Environmental Education

The new O'Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm will grow a diverse crop of vegetables, flowers, fruit trees and specialty plants to teach students and the public about sustainable farming. The farm will work with other campus programs and plans to distribute some of the food, said Patrick Archie, director of the Stanford Educational Farm Program in the School of Earth Sciences.

Last week BBC News published the first results from a year-long project launched at London’s Science Museum in March, 2013. The study found that people were more likely to take positive steps towards reducing climate change when presented with action steps in game form rather than in the midst of a deluge of gloomy facts and figures.

During the 1980s, Mansfield Street in New Haven was an unlikely cradle for a writing career: the block was notorious for its crime rate, not its literary scene. But for Eric Jay Dolin (Yale Master of Environmental Management ’88), championing Mansfield, where he lived as a student at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, in New Haven Register op-eds provided an opportunity to both hone his craft and defend his turf. “They were calling it Manslaughter Street, which was a complete exaggeration,” Dolin recalls. “It was a much safer street than anybody realized, and I had to stand up for it.”

Naturalist Noah Charney can’t go anywhere without noticing things. I’ve been friends with him for more than a decade, and I’ve always thought more people should benefit from his quirky enthusiasm and his knack for explaining things no one ever realized they wanted to know until he brought them up.

This summer I had the opportunity to bring Immersion Camp to my “backyard,” the South Yuba River near Nevada City, CA. For eight years, my colleagues and I have taught underwater science camps that provide river education while snorkeling on the Smith River in northern California. These Smith River camps are aimed at providing local outdoor experiential opportunities for Crescent City youth, many of whom have never been to their local river. In contrast, many Yuba river youth spend much of their summer at the river.