Today’s entry comes to us courtesy of Dr. Mary Keller, a historian of religions who teaches for the Religious Studies program at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Keller also writes a weekly column for the Cody Enterprise on the importance of knowing our history as we address contemporary issues. The following is an excerpt from her column “Confronting reality not easy undertaking“:
Educators are conservatives by nature, always as responsible to remembering the past as we are to solving problems in the present and using evidence to think about the future.
This means we live in the world of change. The demands of carefully studying the past, reading the times, and looking to the future require a downright giddy embrace of and respect for change. The past comes to light differently with new evidence. The present opens up previously unknown realities. Using both of these types of knowledge to look to the future never promises certainty.
I end up pitching my lot with the educators who both respect tradition but also challenge assumptions about what is right and wrong about the way we do things now, with an eye toward the future impacts of how we live.
Bill Hurr was the first teacher to raise a question fueled by environmental sciences that challenged me to question whether what I assumed was “natural and good” was either. Based on evidence already available to a science teacher back in the late 1970s, he talked about the problems that arose when open spaces and agricultural lands were subdivided for what he called “hobby ranches.”
There was a problem, he argued, when people in the semi-arid Western states with irrigation projects began to subdivide land that had previously been developed to produce food. Home by home, fence by fence, dogs and cats by dogs and cats, the suburbanization of agricultural land under the guise of rural living was going to stress our environmental resources, from the resilience of wildlife to the ability of a people to feed themselves.
Since my dream at the time was to have a beautiful log home with enough land for a few horses, I had to ask myself about what the impacts of my dream were for everything from food production to habitat destruction.
(The full text of this column can be found here.)
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