Environmental Education

A bag of chips I bought recently in England had some bad news printed on the back. First, the chips had 14 g of fat. Worse, they had caused 75 g of carbon to be released into the atmosphere. That bag called my attention to my carbon footprint: those 75 g, added to the 2.3 million from the plane I took there and back, plus the total of all the carbon impacts--the emissions into the air that contribute to global warming--of everything else I do and buy. Footprint math uses life-cycle assessment, or LCA, which calculates the amount of carbon released...

They could hardly have been more different, the nomadic Masai tribesmen from East Africa and the college professor from New Hampshire. Yet, as they sat around a campfire on a remote African savanna, it soon became clear that they all spoke the same timeless language: cattle.

Elizabeth Farnsworth is Senior Research Ecologist with the New England Wild Flower Society (NEWFS), and a biologist, educator, and scientific illustrator. She is also Editor-in-Chief of the botanical journal, Rhodora. She previously coordinated NEWFS planning for the conservation and management of over 100 species of rare plants. She is the principal investigator on Go Botany!, which is funded by the National Science Foundation:

On March 3, 2012, Tara Cornelisse and I partnered with the Expanding Your Horizons in Science and Mathematics organization to teach creative science communication to middle school girls. The workshops were built on art and ideas from Switzer Fellows Elizabeth Soderstrom, Susan Ornelas, Kelsey Jacobsen, Mary Brown, Glenn Yeck, Rafe Sagarin and co-led by Yiwei Wang, a GK-12 Fellow, conservation biologist and scientific illustrator; Jasmine Wang, an undergraduate at UC Berkeley studying science and literature; and Tamir Lance, a solar engineer.

Back on that elementary school playground, the girls win one day, the boys another. Whichever is the more sustainable sex, it behooves us all to evaluate our life choices carefully in order to reduce our collective environmental footprint. After all, as Stanford professor of science education Nicole Ardoin points out, “Perhaps environmental impact has less to do with gender and more to do with the roles we play in life.” Read the full article

The goal of this study was to investigate the degree to which school-based and nonformal education programs that focus on air quality (AQ) achieved measurable AQ improvements, and whether specific instructional methods were associated with those improvements. We completed a standardized telephone interview with representatives of 54 AQ education programs.

Dr. Jeff Dlott is the father of one of the students (Chloe Dlott) where I am teaching this year. We connected early in the year when he realized we are both Switzer Fellows and have been in communication. Jeff did his Ph.D. in entomology, but now runs a sustainable agriculture company. I asked Jeff if he was willing to come and run two lab sessions with junior biology students.

Just a short walk separates F&ES from the Yale Divinity School (YDS) campus at the top of Prospect Street. Yet it took Stephen Blackmer ’83 more than 20 years after graduating to make the journey up the hill from F&ES. The long circle that brought him back to Yale shows the ways in which environmentalists are seeking a deeper moral and spiritual grounding for their work and how believers are applying their faith to environmental advocacy. Read the profile