Environmental Education

Aurora Lights, a West Virginia environmental non-profit, has taken the next step in nurturing future generations of environmental leaders with the opening of the Mountain Stewardship and Outdoor Leadership (SOL) School in Morgantown in Fall 2014. 2000 Fellow Jen-Osha Buysse is the school's first Director, and she shares her leadership lessons from the past year.

When it comes to wildlife conservation a huge personality or bags of charisma tends to help your cause. Prefacing any group of animals or plants with the words 'big', 'great' or 'giant' seems to win them fans. Big cats, great apes and giant redwoods are all the focus of on-going research, campaigns and policies attempting to preserve them for future generations. The public are easily drawn to helping iconic and visually-impressive species, which in turn leads to their plight being prioritised.

When 2014 Fellow Karen Andradea arrived at UC Berkeley in 2009, she was surprised to discover how challenging it was for outside organizations to partner with students and faculty on research projects. So she set out to create the UC Berkeley Science Shop, a publicly accessible entity that connects small nonprofits, local government agencies, small businesses, and other civic organizations with undergraduate and graduate student researchers.

The realization that individual action has little to no impact on major environmental problems — to say nothing of the existential threat of climate change — can prompt despair, 1995 Fellow Paul Steinberg, a professor of political science and environmental policy at Harvey Mudd College, says. But it doesn’t have to. We could try, instead, consulting social scientists, who have spent a lot of time thinking about just this problem: How can a single individual can act in a way that effects large-scale change?

The National Science Foundation and other funding agencies are increasingly requiring broader impacts in grant applications to encourage US scientists to contribute to science education and society. Concurrently, national science education standards are using more inquiry-based learning (IBL) to increase students’ capacity for abstract, conceptual thinking applicable to real-world problems. Scientists are particularly well suited to engage in broader impacts via science inquiry outreach, because scientific research is inherently an inquiry-based process.

For many Americans, there is a single word that elicits images of both enduring poverty and environmental degradation: Appalachia. New Stanford research published in the journal Society and Natural Resources paints a starkly different image of the mountainous region by focusing on an emerging movement of citizen volunteers working to clean up watersheds polluted by abandoned coal mines and sewage-clogged streams.

The Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University has awarded seven new Environmental Venture Projects (EVP) grants for interdisciplinary research aimed at finding practical solutions promoting global sustainability. Seven faculty teams will receive grants totaling $1,025,000 over two years to tackle a broad range of environmental challenges, from coral reefs in American Samoa to groundwater supply in China. The seven projects were selected from an initial pool of 24 letters of intent submitted to a faculty committee led by Elizabeth Hadly and Chris Francis.

A visit to the zoo gives kids a chance to see animals they may never otherwise experience. It’s also an opportunity for deep engagement and learning in science. To date, however, the long-term impacts of learning science outside the classroom aren’t well known. Researchers wonder whether the lessons last, how best to connect these lessons to what students are learning in class, and how to make sure all kids have an opportunity for diverse learning experiences.

There are currently about 80 nature-based preschools nationwide, up from 19 in 2009, said Christy Merrick, director of the Natural Start Alliance, which is part of the North American Association for Environmental Education. But she noted that numerous other preschools employ some sort of eco-friendly approach. She said the schools range from taking simple steps to basing their entire curriculum around nature and having students spend time every day in natural settings.