paterson State College Coordinator of Outdoor Education
and, for two years, a member of the summer staff. Thus the news of
the rescue and renewal of the school prompted some acute personal
reminiscences and reflections.
To tell the truth it didn't look like
much that Easter weekend of 1949 - our first encounter with the old
Skellinger farm and the CCC camp at Lake Wapalanne. Too late in the
winter season for the crisp clean mantle of snow and too early for
even a hint of the coming spring, neither the weather nor the season
had arranged an auspicious introduction. Slabs of broken ice quilted
the lake; clods of old windblown snow and drab patches of weedy turf
marked the overgrown fields. A gray sheet of sky and gust of bone
chilling wind reminded us of nature's indifference to our
arrival.
Then there were the buildings. On the
near side of the lake we found rows of standard, government issue,
pine clapboard barracks abandoned by the CCC crews.
"What's all this?" asked the
bewildered teen-ager.
"The college is going to set up a
camp next summer," replied his father, the
director-designate.
"Here?"
The director's assenting
disappointment was ill-concealed by his silence.
The initial letdown was eased
somewhat when we inspected the other side of the lake. There, the
buildings were thoughtfully placed alongside the mountain, away from
the busy road and on the quiet arm of the lake, carefully crafted and
sited to have minimum physical and visual impact upon the natural
environment. We began to suspect that the place might have
possibilities after all.
Two months later, on Memorial Day
weekend, nature had performed her routine annual miracle. With the
oaks, maples, birches, lindens, and beeches leafed out, the cabins
receded into the woods. In this context of life renewed and life in
process, nature was prepared to offer her lessons - much more to the
point, we were ready to learn. The most profound and enduring
lessons, we were to discover, were not in the curriculum.
During those first few years, the
director and his staff set themselves to the tasks of building a
field campus, a curriculum, and a tradition. Significant parts of
those tasks were "rebuilding," "unbuilding," and "non-building" as
some CCC structures were landscaped and redesigned, the row barracks
were razed and their sites returned to the forest and temptingly
"developable" plots were deliberately left in their natural state.
The initial shock of disappointment was forgotten as the attractive
campus evolved on the field side of Lake Wapalanne. The curriculum
was built out of the accumulation insight, experience, and, be sure,
trials and occasional errors of the staff and students. The building
of the traditions was unplanned - and irresistible. Traditions thus
built are the only traditions worth having.
In August of 1977, after a decade of
absence, I returned for a visit. After a warm greeting and briefing,
Director John Kirk wisely left me with my leisure time, my good two
feet, and my memories. The greatest changes, I gratefully discovered,
were wrought by nature, not by developers. The wooded, residential
side of the lake seemed indistinguishable from what I had known
decades before. On the field side, nature's work was more evident.
The trees at Piney Point, planted by the CCC, were approaching
maturity. A previously footworn meadow, now sectioned off, was
displaying plant succession and hosting a rich variety of wildlife.
And the forest's repair of the site of the row barracks promised a
climax stage that would deceive the most acute archeological
eye.
Nature was also politely altered to
make room for a few additions. Noteworthy among them was a carriage
house, first built in 1813 and saved from a farm believed to be
doomed to inundation by the subsequently deauthorized Tocks Island
Dam. After patient negotiations, Director John Kirk arranged to have
a group of Montclair State College Industrial Arts students dismantle
and move the building, and then, using pegs and pioneer tools,
meticulously match the 5000 pieces and reassemble the structure at
the edge of the activities field. No state appropriation cold have
accomplished what devoted attention and persistence brought to that
site. And across from the carriage house, but a bee-line spanning the
activities field and, in a sense, the history of the school, stood
"Chief's," the craft house - a sow's-ear of a CCC shack, transformed
in those early years into a silk purse of a cabin by the skilled and
dedicated old hands of the late Joseph "Chief" D'Angola.
The site of the School of
Conservation thus stands as a physical exemplification of some
enduring principles and lessons of environmental education and as
working evidence of the human resources necessary to make an
environmental education program succeed, prosper, and endure. Among
these principles and lessons:
-
a sense of enduring processes, of
trackless time, of permanence. This sense is acquired
through residence in a forest essentially unchanged since the last
glaciation and through encounters with fossils and strata, ridges,
and ravines.
-
with this sense of permanence, a
sense of natural place, of kinship, respect, and
reverence for the land and the life upon it. This sense is
displayed by the modesty of the intrusions upon the natural
landscape.
-
in contrast, an acute awareness
of the relentless work of a civilization that has effected an
unprecedented degree and rapidity of change in its natural
environment.
-
lessons in interdisciplinary
insight. Cabins and carriage houses, lakes and abandoned fields
are intersections of history, ideology, crafts, sociology, natural
science, and natural resources and environments.
-
lessons in international
brotherhood. A recognition that natural ecosystems do not, like
maps, change colors or character at natural boundaries, that
migratory birds and acid rain do not stop at border stations. It
is the language, not the natural environment, that most
conspicuously discloses that Wapalanne is in the United States and
not in Austria, Norway, or [Russia].
-
a sense of the integrated
wholeness of nature and of the fundamental harmony of humanity
with nature. This sense of wholeness cracks open encapsulated
prejudices and dissolves disciplinary and national boundaries.
-
a reminder that the most
enriching lessons of nature and are learned through
acquaintance and encounter, and learned
early. These are lessons that instill the child with a
sense of delight and wonder sufficient to motivate him later in
life to endure and even eagerly to seek the knowledge of nature
that might be appropriately sought in the library or the
laboratory
-
a reminder that environmental
education programs which succeed and endure are the products of
the work of dedicated professionals for whom environmental
education is not a job but a career - even more, a fundamental
commitment.
Finally, the rescue and renewal of
the School of Conservation testifies, through its students, staff,
alumni, and friends, to an endurance of these lessons so well learned
and to an endurance of loyalty to the place that taught
them.
All these, and more, are the lessons
the New Jersey School of Conservation offers to teachers and citizens
of the state which now supports in perpetuity and to a nation and
civilization acutely in need of such lessons.
