Chapter 3: Visual-Ecological Literacy in Teaching and Learning Through Nature-Based Art

When Greta Thunberg admonished us several years ago to panic as if our houses were on fire, it seemed more metaphorical than literal. Since that warning, a billion animals perished in one year in Australia’s fires. Californians used to fear the earth quaking, but that possibility now seems relatively benign and remote, and has been replaced by the more immediate threat of being engulfed in quickly moving fire, from which one cannot escape in time. Or if fire has already burned all of the trees and vegetation in an area, the flooding and mudslides which accompany the subsequent rains can be more dangerous than the fire itself. For those of us in California, and certainly elsewhere, we are panicked and our homes are on fire. Our schools are on fire as well. We experience this reality and its attendant “ecoanxiety” (Sanders, 2020) as educators living in Southern California and write from this situated place, but where we are also acutely aware of this time and place in the scope of human history, and as part of the global collective in the midst of ongoing planetary ecocide. Our main goal in writing this chapter is to promote nature-based art, learning, and visual-ecological literacy. We used a mixed methods approach which included the creation of visual images, students’ reflections, and elicitations from the images generated. These images and conversations were documented and analyzed with the goal of understanding any particular meanings of the nature-based art activity among participants. We were equally interested in the social contexts and students’ processes of doing nature-based art, where our analysis included this dual focus. This diversity of methodology reflects our intention to create diverse paths towards eco-visual literacy.