88 / 2016-06-15 22:04:38

DEVELOPMENT AND EVOLUTION OF ENVIRONMENTAL INTERPRETATION: THE WHOLENESS PARADIGM IN ACTION

6906,10458,10457,10456

Environmental interpretation first appeared in the United States’ national park system in the 19th century. Before national park was founded, the term “interpretation” was defined as people’s affection towards natural resources and the environment. Environmental interpretation consists of interpretation and environmental education, and the history of it could be traced back to B.C.600. Till Renaissance, the finding of natural rules became the basic knowledge of natural interpretation, and J. A. Comenius, the pioneer and advocate of natural education and interpretation contended that life experience and experiential activities were essential to natural education. After the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, people’s life style had changed. People started to seek leisure and recreation in their free time and thus accelerated the development of interpretation greatly. As time goes by, recreation needs increased and vary in people’s daily life. Nowadays, participants not only have strong motivations in environmental interpretation activities, they also desire to learn further knowledge. This is a driving force for the evolution of environmental interpretation. The main purpose of environmental interpretation was to lead people to understand and feel the Nature before it was seen as an occupation or service. Today, environmental interpretation is more than a kind of service or communication, it is an approach to connect human beings and the Nature.

“Wholeness” has similar idea with the Confucianism and Taoism thinking in ancient Chinese, which see individual’s life and health as intimately related to human beings, the Nature, and other species. In this paper the research methodology is “wholeness analysis”. The authors analyzed the development and evolution of environmental interpretation from the wholeness-praxis perspective with a case-analysis. The wholeness perspective includes four dimensions, namely knowledge level, action level, ethical level, and aesthetic level. In this paper, two examples are analyzed via wholeness paradigm, one is the Hidden Taipei program conducted by Homeless Taiwan in Taipei, and the other is Butterfly Tree program conducted by QingYang Farm in Hualien, Taiwan. The authors presented the process and strategies of the wholeness approach of environmental interpretation and drew a brief conclusion: Hidden Taipei program, mainly focuses their environmental interpretation on action level and has the tendency to social care while Butterfly Tree program focuses on ethical level through observing butterfly’s life and experience learning.