Children & Nature network

Dennis Dowling, 2010 Natural Teachers Award Finalist

– November 23, 2010
By Sara St. Antoine

Sara St. Antoine is a C&NN Senior Writer and Switzer Foundation Fellow

As a child, Dennis Dowling would spend lunchtimes in his father’s machinist’s shop on the University of California-Berkeley campus and listen with wonder as some of the world’s most acclaimed scientists spoke of their awe of nature. “It seemed like at the back of their brilliance was a love of the natural world,” says Dennis. And he knew something of what they were describing. Diagnosed with asthma at an early age, Dennis says he found he always felt much better outdoors than in. Each morning, he’d leave the house early and spend as many hours as possible out exploring his California hills.


Today Dennis is a high school science teacher at Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, CA, who has been imparting his own love of nature to generations of young people for more than forty years. During the school year, he teaches classes on biology and environmental studies, enriched with nearly a dozen annual field trips into nearby natural areas. During the summer, he teaches a bay ecology course for six weeks, with about two-thirds of the class spent outdoors. In addition, Dennis has for the last decade involved his students in a project to convert 40 acres of old golf course into a thriving ecological preserve, called Ulistac Natural Area. By one colleague’s count, Dennis has taken more than 2,000 Santa Clara students backpacking into Point Reyes National Seashore and Yosemite National Park, and motivated more than 800 Wilcox teens to volunteer at the natural area.


With the voice of someone who has seen it all, Dennis professes a loving but objective view of teenagers. “They’re self-centered,” he says with a chuckle. It’s that egocentrism that Dennis loves to see altered by trips into wild settings. “I give them experiences in an outdoor environment they’re not familiar with and for the first time they realize they have to cooperate with others. They can’t really do it on their own. They realize that there is something else bigger than themselves.”


Some of his students are children of Silicon’s brightest engineers, outfitted with every technological gadget and profoundly disconnected from the natural world. In their work at Ulistac Natural Area, Dennis invites these kids—and their parents—to put down the smart phone and pick up a pick axe or a shovel. Often neither group has the faintest idea of how to use these basic tools. But with practice and hard work, they’ve managed to convert a desertlike, weed-infested site into a beautiful place with oak trees and other native plants, and a thriving butterfly garden.


Out on the trail, the learning continues as Dennis has his students reading maps, identifying plants and animals, pitching tents, cooking their meals. They learn from his example how and why to care for the natural world. Time and again he’s able to penetrate their consciousness with new appreciation for the outdoors or a new awareness of their place within a larger system. Still, he takes a measured view of his own impact. “Some get it and you see change. Some you’re never going to really reach the whole way.” At the end of the day, though, what keeps Dennis going is his wisdom and hope. “I have to look on the bright side,” Dennis says. “There’s always someone coming through saying that kids are worse today. They aren’t.”


Dennis has been teaching long enough now to see the long-term effects of his instruction. He’s thrilled to see college grads come back to see their gardens, or to receive phone calls from former students asking how to make reservations at campgrounds so they can take their own children into wild settings. And even now he can find himself surprised by the ways time in nature can affect kids’ lives. On a recent trip, one boy’s father had a medical crisis, nearly falling into a diabetic coma. The boy stayed by his father’s side for hours until emergency help arrived. Dennis assumed the trip had been extremely stressful for both family members, but afterward, the father told Dennis that the experience was strangely wonderful. As he explained to Dennis, “For the first time in a long time, I was able to really bond with my son."

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