by Chelle Koster Walton

“Daniel Quinn in his novel Ishmael makes a statement that I think is so powerful, and it’s just the wisdom of the teacher,” says Bill Hammond. “It’s that you will become what your culture whispers in your ear. And so we [today] become the culture we see on TV. We become the culture we hear in the orderliness of our structured schools and testing programs and all of those kinds of things. So we need to help that culture whisper other tunes in children’s ears. And I think we’ll get healthier children.”

Bill Hammond’s name may mean many things to many people throughout Lee County. It may be known as an emeritus professor at Florida Gulf Coast University or as the education/environmental consultant for developer Syd Kitson and his Babcock Ranch project. Or it may be known for a host of environmental measures from the creation of Six Mile Cypress Slough to bald-eagle protection.

But first and foremost, Bill Hammond is an educator with a love for the environment and the kids he wants to connect with it. Ever since he moved to Lee County in 1961 from the Northeast, he has been whispering and occasionally shouting on behalf of the environment and its children.

At Lee Junior-Senior High School and then Cypress Lake High School, he introduced a marine-biology program into the curriculum and started getting middle- and high-school students bused to Sanibel Island for field work. By the 1970s, environmental education became part of the school system’s fourth-grade studies. “Our goal was to get every child who could out to all the natural areas in Southwest Florida,” Hammond says.

Before Six Mile Cypress Slough was a designated preserve, Hammond would hijack school buses to take the kids sloshing through the wetlands. He still leads slough slogs with school children, and when he does, he comes dressed in a suit and tie. When the kids ask him why he’s so dressed up, he tells them, “I always dress up when I’m going somewhere special.”

Hammond and his students are responsible for turning the slough into a county preserve. As a teacher at Cypress Lake High School in Fort Myers, he created the Monday Group, consisting of high-school juniors and seniors throughout the district exhibiting leadership qualities both in positive and not-so-positive ways. Each year the Monday Group, which continues to meet today, adopted a project. One year, the group decided it was going to get the preservation of Six Mile Cypress Slough on the legislative agenda. It worked, and today the 2,500-acre preserve protects the fragile wetlands that development threatened to destroy. (The Monday Group also had a hand in Florida manatee legislation and other important environmental measures.)

“We’ve had almost a million people through this Six Mile Cypress swamp, more than one hundred thousand wading through up to their chest in a swamp. And we only lost one teacher, and we later found her,” says Hammond in his typical jesting, upbeat tone. “She came with high heels, so we knew there was a risk there. But seriously, you fear what you don’t know. And the most dangerous thing you can do in Southwest Florida is drive on I-75, in terms of risk assessment. One of the safest things you can do is wade up to your neck out here.”

Hammond’s environmental-education program was one of the first three in the country back in the 1970s. The National Science Foundation named his curriculum among the nation’s top ten. “[The] Lee County school system has been one of the national leaders,” Hammond humbly boasts. “We still have more people employed in environmental education as a school system than almost anybody else in Florida.”

Since his days in the Lee County school district, Hammond has gone on to serve as a founding faculty member at Florida Gulf Coast University’s College of Education Division of Ecology and Marine Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies. He’s helped bring about big changes in local habitat preservation by encouraging the creation of the CREW Land & Water Trust, Manatee Park, Cape Coral’s Eco-Park, and Lee County’s Conservation 20/20 taxation program. He’s also had his say in local water-management issues and Everglades restoration. Worldwide, he’s acted as a consultant for programs such as the Children and Nature Network, which focuses on the detriments of “nature deficit disorder,” a phrase coined by Richard Louv in his book Last Child in the Woods.

Hammond and other educators and environmentalists like him embraced that phrase. “We thought that was a message all of us have been preaching and believing in for years,” he says. And as the concept continues to get national attention, Hammond’s lifetime mission to connect kids and adults with nature gains steam. He rails against the loss of recess time and PE classes and the stalemate of standardized testing. He strives to reconnect a nation now two generations removed from nature.

In Lee County, his mission experiences a setback due to budget cuts in the field of environmental education, but he remains optimistic. “Our approach in Lee County is don’t go to the federal government and the state government and ask for help,” he says. “Let’s solve the problem here locally. So we’ve formed a not-for-profit foundation called the Southwest Florida Council for Environment Education. Businesses have been contributors and help provide supplemental funding…So, engaging community is all about letting people share what their resources are, either voluntarily or financially.”

Not one to mince words, he lays blame where blame belongs, he believes. “The Florida classroom-size amendment is really what hurt now the ability to deliver programs like environmental education and marine biology and many of those other specialized programs, because the local school boards have to pick up 100 percent of the cost of those programs and they don’t get any reimbursement from the state,” he says.

In the meantime, he puts his expertise to work creating schools of the future for Kitson’s Babcock Ranch development, where outdoor interaction is integral. “In the new communities that we’re working on, we’re trying to build a visual play space, even an empty lot,” he says. “We’re designing entire school programs based on the outdoors with areas for kids to mess around in.”

They may seem like small, subtle ways to get kids connected to nature and cure the ills that the disconnect has caused. But, the future of education, if Bill Hammond has his way, will whisper generations away from the electronic world and back to the real one.

Chelle Koster Walton’s WGCU public-television segment about nature deficit disorder first airs March 5.