blueprints

80 | robert hass
Tell me, what do you
think amuses a fish? No,
no, I’ve tried juggling.
All of this work comes from River of Words (ROW), an organization
devoted to encouraging environmental awareness through the arts and the
arts through environmental awareness in schools and after-school programs.
ROW publishes annual books of children’s poetry and art in inexpensive
paperback editions designed for the classroom; it has also published larger,
handsome books from commercial publishers representing many years’
worth of work from children all over the world who participate in the
ROW program. It maintains a gallery in Berkeley, California, and it sponsors
workshops for teachers on how to use the arts to teach observation and
imagination and hands-on, outdoor environmental education. To that end,
it publishes a teacher’s manual and a booklet about how schools and natural
history museums can form partnerships with libraries, nonprofits, water
districts, and watershed education programs to promote local environmental
literacy. In the last two years, ROW has been developing a program for
urban environmental education, One Square Block, in which children are
encouraged to map and understand the flow of life through one particular
patch of urban space, attending to its architecture, energy flows, flora and
fauna, and range of human doings. ROW and its regional coordinators
encourage interdisciplinary education by compiling regional bibliographies
for teachers and students of age-appropriate literary and scientific writing
about the places where they live—from literary classics to the biographies
of explorers and scientists to field guides.
The mechanism at the center of this work and the one that has spread
it through schools and youth programs in the United States and abroad is a
contest. Every year, ROW makes awards to schoolchildren from kindergarten
through twelfth grade for art and poetry they make on the theme of the
watershed in which they live. The awards are given in four categories: K–2,
grades 3–6, grades 7–9, and grades 10–12, one each for poetry and art. The
poetry contest is for work in English, American Sign Language, and Spanish
and bilingual entries only, though the Friends of the Loire River in
France has initiated its own ROW program, Fleuves de Mots. The work of
each year’s winners—eight children from the United States and one child
from abroad, an annual international winner in either poetry or art—is