This is Environmental Literacy

Thomas Herman

California’s Hub for Environmental Learning and Action (CHELA) is a new website resource for inquiry- and place-based learning on topics related to environmental literacy and environmental justice. It is designed to leverage the power of geospatial technologies to accelerate environmental learning, connect to students’ lived experiences, and support them in pursuing their interests in confronting […]

Kim Moon

Walking along the shoulder of a busy two-lane thoroughfare called Green Valley Road to Pinto Lake on a sunny morning in Watsonville, CA, bringing up the back of a line of 3rd grade students from Amesti Elementary School, I am reflecting on how aptly the road is named when Juan—everybody calls him ‘Jay’— says, ‘There’s […]

Kim Moon

This is Environmental Literacy: Rialto

Posted by Kim Moon on October 22, 2018

The Wigwam Motel is a horseshoe-shaped collection of nineteen stucco structures fashioned after teepees located on a stretch of historic Route 66 in Rialto, California. The final installment of designer Frank Redford’s Wigwam Villages (there were seven, three remain), built in 1949, was purchased and lovingly restored in 2003 by a family who emigrated from […]

Kim Moon

It’s a dark November night as I drive through the western Sierras toward Quincy, CA (elevation 3,423 ft.). The narrow road twists through pine and rock as the elevation rises, edged by water spanned by erector-set bridges and intermittent power stations. Because it is so dark, because there are no streetlights, and because the stars […]

Kim Moon

It’s a sunny May morning in the Imperial Valley; by 8:00am it’s already 90° and climbing. I arrived the afternoon before and decided to avoid the interstate by taking the 78, a winding two-lane road that at times looks like what I imagine the surface of the moon would. Extending south from the Salton Sea […]