Environmental Education

Hell's Bells: Dreams and Memories

Harold Hungerford grew up along the Kankakee River in northern Illinois, within miles of the Indiana border.  With his father, a high school agriculture teacher in small-town Momence Illinois, Harold raised chickens, gathered and sold eggs, picked rasberries and strawberries, and cut and prepared asparagus and cultivated flowers for commercial sale in Chicago.

Harold also learned the habits of the outdoors as a youth, spending hours hunting and fishing and trapping along the Kankakee River, and exploring its islands and currents and the grasslands along its shores.

These early lessons and experiences influenced Harold throughout his life - as a public school teacher and administator - as a professor in science and environmental education at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale - and as a pioneer of environmental education in the United States.

In his memoir, Harold recounts stories of his youth, and of those who taught him the ways of stewardship and the ways of the river.  With wry humor, he shares insight into his thinking about education and environmental education - writing of students and schools and friends, classrooms and philosophy, and fishing trips, safaris, and photography.