What does stewardship look like?

At Mountain School, we try to teach our students how to be stewards of the earth. When we visit the students at their school a few weeks after they came to Mountain School, we try to get them to make connections between the environment out here in the mountains and the environments closer to their home and their school. At some of these post-trip visits the students participate in stewardship activities at parks near their school. We wrote about this on our Chattermarks Blog back in 2011 when we first began facilitating these stewardship events.

Here are some shots from the Sunnyland Elementary stewardship event at Memorial park in Bellingham. The students, their teachers, and Institute staff removed blackberry, mulched and planted red-osier dogwood and Sitka spruce. They also got VERY muddy!

Here are the shots from Geneva Elementary's stewardship event at Euclid park, also in Bellingham. There, students, teachers, and Institute staff got rid of a TON of ivy and planted some spruce and dogwood.

Leading photo: Students from Geneva Elementary, gathered around the tree they just planted. All photos provided by Jeff Anderson


Ryan Weisberg is a graduate student in North Cascades Institute and Western Washington University's M.Ed. program. Ryan grew up here in Washington, exploring the natural areas around Bellingham and in the Cascades. Ryan is the Chattermarks editor this year during their residency at the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center. Check out Ryan's other writing at: http://chattermarks.ncascades.org/author/ryan-weisberg/