ABSTRACT
The Biblical Garden of Eden is our western symbol of the original, biologically diverse, and unspoiled Earth onto which innocent human beings were placed. Although we now tend to think of Africa’s Rift Valley, running from Syria into Mozambique, as a literal Garden of Eden-that is, the “birthplace” of humanity-we nevertheless use the “Eden” idea to denote blissful times in some relative paradise. Nebraska’s mud, worms, and microscopes may not translate into “bliss” and “paradise” for everyone, but we all have our visions of the ideal environment in which to conduct our business. And when we’re not plunked down in that environment, then we must build it, largely from our intellectual endeavors and values. Remember that in Eden, everything a teacher needs is right at his or her fingertips, all in proper context, a rich supply of wonder for every student, and all of it “alive,” if not literallyfor a biologist-then figuratively for the artist, historian, economist, musician. This supply of wonder in our immediate environment, once perceived as such, is suddenly revealed to occur all around us and in such profusion that a teacher must become a student in order to utilize it. When we started the Cedar Point Biological Station, the place was just one more collection of abandoned buildings out on the prairie a million miles from home. When we had to deliver an educational enterprise then we started looking more closely at our
surroundings, places most people would consider little more than pasture and a typical prairie river. The biologists who built this castle were not “most people”; they were teachers first and foremost, and they were separated from all the standard materials used by teachers everywhere. For us in the mid-1970s, the construction of Eden was almost entirely a mental activity, although having ready access to marshes and prairies cer tainly made such a synthesis easier than it might have been otherwise. Nevertheless, the building of an ideal school, in the very broadest sense, still is, and likely always will be, any time and anywhere, first and foremost, an accomplishment of the unfettered mind.
