Teachers of natural history writing and teachers of outdoor recreation on urban campuses sometimes have difficulty giving their students direct experience with the natural world. The process of composition, as described in the introduction to Words from the Land, should be to research in the field and reinterpret at the desk. This matches what modern natural history writers, the British Romantics, and the American Transcendentalists promote—that humans can read themselves as they read forests, mountains, and rivers. However field trips with a writing class can seem an unnecessary extravagance, especially when budgets are tight and risk management seems insurmountable. Part of the difficulty is our traditional dichotomy between nature and civilization, which prevents campus-bound teachers from conceiving that they can help students access nature locally in significant ways. We think of the campus as a means to an end, the place where we study the world’s information; for the humanities, this is a non-experiential kind of study. But writing teachers can reverse this thinking and study campus as an environment or even a landscape.
In a couple of class periods or in a few hours outside class, writing teachers can structure a field experience on campus. Obviously, students can visit the natural history museum, arboretum, observatory, or other areas where they can describe or sketch plant and animal life. Another kind of excursion moves students through several writing points or stations. At the first station, students write in their journals for fifteen minutes either to a prompt or as a free write; they read responses to each other and discuss their entries. Then they move to the next station and repeat the process. The best prompts are organic to the location or lives of the students—for example a location where something unique happened in the history of the campus or a reference to contemporary events. Other prompts instruct students to describe the difference between man made and natural objects, identify the source of water or energy or describe the destination of liquid and solid waste, imagine the pre-Columbian residents, describe a physical or virtual boundary on campus, describe the oldest building, put their ears against a tree or against the ground and describe what they hear; describe the behavior of observed people, or simply to collect ten or more images. Certain buildings may have swallows, pigeons, or other birds that students can watch and describe. At night students who wait in one place may be able to see feral cats or dogs, or even coyotes. Other ideas are to have students explore campus and write descriptions of what they notice as they walk, or they can go on a scavenger hunt for descriptions of birds or insects or the names of trees and flowers.
In terms of resources for teachers, at least two anthologies of urban nature writing have been published: Terrell Dixon’s City Wilds: Essays and Stories about Urban Nature and Laure Anne Bosselaar’s Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City. Also, many organizations facilitate the study and exploration of urban nature, including an umbrella group—EarthCorps, whose goal is “Building global community through local environmental service.” Individual urban nature groups operate in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Houston, and other cities.