GREENIFY BACK TO SCHOOL

The Nature Conservancy can help the children in your life become lifelong nature lovers!

Written by Cailin Mackenzie, Marketing GLOBE Intern
Photographed by Jeffrey Macmillan (Photos 1-3) and Jaci Downs (Photo 4)

Remember the school field trips you used to take? Clutching your brown bag lunch and the permission slip your parents signed? Filing onto the school bus? Listening as your teacher announces, “Okay kids, we’re headed to Burkina Faso to learn how a farmer is restoring forest lost to desertification”? No? Well now your child can! Minus the school bus.

Our Nature Works Everywhere program, with generous support from Lowe’s, takes a two-pronged approach to excite the next generation of conservationists. First, we use Conservancy science to engage kids with educational videos, lessons and virtual field trips.  Second, we foster tangible environmental relationships with our school gardens program, featuring curriculum that helps students use the garden as a living laboratory and measure the ecosystem services it provides.

Classes

The number of K-12 students taking online courses has skyrocketed from 45,000 in 2000 to 6.7 million in 2012, representing a huge opportunity to bring nature into the classroom. In its four-year tenure, Nature Works Everywhere has brought ecology into the classroom for 2 million students through its digital platform, partnering with teachers to create relevant curricula that advances STEM goals and achieves a productive balance of entertainment and education. Currently, the program is working with LEAF participants to create high school lessons focused on urban sustainability, sustainable fisheries, and climate change.

Virtual Field Trips, another component of the program, are a wonderful opportunity for students to interact with Conservancy scientists and experience conservation in action. Can’t make the live field trip? No problem, you can stream them anytime. Take your child (or just yourself!) on a field trip close to home and learn about the Olympic rainforest and compare it to Arizona deserts.

Gardens

“Educational gardens give students valuable hands-on experience that grows into an appreciation for the environment and understanding of the importance of conservation” says Angela Brisson, Program Manager Nature Works Everywhere. “The main principle behind the Gardens program is that gardens model conservation science on a relatable scale. Gardens are tools to teach everything from watershed science to global climate change. Meanwhile, students are getting outside and connecting with nature in a meaningful, hands-on way.”

Any school with an existing garden can set up an account to track data from the garden’s production levels and ecosystem services. If your child’s school does not have a garden, excellent resources are available the teach how to design and build one.  Washington State currently has two registered gardens, and we would love to increase local participation!

Nature Works Everywhere is a resource for everyone. Parents can register, get newsletters, share the videos with their kids, and attend virtual field trips.  We invite parents to encourage their children’s teachers to incorporate this curriculum in their classroom. Your children just might find that a coral reef in Palau or an elephant herd in Sumatra affects them more than they think. Only 6% of children ages 9-13 play outside on their own every week – it has never been more important to connect future generations with the earth they rely on. Nature Works Everywhere is a potent, free way to invest in the children that will shape our planet’s future.

Parenthood, Conservation and City Living

Finding ways to engage city kids in conservation

Written and Photographed by Jamie Robertson, Spatial Analyst

“Outside, Daddy!” demands my toddler, Rowan. She wants to be out of the house exploring the community garden, following the hoot of an owl, or surveying the bay below our Tacoma neighborhood. I hear it multiple times a day and will never tire of it. She loves being outside – out adventuring – and I wish more than anything that she always will.

Being a conservation geographer, my career and my personal life meet at a crossroads of place and a respect for the natural things supporting us in this world. As a parent whose childhood was spent freely wandering many undeveloped acres of wooded hills, playing in healthy clear creeks, and dancing around May Poles in what wasn’t quite a hippy commune but let’s call it one anyway, I recognize “place” played as large a role in shaping my sense of discovery, wanderlust, and career as the people I shared those experiences with. And Rowan’s childhood place is certainly different from my own.

My wife Courtney and I recently moved back to Washington after each discovering its lures before we even knew each other. We are from North Carolina, though we met, fell in love, and had Rowan in Colorado. Our landing in Tacoma was a surprise, but our decision to raise Rowan in this state was absolutely deliberate. As it turns out, Tacoma is arguably the prettiest city in the Pacific Northwest. Mt. Rainier looms, old growth trees tower in vast Pt. Defiance Park, the waters of Tacoma Narrows and Commencement Bay surround half the city, downtown museums and theaters provide an impressive cultural and aesthetic appeal, and beautiful Craftsman, Victorian, and Tudor homes with lush gardens spread across the steep hillsides. Despite its rough history and typical urban issues, Tacoma is a wonderful place to raise our family.

But with city living – or maybe I should say modern living – comes a struggle. How do we allow Rowan enough freedoms to discover her own paths? What is truly necessary for her to grow respect for the natural world?

Granted, my daughter is still a toddler, but finding ways to engage city kids in conservation is a necessary strategy for all people concerned with natural or urban wellbeing. I believe tomorrow’s conservationists will increasingly be born from an urban experience which differs so vastly from the back-to-nature background of so many conservationists today. Indeed, this will be necessary as urbanism will only continue to influence and control the fates of the natural world that shaped me so profoundly and which will keep our social and economic systems running well into the future. Freedom to discover outside leads to respect for nature and is fundamental to engaging all children, I believe.

In my job, discovery means mapping out the world around us to help Washington understand the natural world and the factors impacting it so we can determine collectively how to address conservation issues. As a parent, discovery means finding ways to teach Rowan skills of self-reliance and to build a foundation of confidence she will need to adventure on her own. …But for now, I’ll be sure to keep a watchful eye when she sprints out the door.

Learn more about how you can share the love of the outdoors with your kids.