August has almost always been a month of transition for me–a transition from summer back to glorious school!  Don’t get me wrong–I love summer–but I have always loved the excitement and anticipation of a new school year.  Maybe that’s why I have twelve years of post-secondary education under my belt.  Perhaps that is why for twenty-three years we have had back-to-school parties for the kids.  But this August is different–nobody’s going to school.  No school supplies, no parents’ night, no new classes, no move-in days….

I have been privileged this August to be in contact with two educators of a different sort.  Neither is employed at a school, but both educate children and adults alike.  Both are writers and speakers who embody the message they bring.

At the beginning of the month we were lucky enough to spend time in the far north at the Steger Wilderness Center.

Will Steger was one of the first people in the world to experience the effects of climate change in his Arctic expeditions, but recently he wrote, “We are all eyewitnesses now.”  While we see and experience extreme weather events like the drying and burning of our western lands, flooding rains in eastern and midwestern regions, and erratic and unusual temperatures, do we know what climate change means to the moose or the tree frogs in northern Minnesota?

photo by LAn

Do we realize what impact it has on the aquatic life of our rivers….

or the wildlife and plant life in the old-growth forests?

How does climate change and human destruction of habitat affect the intricate ecosystems of the world?  And how does all of that, in turn, affect our survival?

This is where the second educator comes in–we have to teach our children to love the natural world–even the people who are not directly exposed to it.  At the end of August we attended a concert by local author and musician Douglas Wood.  His books are well-known–Old Turtle, Grandad’s Prayers of the Earth and dozens of others for children.  He has written inspiring little handbooks for adults, too.  As a musician and song writer, Doug Wood also expresses his love for Nature and our Earth to the people who hear him sing and play beautiful acoustic instruments.

August brings flowers that are striking for their beauty like these Black-eyed Susans…

and for their beauty plus function, such as Purple Coneflowers (Echinacea) that have been used as an herbal remedy for flu and colds for hundreds of years.

August supplies us with food from our cultivated gardens and food from the wild Plum trees.

Mother Nature somehow uses temperature and humidity to synchronize August ‘nuptial flights’ when winged princess and drone ants leave their colonies and take to the sky to mate.  The patch of grass in our yard seemed to be shifting and moving as the ants crawled to the tip of the grass blades to fly away from their nest to ensure outbreeding.  The females store the sperm in a ‘sperm pocket’ that will eventually fertilize tens of millions of eggs over her lifetime, the male drones die after mating, and the survival of the colony goes on.

August is the month of new school years and new beginnings.  Education is the foundation for our lives–the more we learn, the better able we are to understand the balance that Nature brings to our lives and to the lives of all the plants and creatures on the Earth.  Doug Wood educates with his books and music–he teaches us to know and love the natural world.  Will Steger educates with his explorations, writings, and living example–he reminds us that it is our moral responsibility to be good stewards of our Earth and to build a sustainable future for our children.  We take care of the things we love.  Learn to know and love Nature, for it is when we love something that we can move beyond ourselves in caring, in responsibility, and in action.  And then, as Douglas Wood wrote in Old Turtle, Old Turtle and God will smile.