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Monsanto Chairman Hugh Grant figures that we can beat the food vs. fuel problem by making better use of the corn “waste stream.” His comments get me thinking about what we are trying to teach kids when we focus on whole systems.
“Play that is good for kids, and presented as such–by best selling authors, by teams of experts, by parents–doesn’t strike me as all that playful. It sounds like eating your peas.”
So writes Walter Kirn in an article titled “Boys Gone Mild” in this week’s New York Times Magazine. Kirn is responding to the popularity of the recently published Dangerous Book for Boys, a book that encourages boys, and their fathers, to get out and do stuff–stuff ranging from coin tricks and tying knots to hunting and cooking a rabbit.
Over the past couple months I have been working with teachers and other people involved in education across Maine on the question of how we can do an even better job of teaching science. Everybody that I talk to agrees that we should be giving kids the tools and know-how to think about whole systems, rather than just knowledge about a bunch of scientific facts. Everybody also agrees that teaching about systems means teaching about change. Unfortunately, everybody also agrees that this is hard. Perhaps the way to get started is with a “vocabulary of change.”
We are in the final days of making preparations for the arrival of Maine School of Science and Mathematics students who will participate in the Winter Watershed Geochemistry field school run by Sarah Nelson. Preparations include setting up a speical blog page for students particpating in the class. See the full story for detials.
It’s 7:30 a.m. Saturday morning and I’m having breakfast with my 11 year old son, Gabe, (well I’m having coffee…Gabe’s having the Big Special [two eggs, bacon AND sausage, pancakes, home fries and hot chocolate]). The breakfast is a bribe to get up early on a Saturday and participate in a pilot program at SERC — the DOWNEAST ECOLOGY PROGRAM.
A majority of scientists studying the changes in species diversity have concluded that we are in the early stages of the sixth “mega-extinction†– a massive die off of species that will radically transform life on earth. Over the last 550 million years, we know of only five other large scale mass extinctions. Evidently, we live in interesting times. The surprising thing is that we don’t seem to know it.
How can we be living through a mass extinction and not be aware of it? Bringing the Biosphere Home is Mitch Thomashow’s exploration of this question and of its implications for education. In this slim but important book, he asks what we can do to provide young people with tools that enable them to perceive global change. In this essay I look at Thomashow’s book as well as its implications for teaching about global change here at Schoodic.
Acadia Partners’ business is conservation. Sure, we have a special niche to fill in the world of conservation, supporting the scientific research that the Park needs and promoting related science education, But, in the grand scheme of things, we’re conservationists.
Here’s the rub: People don’t conserve when they are living on the economic edge — instead, they use whatever is at hand, ignoring the ecological costs. In an earlier article I have written about the need for a conservation ethic — a sense of obligation to the land in place of the conviction that nature is there for us to use. But we also know that such a reciprocal relationship between people and land — that sense of obligation and connection to place — can emerge only when people are meeting their own needs.
Put simply, conservation emerges out of economic stability.
That’s why Thomas Friedman’s most recent best selling book, The World is Flat, is required reading for conservationists. It is also required reading for anyone concerned about the future of scientific research. I’ll go one step farther. It is required reading for anyone thinking hard about the future of the United States.
A remembrance and recognition of Fitz Eugene Dixon’s contribution to Acadia Partners and some thoughts about how that contribution extends much deeper and encompasses much more than the financial support that he committed to this organization.
We often make the case for conservation by arguing that conservation brings benefits to mankind. This may be true, but it also takes us away from what may be the real work that needs to be done, which is to develop a “land ethic.” Focusing on the utility of Acadia National Park and of other conserved places reinforces the idea that the Park and the animals and plants that live there are just property and that our relationship to the Park, as Aldo Leopold put it, “is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.” This essay argues for a deeper, more reciprocal relationship with nature, and for a different rationale for conservation.
This summer I am spending part of each day working out of the Research Building at SERC. The Park and Acadia Partners have just opened this building up this year for the summer season, and what is going on here is exciting. The building is the daily workspace of a group of scientists and students doing interesting work that is good for the Park, good for the researchers, and ultimately good for the community. This post takes a look at what is going on and at why it is important.