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live because it’s too dangerous in the wild.” “What do you mean Anthony?” I asked. “Well,” Anthony paused, “it’s like this. We keep them alive since things are messed up in the wild. Then we can learn more about them and try to fix things. And people get to know them, too. People like learning about animals.” Tasha frowned, “It still doesn’t make it right.” The subject was unavoidable. The glance of an animal enclosed by an artificial surrounding is enough to provoke both wonder and regret. It is as if the animals speak through their eyes, and when they look back at you, you know better. For my students, the question usually emerged a few weeks into the program. After the initial excitement found in working at the zoo began to wane, my students began to make more astute observations of their surroundings. I wanted to encourage these observations for I believed that the dilemmas provided greater opportunities for learning. I encouraged students to write from the animal perspective. We took the case of the Snow Leopard, an endangered large cat that lives in the mountains of Afghanistan and the Himalayas. Students worked in small groups to research the various aspects of the snow leopards life, including the biology of the animal, the ecology (where it lived and what the environment was like), and socio-political issues impacting its livelihood. Students found a BBC report concerned with increased poaching of snow leopards in Afghanistan, shortly after the US invasion prompted a fall of the Taliban regime. The students also learned that the snow leopards live in very particular areas at high altitudes and are highly endangered from poaching and habitat fragmentation with numbers in the wild ranging from 4 – 7,000 (Kirby, 2003). After spending some time outside the exhibit housing the zoo’s lone, aged snow leopard, they wrote letters to humanity from the perspective of the leopard. The letters were impassioned, thoughtful, and provocative. And while zoos have moved away from the personification of animals, toward more scientific narratives, the desire to listen to what an animal might say was all too compelling. * * * * “What are we conserving?” I asked the director of my department. “What do you mean?” he responded, “We conserve habitats, and we are working to develop conservation education programs that help foster a conservation attitude in visitors who come to the zoo.” “I know all that. But what exactly are we conserving, here in this zoo, with animals on display?” My disposition to my work at the zoo had become more critical as I read the work of Chet Bowers (2001, 2003). Bowers has been the primary voice in curriculum to question the ecological implications of educational work. Bowers (2003) has questioned the way we have come to understand conservation in contemporary society. He asks, “what do we want to conserve?” (p. 1), pointing to a taken for granted assumptions of the so-called liberals and conservatives in today’s political arena. Echoing the work of Wendell Berry, Bowers has also questioned the term progress, viewing it as a perpetuation of the myth that “the future will be an improvement over the disappointments of daily life” (p. 2). His critiques of globalization, unchecked economic growth, and unquestioned faith in technological improvements build from his earlier work (list) that questioned the influence of Cartesian thought in the pedagogical approach taken by many teachers – including those who wish to teach toward the ‘ecological.’ David Orr (1999) has cautioned us about the ecological ramifications of unquestioned assumptions about education, that our purposes in education satisfy the demands of industry and continued economic growth and neglect the demands of the planet (p. 27). “I just think that while we may be teaching visitors about zoo conservation efforts and Page 9
Green Theory & Praxis Journal, Vol. 7, Issue 1, December 2013