Remembering Dr. Milt McClaren
Dr. Hilary Leighton, professor and program head of Master of Arts in Environmental Education and Communication and Graduate Certificate in Regenerative Sustainable Community Development, shares this moving tribute to her friend and colleague, Dr. Milt McClaren:
Dr. McClaren passed from this earth February 8, 2025. He was a true elder in the field of environmental education, an inspiring colleague and dear friend. We are standing in a great loss.
For Milt McClaren
Milt lived a big life.
The ripples he sent out to so many will echo a long time. He generated so much goodness and encouragement of students and colleagues alike and well, anyone who met him, that there is no doubt he has become our good ancestor now.
Milt was the inspiration for, and founder of, the Master of Art in Environmental Education and Communication (MAEEC) program at RRU over 25 years ago. An ongoing touchstone to students and faculty alike throughout the years, he was always a great champion of Royal Roads. Milt was adjunct faculty in the School of Environment and Sustainability, often called upon for his insights, strategic planning, and consulting/advisory acumen around special projects and reviews. His wisdom was sought after, his ideas well regarded, his company, a joy! He taught in the MAEEC program up until 2015 and then supervised for many years afterward.
He led an extraordinary life that covered a wide terrain of interests as characterized by his insatiable curiosity to understand, to interpret and reflect, to contribute, and to act. He was always slightly ahead of the curve, working at the edges of change and innovation in education so it is no wonder that he was a very early adopter of the potential of online learning using innovative technologies. However, he also created the Dr. Milton McClaren Travel Award at RRU to help students in financial hardship get to campus residencies because he knew how deeply important in-person learning was to overall outcomes and human development. He was the epitome of the “both-and” kind of thinking, always resisting the tyranny of the “either-or”.
Last year, when he was awarded the Order of Canada in Ottawa for his work in leading the environmental education movement in Canada, my heart leapt when they mentioned he was a champion of fostering ecological identity and nature-rooted learning at all stages of development and learning. You don’t hear those words in Rideau Hall too often! To many of us, he was the grandfather of EEC. His direct contributions reached community, provincial, national and international levels of learning.
Growing up in East Vancouver with lots of vacant lots, big water ditches and sandpits filled with car bodies where kids made ‘forts’ in the vehicles, he told me he spent much of his time outside searching for frogs and other pond life. He learned to survive and thrive as he navigated the world — whether on bikes, streetcars or on foot, his childhood playground extended to the thrilling adventures of the whole city with the freedom to just be a kid exploring his own backyard while pushing the boundaries to find out more about himself and the world. As a result, he resisted discriminating between natural and human-made or built environments when speaking of ‘nature’ and asked environmental educators to expand their perceptions of what is ‘natural’ beyond wild, pristine places to include urban centres too.
A beloved friend and advisor, he was a brilliant educator who so loved this Earth that he dedicated most of his life to teaching and learning about how we might co-exist. And he loved his students. When a thesis writing student hit an inevitable dead-end, this was the time to put our heads together and listen in and help accompany that student to find a way through, to find her way. He had long patience which required a fantastic sense of humour and perspective. Milt’s huge capacity for what was possible when we all worked together taught me to continue to dream wildly (as he always did), recruit others to dream alongside (as he always did) and then to jump in to make something happen or help those who could (as he always did). And with all due respect, he did not ask permission. Thank the education gods for that!
In The Summer’s Day, the poet Mary Oliver writes, “doesn’t everything die at last and too soon?” Too soon in his case. Too soon.
I realize I would not be doing what I love at RRU if it were not for Milt. Full stop. The good doctor always promoted my particular ecopsychological scholarship and he tirelessly advocated for the MAEEC program acknowledging that it would never be a behemoth for enrolments, but it was important and beautiful and would be a world-changing place, one environmental education and communication student at a time. And people listened to Milt. He was a specialist of the impossible!
A visionary, a leader, and a true friend whose great grand gift for this world was that he gave of himself, authentically, freely, I feel so lucky to have known him. And I will miss him terribly — our long conversations, sharing ideas around students and their research projects, and what mattered most, and sometimes on the rare occasion when we were in-person these last years, we would get up to the right kind of trouble imagining what education could be. He was a beautiful soul who made the journey truly fun.
Thank you, dear Milt, onward on bright wings!