Teacher-Educator Adventures in Alabama State Parks Workshop Lakeside at Joe Wheeler State Park!

On August 9, 2025, I assisted with the delivery of a Teacher-Educator Adventures in Alabama State Parks Workshop at Joe Wheeler State Park. Funded by a grant from the Caring Foundation of Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the workshop introduced the 23 participants to the Nature of the park face-to-face. They engaged with expert naturalists, experienced field-based learning, and received program curricula, lesson plans, and teaching kits. My role was simple: offering opening words of inspiration and lunchtime reflections on Aldo Leopold, a pre-eminent conservation scholar of the twentieth century.

A recently painted water tower welcomed visitors to Joe Wheeler State Park.

Just a 50-minute drive from my Madison, Alabama residence, the park welcomes me at least once every season. I enthusiastically agreed to assist with the Saturday workshop.

Setting

We gathered at the Day Use Area pavilion along Lake Wheeler, enjoying fair skies and a summer breeze. Alabama State Parks Chief Naturalist, Renee Rainey, welcomed participants and introduced speakers and staff.

Renee is a tireless champion of Nature education and interpretation.

Words of Inspiration

Asked to offer words of inspiration, I emphasized that Nature education is a process of outdoor immersion, discovery, illumination, inspiration, and encouragement. I reflected on the dual, and seeming contradictory, emotions I felt when I first encountered a full profile view of Alaska’s Mount Denali (McKinley) from the nearby, and much lesser, Mount Quigley in 2005. Simultaneously, the feelings of absolute humility and overwhelming inspiration brought me to tears…and nearly to my knees. The gleaming towering white mountain ediface reached high above me, just 20 miles south of where I stood. Breathless, I knew that nothing in my life matched its glory…its significance…its eminence…its symbol of Creation and God. Countering the weight of Humility, its Inspiration lifted me…buoyed me…reminded me what John Muir knew all along:

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

I counseled that their role as educators requires an approach steeled in humility and inspiration. Humilty in recognizing that they are changing the world through each young person they reach, educate, and encourage.

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. (Robert Louis Stevenson)

And Inspiration in accepting that the differences they make can last a lifetime and beyond…permanent, resilient, and immutable, like Denali Mountain.

Pulitzer Prize novelist and essayist Louis Bromfield wrote in his non-fiction Pleasant Valley of his life’s work rehabilitating his old worn out Ohio Farm:

The adventure at Malabar is by no means finished…The land came to us out of eternity and when the youngest of us associated with it dies, it will still be here. The best we can hope to do is to leave the mark of our fleeting existence upon it, to die knowing that we have changed a small corner of this earth for the better by wisdom, knowledge, and hard work. (Louis Bromfield (1896-1956)

Whether shaping Malabar Farm….or an eager sixth grader…wisdom, knowedge, and hard work, fueled by passion, and laced with humility and inspiration, carry the day.

What a great pleasure and privilege to engage with enthusiastic educators.

Setting the Stage

Environmental Educator and Main Guest for the workshop, Jimmy Stiles, introduced Dr. Scott Duncans’s Southern Wonder: Alabama’s Surprising Biodiversity. My intent is not to reiterate workshop content. Instead, I want to give you a feel for the major themes and a sense of the exquisite setting.

Why should we focus on our state’s biodiversity? First and foremost, Albert Einstein, instructed us:

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

We cannot truly know our state and teach environmental education without understanding our location, climate, geology, geography, and surrounding ecosystems. Biodiversity is interwoven with all those factors.

The ever-present lake served as backdrop for the entire day.

Jimmy presented how the ice age that ended 13,000 years ago influenced Alabama’s present-day biodiversity (my 60-second video).

Jimmy and NW District Naturalist Amber Coger presented where we are, the Highland Rim, emphasizing the importance in knowing our location and context.

Fishing as a Learning Exercise

Obviously, Lake Wheeler and its associated ecosystem is a major component of where they are. Joe Wheeler State Park Naturalist, Jennings Earnest, oriented the teachers to one of the lake’s residents, its ubiquitous sunfish. For some participants, this was their first fishing experience. Excitement ran high!

Here’s my 60-second video of Jennings readying the educators to fish.

Exemplifying a critical characterization of teaching, Jennings exudes passion and enthusiasm

He admits that he has the best job on the planet!

I recorded this 57-second video capturing the moment when one of the teachers landed a sunfish.

Not a trophy, but a successful teachable moment.

The day could not have been better. These moments along the lake will accompany participants into their fall classrooms and will infuse the spirit and passion of their teaching.

Often I find that others who preceded me constructed verbiage long ago far superior to any utterances I might make to express timeless wisdom. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was among them.

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. 

I believe our workshop instructors planted seeds that will multiply manifold times through the students they touch.

Meeting Animal Friends

Again, I offer some photos with narrative unecessary: box turtle and American aligator.

Black kingsnake.

I recorded this 46-second creature-teacher video

Knowing our setting and introducing some of our common animal neighbors impressed participants.

Measuring Vegetative Cover

Jimmy conducted an exercise adding an element of quantifying elements of our surroundings, like measuring vegetative cover in field and forest edge.

I recorded a 56-second video of measuring vegetative cover.

I remember summer days prescribed burning, marking and cruising timber, laying out roads, and other field tasks during my 12 years practicing industrial forestry…hard demanding days of exertion, sweating, challenge, and near exhaustion. And, too, younger days! As a 74-year-old retiree, such days would be more than I can handle. The state park workshop required no such toil. Total relaxation, at least physically. A bit of intellectual engagement, which knows no limit to date, just some continuous tuning by teaching, speaking, writing, and woods-sauntering!

Steve’s Shoreline Ramble

I explored during sessions, wandering (and wondering) along the lakeshore. As I’m drafting this narrative, some Leonard Da Vinci wisdom emerged from my mental recesses:

It’s not enough that you believe what you see. You must also understand what you see.

I regret not including that wisdom in my lunchtime message. The workshop’s core theme is opening the educators’ eyes to understanding the Nature around them. Empowering them to see, appreciate, and understand all that lies hidden in plain sight, like the magnificent eastern tiger swallowtail sipping nectar from a buttonbush.

Or the clouded skipper on a buttonbush nearby.

Buttonbush seedpods give the plant its moniker.

I added each participant to the distribution for my weekly photo essays. I hope at least a few find time to read this edition. I know I learned as much as they did. I admire their eagerness to learn and I sensed their desire to deliberately incorporate Nature into the fabric of teaching.

I am privileged to occasionally interact with educators committed to learn from and teach in accord with Nature.

• I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. John Muir

Alabama State Parks Foundation

Thoughts and Reflections

I offer these observations:

• Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. (Albert Einstein)
• Nature doesn’t steal time, it amplifies it. (Richard Louv)
• I embrace Nature’s relentless magic, wonder, awe, and inspiration — her infinite storm of BEAUTY! (Steve Jones)
• Every lesson for living, learning, serving, and leading is written indelibly in or powerfully inspired by Nature. (Steve Jones)

Inhale and absorb Nature’s elixir. May Nature Inspire, Inform, and Reward you!

If only more of us viewed our precious environment through the filters I employ. If only my mission and vision could be multiplied untold orders of magnitude:

Steve’s Four Books

I wrote my books Nature Based Leadership (2016), Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading (2017), Weaned Seals and Snowy Summits: Stories of Passion for Place and Everyday Nature (2019; co-authored with Dr. Jennifer Wilhoit), and Dutton Land & Cattle: A Land Legacy Story (2023) to encourage all citizens to recognize and appreciate that every lesson for living, learning, serving, and leading is either written indelibly in or is powerfully inspired by Nature. All four of my books present compilations of personal experiences expressing my deep passion for Nature. All four books offer observations and reflections on my relationship with the natural world… and the broader implications for society. Order any from your local indie bookstore, or find them on IndieBound or other online sources such as Amazon and LifeRich.

I began writing books and Posts for several reasons:

• I love hiking and exploring Nature
• I see images I want to (and do) capture with my trusty iPhone camera
• I enjoy explaining those images — an educator at heart
• I don’t play golf!
• I do love writing — it’s the hobby I never needed when my career consumed me
• Judy suggested my writing is in large measure my legacy to our two kids, our five grandkids, and all the unborn generations beyond
• And finally, perhaps my books and Blogs could reach beyond family and touch a few other lives… sow some seeds for the future