Last Wednesday (August 27) Marketplace aired an interview with Hugh Grant, chairman and CEO of Monsanto. Among other topics, Kai Ryssdal, Marketplace host, asked Mr. Grant about the potential conflict between food and fuel. If we are using corn to make ethanol, doesn’t that drive up the cost of food?

Mr. Grant’s reply was:

Bio-fuel’s in its infancy. So if you’re in Europe you’re making diesel out of canola. If you’re in Brazil you’re making ethanol out of sugar cane. So far in the U.S. the industry’s been making ethanol out of corn.

My guess is we meet here in five to ten years time, we’ll be looking at the waste streams in these products. So the leafs and stems and turning them into ethanol, but you have to make a start.

At Acadia Partners we are working to help kids become better at thinking about whole systems — about natural systems. We are not in the business of debating ethanol policy–but I would very much like to provide students with the training to enable them to hear an interview like this one and to immediately conclude that Mr. Grant is trying to convince us that there really is a free lunch someplace in our future.

I hope we can get kids to think twice when anybody uses a term like “waste stream.” Deciding that something is “waste” is always a judgment call — a value statement — not a statement of fact. When we work with teachers to help them make students aware of cycles — the carbon cycle, the water cycle, the mercury cycle — I am hoping that one outcome is that students think it’s strange when someone says that something is just a waste stream — to be appropriated at no cost to the rest of the system.

Mr. Grant is taking the position that agriculture is just another form of extraction. The corn is a resource to be used. Plowing stalks and leaves back into the soil is a waste. Extracting it is a way to get something for nothing.

The point I would like to make for students is not that ethanol is necessarily a bad idea. I just want them to have the training and experience with living systems to understand that using the whole corn plant involves costs as well as the benefits that Mr. Grant is focused on.

As Aldo Leopold said in 1921 in his talk titled “Erosion and Prosperity:”

… destruction of soil is the most fundamental kind of economic loss which the human race can suffer. With enough time and money, a neglected farm can be put back on its feet–if the soil is still there. With enough patience and scientific knowledge, an overgrazed range can be restored–if the soil is there. By expensive replanting and with a generation or two of waiting, a ruined forest can again be made productive–if the soil is still there. With infinitely expensive works, a ruined watershed may again fill our ditches or turn our mills–if the soil is there. But if the soil is gone, the loss is absolute and irrevocable.”

Teaching students to think about systems and cycles–about how if you remove something from a system by extracting it and turning it into fuel for another use, then the system is changed–teaching all of that is, of course, also a way to get students thinking about stewardship.

But–for the moment–I will settle for creating providing students with an education that enables them to listen to Mr. Grant’s plans for using the “waste stream” from corn and to say, “Hey, wait a minute …” rather than “Cool. No problem” or, worse, “Whatever …”

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.

The Amazon web page for The Dangerous Book for Boys includes an interview with author Conn Iggulden that includes a question about just what he and his co-author (and brother Hal) tapped into when they wrote this suddenly very popular book. Iggulden’s response touches on some of the same important ideas expressed in our own recent No Child Left Inside conference at Schoodic:

In a word, fathers. I am one myself and I think we’ve become aware that the whole “health and safety” overprotective culture isn’t doing our sons any favors. Boys need to learn about risk. They need to fall off things occasionally, or–and this is the important bit–they’ll take worse risks on their own. If we do away with challenging playgrounds and cancel school trips for fear of being sued, we don’t end up with safer boys–we end up with them walking on train tracks. In the long run, it’s not safe at all to keep our boys in the house with a Playstation. It’s not good for their health or their safety. … Nothing gives me more pleasure than to know the book is being used with fathers and sons together, trying things out. Nothing is more valuable to a boy than time with his dad, learning something fun–or something difficult. That’s part of the attitude too. If it’s hard, you don’t make it easy, you grab it by the throat and hang on for as long as it takes.

Anything that provides more motivation for children and parents to do things together is a good thing. If The Dangerous Book for Boys sets the stage for boys and dads to spend more time doing stuff, that’s a good thing.

The more critical questions that Walter Kirn raises in his New York Times Magazine article have to do with moving beyond these good things–kids doing more things with parents–to more organized programs that try to prescribe these good things for kids. Kirn makes two points. The first is that, as we all remember our childhoods of playing in the woods, building tree houses, fording streams, and otherwise engaging in grand adventure, there is risk reaching nigh unto certainty we romanticize all of this. As Kirn puts it: “Who knew at the time that playing and getting hurt would come to be regarded later on as exotic, threatened activities sorely in need of a cultural revival led by concerned adults?” His second point grows out of the phrase “led by concerned adults.” Concerned adults can easily fall into the trap of creating structured programs intended to ensure that kids enjoy unstructured time out of doors. Hello?

None of this is black and white, or simple. Scouting, for example, always had highly structured elements, but still led to unstructured experience. I do a lot of sea kayaking, and I am here to tell you that it takes a good bit of structured training before you can really, safely, enjoy unstructured time on big water.

But, still, Kirn is raising some questions that we should keep in mind as we work to create more opportunities for kids to play, work, and learn in the outdoors. if you have a chance to see it, Kirn’s brief article is worth a look.

– Bill Zoellick

Note: This entry was originally posted on the Kids Outside website.

Heck, teaching about change is even hard to think about. Sarah Nelson and I attended a meeting up around Unity, Maine, last week and got to thinking about this problem on the drive back. If you were going to pick someone to have in the car with you while your mind began working over this question, “What does it mean to teach about change?,” Sarah would be the person you’d want with you. She is a Canon National Parks Science Scholar, associated with the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed Research, who has spent most of the past eight years looking at changes in the watersheds at Acadia. She combines this rigorous research work with a real interest in working with high school students.

Learning to See

One thing that jumps out in front of any conversation about change is that you can’t teach about it if the students can’t see it. So, one part of teaching about change is teaching kids to be more skillful observers. To take a very simple example from our work in the intertidal areas around Schoodic, you can’t tell whether there are changes in the makeup of the local crab population if you can’t separate one species of crab from another. The same thing goes for snails, seaweed, spiders, butterflies, trees, and so on. Students need a basic foundation in biology before they can even notice change.

Beyond having the background training to know what you are looking at (this is easy with a lot of things — snails and crabs, for example — harder for others — mosses and flies come to mind), you also need to have the motivation and focus to WANT to pay attention enough to see differences. Sarah reminded me that, in our workshops at Schoodic, we have seen that this motivation and focus increases when students are engaged, first-hand, in the actual collection of the samples and data. For some reason, sorting through the stuff that you have collected yourself is much more interesting that sorting through stuff that someone else found.

The lesson that we can take away from this is that getting kids to commit the kind of attention necessary to even notice change in the first place is a lot easier if you get the kids involved, hands-on, in the sample and data collection. This can’t just be a textbook exercise.

Seeing Connections, Not Just Facts

But — OK — let’s suppose that we create the engagement and can train students to observe carefully. Will they learn about change?

No. Or, more accurately, they would do so only very slowly, wandering around and hitting a lot of dead ends. It would be a little like giving someone flour, water, and salt and waiting for them to fool around long enough to make good bread. The careful, informed observations are the ingredients. They are absolutely essential, but are not sufficient to help students develop a useful understanding of how systems change.

What’s missing is method — in this case the methods of working with, arranging, and aggregating the raw ingredients to see patterns and to generate hypotheses that can be tested. Put another way, students need an introduction to the key concepts associated with change — conceptual tools — so that they have a way to move beyond their observations toward an understanding of change.

Conceptual Tools– A Start at a List

A conceptual tool is a big, key idea that you can use to see things in a new way–to link observations and to see relationships that you could not see before.

As an example of a “conceptual tool” it would be hard to do better than Darwin’s introduction of the “theory of evolution.” Darwin came up with a way of seeing change that was radically different than the prevailing understandings of his time. Before Darwin, the focus in biology was on uncovering what were assumed to be immutable laws of form — a grand ordering of life in which the living forms were expressions of a deeper, universal order. Darwin came up with the very different idea that forms and structures changed over time, driven by natural selec-tion operating on differences caused by random variation. Darwin gave us a new lens through which we could see change in a different way.

Another important concept that can help students think more productively about change is “sustainability.” They will sometimes encounter sustainability in the form of a system that is in balance — an equilibrium system — but they can also encounter sustainability in systems that continually take in energy and dissipate it. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is one example of a non-equilibrium system that has been stable and sustainable for a long period of time. You, and I, and other living creatures are other examples. Helping students master a comfortable, working familiarity with these ideas — stability, equilibrium systems, dissipative systems — seems like a core objective in any program designed to help students see and understand different kinds of change.

Here’s another example of an important conceptual tool: We send kids through most of high school giving them the idea that the rate of change is proportional to the amount of energy exerted. You pedal your bike harder and you go faster. Setting aside friction, wind resistance and such, if you pedal twice as hard, you go twice as fast. It is easy for kids to over-generalize the idea that systems are linear with regard to how they change. It’s a good concept, but it doesn’t work everywhere.

We should perhaps have students spend more time in rowboats. You move to one side, and the boat tips a little. You move a little farther, it tips a little more. But at some point, when you move just a little more, the boat tips over. It’s a dramatic state change, it happens really fast in response to only a small input, and suddenly you are in a new equilibrium state. Kids need to have a feel for that model of change that is just as sure as their feel for linear change.

Words and Sentences About Change

By the time that Sarah and I worked through this list of concepts, we were back at her house in Bangor and it was time for me to drive on back to Schoodic by myself. We didn’t manage to list all the concepts, and perhaps not even the most important ones. But I do think that we got a start on at least approaching this question of how we teach students about change.

Yes, we need to start by getting the students out in the field, working on real problems, collecting their own samples and gathering their own data. That is an absolute requirement, just like the flour and water in bread. But we also need to give them a conceptual toolkit for understanding change. It might be useful to think of this just as a “vocabulary of change.” What are the key words — the basic concepts — that need to be in this vocabulary for it to be functional? What are the key entries in a “working vocabulary” that enables a student to talk, think, and write about change in ways that are accurate and that can lead to new insight?

Once the students master a basic vocabulary, we could help them learn how to put the “words” together — how to connect concepts in ways that make sense, and how to avoid connections and “sentences” that don’t work. Given the vocabulary, we can move on to helping students master a grammar of change.

I am getting ahead of myself and ahead of where we are in this effort to improve science education. Let’s start with the vocabulary. What are the words about change — the key ideas and concepts — that we need to introduce to students in high school?

Sarah suggested setting up a blog for students participating in the class, so that they have a way to create a public record of their work in the class. We thought this was a great idea, so we created the blog page. Participation is limited to students and staff in the class, but the students’ writings are available to anyone to read.

The Downeast Ecology Program was developed by Darrin Kelly and Megan Galh of Ardea EcoExpeditions, experienced environmental educators and certified Maine Guides, and consists of 15 grammar school aged kids who have committed five Saturdays to explore the Schoodic Peninsula with themes such as “Who eats whom. The nutrient cycle from life to dirt and back again” and “Geology and climate, the great abiotics.” In the process Gabe is learning basic ecological concepts that help him to read the landscape and understand and know his own backyards better.

This is all great but Gabe wants to know why he has to go to “school” on Saturday too. Good question. I patiently explain that his mother and I think this is an incredible opportunity with many benefits including:

1. learning about science hands-on and outdoors will provide context and depth to his work in the classroom at Peninsula Grammar School
2. takes advantage of the incredible assets Maine has to offer…a national park at out door step…and, hopefully, be infected by the sense of wonder these excellent science educators exude from every pore
3. and, finally, I explained that the earth is facing significant environmental challenges and will need citizens like him to be science/environment literate to help set policy and make laws… even if they do not become scientist and work to find answers to these challenges.

Gabe’s eyes have long since glazed over, “thanks Dad, that was, uh, really more than I needed to know.” “Shut up and eat your pancakes.” He’s too cool to admit it, but he’s learning and enjoying it…and, maybe even more importantly, is his sense of awe at what he’s learning about the world around him. Just the other night I overheard him explaining bio-phosphorescence to a neighbor – that was worth any number of Big Specials.

Over the entire, 550 million year span of time since the initial explosion of diversity, there have only been five periods when this pattern has been massively reversed — only five times when there has been a die-off resulting in a large-scale reduction in the number of species. These die-offs are called “mass extinctions” or “mega-extinctions” The most recent mega-extinction happened 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs and, in North America, around half the plant species that had been living before the extinction event.

Since mega-extinctions are very rare in the grand scheme of life and result in so much change, you would think that they are the kind of thing that you would notice. So, it might come as a surprise that the great majority of scientists who study the birth and death of species agree that we are now living through the early stages of the sixth mega-extinction. Mitch Thomashow, formerly of Antioch New England Graduate School and now the new president of Unity College, estimates that we are now losing between 1 and 3 species per hour. Compare this to an estimated background rate of extinction of between 1 and 5 species per year. Welcome to the sixth mega-extinction.

Becoming Aware of Global Change

How can we be living through a cataclysmic event–the kind of thing that has occurred on only five other occasions in the entire story of life on Earth–and not know it?

Bringing the Biosphere Home is Mitch Thomashow’s exploration of this question and of its implications for education. He asks what we can do to provide young people with tools that enable them to perceive global change. If people can learn to be aware of global change, awareness of the mega-extinction will follow. Since human activity is the cause of this mega-extinction, being aware of it is the first step toward taking action toward slowing it down, before it can have dire impacts that will affect not only places that we love, such as Acadia National Park, but also the well-being of our own human species. After all, the history of life on Earth to date shows that extinction events continue until the cause of the event is no longer present. In this case, that would be us.

The Central Role of Place

Thomashow argues that creating awareness of global change grows out of awareness of local change. It does not begin by telling people that we are in the midst of the sixth mega-extinction and that the sky is falling. “Mega-extinction” has no personal meaning; it is just an abstraction. As abstractions go, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average has more personal meaning. “Well, there is the mega-extinction thing to worry about–I hear that it could be bad–but at least the Dow is hitting new highs.” (And so it is, as I write this.)

Personal meaning comes from personal experience. This is why teaching students to perceive global change starts by teaching them to perceive local change. In turn, the first steps toward seeing local change consist of learning to be aware of what is around you in detail. You won’t notice a change in the timing of bird migration if you cannot tell one species of bird from another. You won’t be able to piece together the history of change in a forest if you can’t tell one species of tree from another.

Learning to Manage Scale

Thomashow makes the important observation that if you want to move beyond noticing a change to understanding it, you typically need to be able to juxtapose different levels of scale. For example, here at Acadia National Park we have a pretty good idea of which species of vascular plants are rare. To go beyond this observation to an understanding of the mechanisms that lead to rarity, it is necessary to drop down to a smaller scale, looking at soil chemistry and soil microorganisms. Moving down a level of scale can help in gaining an understanding of what makes the change happen.

Moving in the other direction, to a larger scale, provides a different kind of understanding. The broader scale can enable the observer to see context and impact. In our rare plant example, moving up a level of scale provides a look at the system in which the rare plant exists. What animals depend on this plant for food or shelter? What other plants share the ecological niche associated with this plant, perhaps competing with it and benefiting from its rarity?

The ability to shift from one spatial scale to another becomes all the more important as you “scale up” observations to encompass global change. Rather than centering on something at the scale of a rare plant community, you focus on entire ecoregions, looking at scales larger than a single region to understand the global context. Then, moving down-scale from the entire region, to forests and protected areas like Acadia National Park, you can begin to understand the mechanisms that create regional change.

As an example of the need to juxtapose radically different scales of observation, consider the problem that one of the L.L.Bean Acadia Research Fellows, Dr. Natalie Cleavitt of Cornell, ran into while she was looking at the impacts of air pollution and acid rain on a division of non-vascular plants called liverworts. She found that perceiving the effects of increased acidity (a fairly large scale effect) was only possible if she moved down below the forest level, and even below the research plot level, to look at changes in the kinds of trees that the liverworts grew on, and even at changes in location on individual trees.

Perceiving global change requires not only the ability to shift between spatial scales, but also between different time scales. The core concept of “mega-extinction” requires an ability to look at change over the past few decades in the context of change over the past few hundred years, and then again in the context of patterns unfolding over tens of thousands of years.

The need to help students move between different spatial and time scales takes us back to the idea that understanding of global change must begin with understanding of a particular place. Thomashow argues that only by rooting students firmly in knowledge of a specific place can you give them the framework required to move freely from the scale of microorganisms to the scale of global change. Similarly, understanding of change over time begins with a study of the geology, forest succession, and human use patterns of a particular place.

Imagination as Scientific Tool

You perceive global change by observing physical, local change — for example, changes in the timing of migration or, as Natalie Cleavitt discovered, changes in the kinds of trees that liverworts can grow on. You then connect that observation, through a series of linkages across different scales of time and space, to global patterns. It is that kind of observation that makes global change personal–not just an abstraction. It emerges with more substance than the Dow-Jones Industrial Average.

Making those linkages across different scales requires more than knowledge: It requires imagination. In Bringing the Biosphere Home Thomashow explores a variety of ways in which active use and training of imagination must be part of teaching students to perceive global change.

For example, imagination is a necessary element in storytelling, and construction of narratives is, in turn, an essential part of being able to reconstruct the natural history of a place or region over time. Imagination is also the key ingredient in the construction of metaphors and images. How else can we understand something like the ozone hole, making it personal and comprehensible, except through images and metaphors?

Imagination takes a different form as observers struggle to understand the world through the framework of other species. For example, Thomashow talks about E.O. Wilson’s drive to collect and systematize all knowledge of wolf spiders. Putting together the big picture emerging from all the data about wolf spiders ultimately required trying, as much as possible, to enter the species space of the spider. The result of this intense imaginative effort was empathy, insight, and respect. It was an imaginative act as well as a scientific one.

As is true of teaching students to fly through space and time, training students to use their imaginations in ways that lead to insight and to sharpened perception requires training grounded in the plants, animals, and ecology of a particular place.

Wonder, Doubt, and Hope

Being able to perceive and understand the living systems in some particular place surely involves a lot of biology, chemistry, geology, and ecology. Learning to extend perception to scales that are both larger and smaller than what you can readily observe in the field and learning to think about systems working over different spans of time requires science, mathematics, and imagination. But Mitch Thomashow argues that training young people to perceive global change requires more than science, math, and imagination.

Thomashow tells of a trip he made to the volcanic mountains surrounding Mexico City that are the destination of every monarch butterfly living east of the Rockies. Fluttering from milkweed to milkweed captured by wind currents, fluttering through fields, back yards, and across highways, the monarchs travel thousands of miles, all coming to this place. Thomashow writes:

“After about an hour of hiking, you enter the realm of the monarchs. At first, you don’t notice anything different, except a thicker, darker forest. Then someone points to a large oblong mass, drooping off a tree. … On closer glance you realize that these structures are the forms of hundreds of huddled monarch butterflies, nestled together for evening warmth in the high mountain forest. … You realize that the air is filled with butterflies, dropping from the sky after a feeding foray, preparing for sunset. Orange wings flutter throughout the forest. You observe the enormity of the colony. There are thousands and thousands of butterflies in this special grove of Oyamel firs–butterflies from all over North America. The butterflies drip from the trees into your heart … In observing the orange brilliance of the monarchs, in contemplating their remarkable passage, in the presence of their awesome confluence, in considering their fragility and resilience, you are overwhelmed with wonder.” [pp. 56-57]

Wonder is essential to sustaining lifelong commitment to inquiry and to disciplined, scientific perception. Encountering wonder can happen in many ways, particularly in a place such as we live here at Schoodic. It can happen in a kayak when surrounded by porpoises, when watching the mating flight of eagles, when looking closely and carefully at a colony of bryophytes in the forest, when looking at the stars. Enabling students to encounter the world in a way that creates wonder is a key step in training them to become dedicated observers.

But, as Thomashow notes, the training of a careful observer must temper wonder with doubt. Even as the commitment to scientific observation arises out of engagement with nature, the practice of science depends on detachment. So, training young people to be sensitive observers of global change means helping them find the way to balance wonder and doubt, engagement and detachment. In short, we need to train them to be fully human, in the finest, fullest sense of our understanding of human capacity.

A consequence of teaching the discipline of detachment alongside the commitment emerging from wonder is that the student must face the possibility of loss. Writing about his encounter with the monarch butterflies, Thomashow is also fully aware that the preserves that are the destination for all the monarchs are “islands in a sea of encroachment,” threatened by development, eroded mountainsides, and even illegal logging of the trees in the monarch’s forest preserve. He knows that, if current trends continue, “the monarch butterfly may face its doom within a few decades.”

The coupling of wonder and awe with potential loss can lead to despair and indifference. Providing a meaningful alternative to despair is a critically important part of training young people if we do, indeed, hope that they will continue to grow in their ability to perceive global change. Global change, particularly change in the midst of a mass extinction event, involves loss. The student must have a way to accept the possibility of loss; otherwise he or she will turn away from engagement in perceiving change. Thomashow illustrates this with a quotation from Scott Russell Sanders’ book, Hunting for Hope. Sanders’s son says:

“You make me feel the planet’s dying and people are to blame and nothing can be done about it. There’s no room for hope. Maybe you can get by without hope, but I can’t. I’ve got a lot of living still to do. I have to believe there’s a way we can get out of this mess. Otherwise what’s the point? Why study, why work — why do anything at all if it’s going to hell?” [p. 67 in Thomashow]

Because children come to the educational program with different religious beliefs and backgrounds, hope will come in different forms for different people. But, within the framework of studying global change, it is important that the foundation for hope builds on the same concepts and principles that make up the foundation for perceiving change: the ability to observe closely, the ability to juxtapose radically different scales of space and of time, and the ability to imagine. Hope emerges from taking the long view. It is an essential part of training children to perceive global change.

Teaching Perception of Global Change

It should be clear from this review of Mitch Thomashow’s Bringing the Biosphere Home that he has written an ambitious book. It is about biology and ecology, but also about history, ethics, and the human condition. He makes a persuasive case that teaching young people to perceive global change is about much more than giving them the scientific tools and facts. We must also help students form connections to the world around them so that they care enough to commit to careful, sustained observation — observation that challenges each student’s intellectual and imaginative capability to span great ranges of space and time. We must also help students develop ways to sustain hope in the face of a lot of bad news.

Put another way, if someone is not aware of the sixth mega-extinction, it could be because he or she does not have mastery of the facts or of the techniques that are necessary to make such an abstraction real. We can address that problem by providing place-based scientific training that will allow the observer to juxtapose global scales with local observation.

Or, it could be that the sixth mega-extinction is invisible because observer is not sufficiently connected to the natural world, and so does not bother to make the investment of time, thought, and imagination required to perceive global change. We can address that by creating situations in which the student can develop a sense of wonder, leading to connection and commitment.

However, even given solid scientific skills, coupled with wonder and commitment, it could be that a student cannot “see” the sixth mega-extinction because he or she has no way to confront so much bad news. For this student, what is needed is a more vigorous basis for hope. We help the student achieve that foundation by showing him or her how to combine love of place, wonder at the mystery and power of life, and the ability to move beyond changes in the current time-scale to look at the bigger picture, over longer time.

What is striking about this combination of educational activities—acquisition of core knowledge, mastery of tools that span different scales, encounters with wonder, disciplined skepticism, and an outlook founded in hope–is that it comprises an educational program that embraces both the sciences and the arts. It is an educational program that nurtures the full, complete development of the student’s humanity.

It is not just about teaching about global change. We are also educating the whole person.

Schoodic as the PLACE for Global Change Education

The core element in this educational program is “place.” The educational experience and the emotional development both grow from attachment to a particular place and from engagement with the living systems, and their history, that make the place what it is.

The Schoodic Education and Research Center, located here in a quiet, beautiful part of Acadia National Park, surrounded by the waters of the Gulf of Maine, provides educators with important opportunities to foster such engagement and attachment. There are, of course, the physical facilities at the Center—the lodging, meeting, research, and classroom space. In other words, Schoodic is not just a park and a natural setting. It is also a fully-functioning residential educational institution.

As important as the facilities are, they are just tools. What is important about Schoodic is that this educational setting is part of Acadia National Park. The Park’s Schoodic District, where the Center is located, provides a wide variety of opportunities to observe natural systems, from seacoast to wetland to boreal forest. There are more than 2,000 acres, comprising a range of habitats to support place-based education. The Schoodic Peninsula is a richly diverse, flexible outdoor classroom.

In addition to the opportunities for place-based learning provided by Acadia National Park, there are the opportunities associated with the work of professional scientists who are conducting research in the Park. The Schoodic Education and Research Center, working closely with Acadia Partners for Science and Learning, supports a broad variety of research activities, including wildlife research, species inventories, studies of the ecological impact of invasive species, research into air and soil chemistry, watershed research, and modeling of change in the Park ecosystem. This work provides students with a broad variety of research problems as well as opportunities to learn from practicing scientists.

Finally, given the access to educational facilities the variety of habitats and instructional opportunities, and the community of working scientists at Acadia, perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the Park on the Schoodic Peninsula is its ability to generate awe and wonder. As Thomashow and others note, awe and wonder can emerge in many settings, from a backyard garden, a local pond, or a small city park. But as anyone who has visited here knows, Schoodic has the kind of presence and beauty that shakes a person from their usual habits of looking and feeling. It is the kind of place that brings the natural world to the forefront in the visitor’s mind. It is also the kind of place that, as one comes to know it better, inspires ever-deeper wonder and respect.

This ability to make students interrupt normal routines, watch more carefully, and engage more deeply might be Schoodic’s most powerful asset in the effort to help students become perceptive observers of global change.

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.

Friedman’s Argument in a Nutshell

Hats off to Friedman for taking on a really big problem. The great value of The World is Flat is that it pulls together a great deal of the world around us — technology, terrorism, international relations, domestic politics, economics, and more — and takes a shot at showing how all of these trends are connected and, more important, and where we seem to be headed. 

The odds are very much against Friedman’s having the details all right in such an ambitious effort. The value is in the general shape of the picture that emerges as Friedman draws lines between all those dots. Here is the overview:

1. Over the last 15 to 20 years, a we have seen the emergence of a potent combination of new technologies and investments. (For example, the Internet, an excess of digital bandwidth connecting disparate parts of the globe, open source software, and workflow that makes it possible to connect different business processes.) 
    
2. Over the last decade companies and individuals have developed the new habits of thought, internal processes, and business models that allow them to make powerful use of these new capabilities.  (For example, outsourcing, offshoring, and new kinds of collaborative work.)
    
3. In the last five years 3 billion additional people suddenly came on to this newly level and highly connected playing field — many of them equipped to play the game of world commerce at a world-class level.  Many more are quickly learning to play the game.

Friedman argues that the United States has been slow to respond to this leveling of the playing field and to this enormous increase in competition.  Part of the reason for this slow response is simply that we are used to being the leading source of innovation — in other words, we’ve become complacent.  But our slow response is also due our focusing our attention elsewhere since 9/11.  Friedman puts it this way::

"The two greatest dangers we Americans face are an excess of protectionism — excessive fears of another 9/11 that prompt us to wall ourselves in, in search of personal security — and excessive fears of competing in a world [that has opened up since the fall of the Berlin Wall] that prompt us to wall ourselves off, in search of economic security. Both would be a disaster for us and for the world." [p. 469, first edition ]

Instead of putting up walls, Friedman would have us imagine new new era of possibility and discovery, similar to our nation’s push in the 1960s to create the educational system and research infrastructure that put a man on the Moon. In President Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 speech calling for the national commitment required to create such a program, he said,

"Let it be clear that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action, a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs … This decision demands a major national commitment of scientific and technical manpower, materiel and facilities, and the possibility of their diversion from other important activities where they are already thinly spread. It means a degree of dedication, organization and discipline which have not always characterized our research and development efforts."

Friedman sees a similar opportunity today to call America out of a state of complacency and fear:

"If President Bush is looking for a similar legacy project, there is one just crying out — a national science initiative that would be our generation’s moon shot:  a crash program for alternative energy and conservation to make America energy-independent in ten years. If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, in one fell swoop he would dry up revenue for terrorism, force Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia onto the path of reform — which they will never do with $50-a-barrel oil — strengthen the dollar, and improve his own standing in Europe by doing something huge to reduce global warming. He would also create a real magnet to inspire young people to contribute to both the war on terrorism and America’s future by again becoming scientists, engineers, and mathematicians." [ p. 284, first edition ]

In short, Friedman would like to move away from what he sees as the current culture of fear.  He would like to see the U.S. replace fear with hope, commitment to competition, and a belief that out nation’s future is best served by creating a worldwide sense of possibility.

Some Problems With All This

There is a lot to learn from the argument that Friedman develops in The World is Flat.  So many books that reach for big problems manage only to provide a lot of stimulating anecdotes, without the careful analysis and argument that is necessary to tie the whole complicated set of problems together, and to suggest a solution.  Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods comes to mind as an example: Louv wrote an important book that points to a real problem, but also one that fails to come to grips with the problem. (I took a close look at Last Child in the Woods in some earlier articles.)  Friedman does better than that — he actually provides a way to understand what is happening.  That makes the book worth reading.

But I also have some real discomfort with Friedman’s approach to the problem — particularly with regard to his apparent confidence that market forces, in a flat world, will produce generally good outcomes.

Markets only deal with values that are monetized.  Worse, monetizing values creates an illusion that they can somehow be traded off against each other.  If we monetize the value of, say, a species of flies, and if we then find that the value returned by a development project that would extinguish the species exceeds the value of the species, the logical response in market terms would be to build the project and extinguish the species.  

There are a number of obvious technical problems with this mechanism and its conclusion. How, for example, do we ensure that the market has a reasonably accurate estimate of the future returns in value from the species? But those are just details.  From the standpoint of conservation ethics, there is an even more fundamental problem: From whose viewpoint do we measure value?  The viewpoint of the human developers?  Or that of the flies?

This isn’t just a silly or a cute question.  If you are looking at the overall health of a system, when would you ever choose to equate the benefit to the whole system with the benefit of a single class of actors in the system?  Particularly when the class of actors in question is a leading source of stress on the system?  

You wouldn’t.

So, why would you expect markets, which measure value only in human terms, to provide good results from the perspective of the ecosystem?

You shouldn’t.  But we do.  And Friedman seems untroubled by it.  (See "Belonging Here" for a different look at the shortcomings of economic utility, in place of a land ethic.)

I am also troubled by the potential displacement, in Friedman’s flat world, of local knowledge and know-how with "flatter," global approximations of that knowledge.  I think of the state of fishing off of our own coast. It seems to me that the "flat world" view results in fishing a species until it is wiped out.  We are only now feeling our way with this, but it does seem that local engagement, local knowledge, and local commitment are required in order to encourage stewardship of a resource, rather than its extraction.

Maine in a Flat World

However, even given my reservations about Friednman’s enthusiasm for market forces and flatness, it is worth paying close attention to the argument he develops.  Especially here in Maine.  

One of the things that struck me hard as I read this book was that the technological changes and the new ways of doing business — the changes that enable Bangalore to out-compete Bangor for software development or call center operations — are still only at an early stage here in Maine.  I have written about this before, describing it as a kind of "digital divide."  Rather than benefiting from new technologies, Maine ends up further behind. This happens despite the fact that, in theory, place and physical proximity should be less important in a flat world.  Heck … it the flat world helps Bangalore, why not Bangor?  Or Gouldsboro, Steuben, or Eastport? 

There are a couple of answers to this.  One is that in a flat world, plain "vanilla" skills and systems won’t do.  For example, Friedman explains that Mexicans began noticing that "some statuettes of Mexico’s patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, were being imported into Mexico from China, probably via ports in California. When you are Mexico and your claim to fame is that you are a low-wage manufacturing country, and some of your people are importing statuettes of your own patron saint from China, because China can make them and ship them all the way across the Pacific more cheaply than you can produce them, you are are living in a flat world." [page 309]

In other words, the good news is that all of this new technology makes it easier for workers in Bangor — or Winter Harbor — to connect with New York in San Francisco.  The bad news is that workers from Bangalore and Beijing are just as connected.  To play in this arena, Maine needs to upgrade its skills — corporate and individual — to compete at a world-class level. "Pretty good" is not good enough anymore, even when it is local.  In a flat world, locality matters much less, and competence, efficiency, and quality matter more. The level of play ratchets upward.

But it is worse than that.  People and companies in Maine are often less well connected with New York and San Francisco than they would be if they were in Bangalore or Beijing. Even worse, the people here in Maine are less familiar with the tools and techniques of a flat world, and are falling farther behind, fast.  In general, we don’t know how to make effective, productive use of digital collaboration, instant communication, automated workflows, or even simple publication tools such as blogs and podcasts.  That means that our skills are increasingly out of synch with the realities of the flat world.  We are less able to play the game, even if we do finally get the connectivity.

The Way Forward

Hey.  I’m a realist and a pragmatist. No matter how uncomfortable I am with our focus on markets, rather than ethics, obligation, and stewardship, I also know that we live in a world where conservation must make headway in a market economy.

Let’s take Friedman’s thesis seriously.  So, what do we do?

Well, first of all, let’s make sure that the world is just as flat here in Maine as it is elsewhere.  If Friedman is right, having a state that still requires knowledge workers to rely on dial-up connections over much of the state is going to do a lot of damage in a short time. Making the investment to ensure that broadband access to the Internet is available everywhere in Maine is a good investment.  At least we can get out on the playing field.

Second, we need to invest in providing today’s children with more education in mathematics and the sciences. Although Maine and the rest of the U.S. are already feeling the effects of global competition in a flat world today, the real competition heats up over the next 20 years, and countries like China move from being leading manufacturers to leading designers and innovators.  It is the quality of the training that we are providing to children today that will determine the degree of economic health — and ability to commit to conservation — that Maine enjoys over the next 20 years.

Acadia Partners and the Schoodic Education and Research Center can play an important, useful role in providing the natural science component of this education.  We are already doing that for children in grades 5 through 8 with the Schoodic Education Adventure program.  We need to expand that to include high school students.

Third, we need to give teachers the training and tools they need to ensure that science and mathematics education is not only first-rate, but also engaging.  Once again, Acadia Partners and the Schoodic Education and Research Center are already playing a role here, and can do much more.

These first three points — provide the connectivity, train the students, train the teachers — are steps toward a more secure economic environment for all of Maine and the U.S.  There is also work that is more directly tied to conservation.

I have written before about the fact that Acadia is really a very small protected area. Its health depends on the larger, and largely unprotected ecosystem that extends beyond the Park boundaries, along the Downeast coast and inland all the way up to the County. The technologies and new ways of interacting that Friedman describes in The World is Flat create new opportunities to cooperate across agencies and across institutions to work on larger-scale conservation problems. In a flat world, it should be much easier to look at conservation from the standpoint of whole ecological regions–in our case, embracing much of New England and the Maritime Provinces in Canada. Acadia Partners and the Schoodic Education and Research Center are not staffed in a way that would allow us to become the center of such conservation efforts, but we can be active participants and contributors. More important, perhaps, we can take a leadership role in encouraging the development of such landscape-scale conservation work.

Our Best Days Are Ahead of Us

Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat sounds an alarm.  The world is changing rapidly — the rules of play are being rewritten — and we are not paying attention and are not making the investment required to enable us to compete effectively in the world that is emerging. This is especially true in Maine — we face a real risk of finding that our economic lot is even harder and less rewarding.  Such an outcome would be bad for those of us who live here, and would be bad for conservation at Acadia and in the ecosystem that surrounds it.

But Friedman’s book is also optimistic. Friedman argues that this country’s greatest days are still ahead of it, rather than in some golden age in the past.  All we need to do is decide that we really do want to fully engage in this new competition, rather than trying to wall it off.

Acadia Partners and the Schoodic Education and Research Center have roles to play in ensuring that the best days for the people of this area, and for the land, plants, and animals that we are committed to conserving, are still in the future.

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In the case of the staff here at Acadia Partners for Science and Learning, our recent acquaintance with Mr. Dixon has been primarily in the context of this organization. It was clear from the outset that Acadia Partners embodied things that mattered to Mr. Dixon. It is connected to the communities here on the Schoodic Peninsula, its mission revolves around knowledge and learning, and its work focuses on Schoodic and the rest of Acadia National Park–and its protection into the future.

Without Mr. Dixon’s early, active engagement, Acadia Partners would not have the health and the reach that it has today. He provided significant financial support, but, just as important, he connected other people to Acadia Partners. A good portion of the board of directors that currently guides our growth first became engaged because Mr. Dixon shared his enthusiasm for our mission. Beyond the board of directors, Mr. Dixon connected Acadia Partners to other individuals and institutions that will continue to be partners and supporters as we grow.

In our own dealings with him, one of the things that we appreciated was his focus on the “big picture.” Acadia Partners is a new organization that is providing a new kind of support for National Parks. We do not have a template to work from. We are inventing something here — a way to support scientific research and education in the National Parks that has not been tried before. As you might imagine, this work does not always proceed stepwise, one foot after the other in a straight line toward the goal. Sometimes our progress works that way, but other times we find that we encounter an unexpected barrier that we have to work around. Sometimes we also find unexpected opportunities. In doing this kind of work–inventing something–having a Board President who stayed focused on the big picture was essential to our ability to continue to grow and move forward. The question that he asked of the Acadia Partners staff was whether we were headed toward the goal. The fact that the actual path we ended up taking was sometimes different than planned was not a primary concern. It was keeping the boat headed toward the finish line that was important.

We have been very fortunate to have such leadership during these first, very formative years at Acadia Partners. Focusing on the goal, and being flexible and creative with the means to reach it, has been an essential ingredient to our success to date.

The other dimension of Mr. Dixon’s leadership style that is firmly imprinted on this organization is attention to the power of leverage. In his support for Acadia Partners and other organizations, he often offered matching grants, rather than direct support. This is one manifestation of leverage–using his money to open up other resources. It is certainly an approach that he used here. It is also a technique that we have adopted–taking a page out of the Fitz Eugene Dixon playbook–as we have gone to foundations asking for support. We often ask for support that we can use to bring other, private support to the table. It is an approach that has brought consistently good results. 

Mr. Dixon also liked finding ways to make each dollar return multiple benefits — another version of leverage. That focus has also become part of the genetic code that shapes Acadia Partners. For example, we have found ways to invest in research that provides immediate benefit to the Park, while also providing educational opportunities for high school students, new information about citizen engagement in data collection, and new opportunities to enable private citizens to provide financial support for research in the Park. 

All of which is to say that Mr. Dixon did not just provide money here. He helped Acadia Partners develop a style and approach that is essential to the innovative work that we have to do. He helped create an organization that embodies a little of what he learned in a lifetime of service to higher causes.

In the last weeks of his life Mr. Dixon also decided to lend his name to an initiative here — the Fitz Eugene Dixon Fellowships. Characteristically, he told Alan Goldstein, who also serves on our board, that he wanted to get the Fitz Eugene Dixon Fellowship program started by offering a challenge grant–there is the focus on leverage again–matching the first $100,000 that we raise with another $50,000 of his own money.

We are honored to have responsibility for raising the money for fellowships that bear Mr. Dixon’s name. As they grow and bring new knowledge and benefits to Acadia over the coming years, the Fitz Eugene Dixon Fellowships will be an appropriate, powerful way to recognize Mr. Dixon’s contribution to this organization, to the Park, and to the surrounding communities.

Acadia Partners was a late addition to the tapestry of philanthropy, investment, and other work in Mr. Dixon’s life. We honored to be a small part of that colorful, much larger picture. We will most certainly keep Acadia Partners’ boat headed toward the finish line, and we will continue to strive to embody the spirit and insight that he shared with us.

– The Staff at Acadia Partners for Science and Learning
    Denny O’Brien, Michelle Bierman, and Bill Zoellick

   August 14, 2006

Because my "day job" focuses on asking people for money to support science and education at Acadia National Park, I spend a fair amount of time explaining why it is important to protect and preserve Acadia. Why do we need National Parks like Acadia? What is it that makes the Park so important? Shared values and shared answers to such questions must be firmly in place before I can talk about the importance of scientific research at Acadia, or about the need to give young people more opportunities to experience the Park.

I am not alone in having this problem of needing to make a case for nature–it seems to be common to everyone who argues for the importance of conservation. The usual pattern in this argument is to focus on utility–on the important role that the rest of nature plays in supporting the health and wealth of our one species. For example, I am just now reading a book on the potential effects of global warming. The author (correctly) concludes that he cannot simply assume that the reader will understand that preserving biodiversity is a good thing. (Why is this? Why is it more obvious that keeping the inflation rate in the U.S. economy at 2%, and not 3%, is important, while something as fundamental as preserving the diversity of species requires an argument and explanation?)

So, how does the author make the case for biodiversity? One typical argument focuses on the potential loss to medicine when we lose species and the evolutionary innovations that they might contain. For example, the author points to the recent extinction of a rare frog that had the unusual ability to transform its stomach into a brood chamber for sheltering its offspring, somehow rearing young frogs in an environment that is otherwise acidic and hostile to life. The argument is that the loss of this species before scientists had time to study it foreclosed any chance of discovering  new ways to treat stomach disorders based on the gastric mechanisms and genetics of this frog.

Similarly, people argue for the conservation and protection of watersheds because of their ability to filter and purify our drinking water. Forests are valuable because they play a role in controlling climate and, of course, as a source of lumber, pulpwood, and fuel. Wetlands are important because they buffer coastal towns and cities from the full effect of storms.  And so on. The value of a species, or of an entire system such as a coral reef, is measured in economic terms, where the ultimate measure of value is its utility to the human species.

That’s not how I see it when I am out for a morning walk. I am just happy to be there. It is not about utility, but about being part of something bigger than me or my species. It is not about me, or what the forest can do for me. It is more about the forest, but also about the exchange between me and the forest. That is where the science comes in. The science helps me better understand what is happening in the forest, and that understanding is, itself, a source of pleasure. Sometimes what I see surprises me and even makes me laugh. The understanding also helps us take action to protect the health of the forest. (Not my health, but the forest’s health.)  There is interaction here. I have a role. Wind, rain, plants, and other animals have roles.

Aldo Leopold said that it is a question of ethics, not utility. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of his essay titled "The Land Ethic."

When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls of his household whom he suspected of misbehavior during his absence.

This hanging involved no question of propriety. The girls were property. The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong. …

There is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus’ slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations. …

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there might be a place to compete for).

The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. … In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.

Aldo Leopold wrote "The Land Ethic" nearly 60 years ago. It is a broad essay, dealing frankly with threats to world-wide ecosystems, and is still largely fresh and relevant today. Leopold expresses optimism that Homo sapiens will develop a land ethic, just as the species has, over time, developed ethics for relations between individuals and between the individual and society.

This is an appropriate focus for our work at Acadia Partners for Science and Learning. I have no illusion that, working on our own from this corner of the United States, we are going to create a world-wide change in the relation between people and the land. But we do have this Park to work with, as members in its "land-community." We have the opportunity to invite others to join that community. We can start by inviting them to take morning walks and to develop their own history and conversation with this land and with these plants and animals. And we have the opportunity to help each of these members gain a better understanding of the community, of what is healthy, what is at risk, and of how things interact, and of the work to be done, so that they can be more effective community members.

It is really not about use. It is about belonging here.

Next door to me is Gabby Voeller, a Bates College student who is working with Dr. Holly Ewing on research related to the chemical makeup of the fogs that move over the Schoodic Peninsula. In general, Dr. Ewing is looking at factors contributing to the makeup of soil chemistry in the Park. Fogs are particularly important, both because they are a significant source of precipitation at Acadia and because fogs tend to carry high concentrations of chemicals than does rain.  Gabby is maintaining a fog collector on Schoodic Point in order to gather data about sulfates, phosphates, and nitrates. Gabby must be a very happy researcher–if fog is what you are looking for, Schoodic has been a rich resource this past month.

Across the hall is Dr. Aimee Phillippi of Unity College. She and two students from Unity are working in the intertidal zones around Schoodic to quantify the current population of Asian shore crabs (Hemigrapsus sanguineus) in the area. Asian shore crabs are an invasive species that has had a significant impact on other intertidal crab species and bivalves in areas to the south and west of Schoodic. Dr. Phillippi’s research, which is funded by Acadia Partners, will characterize crab and bivalve populations in advance of any impact from an Asian shore crab invasion.

Down the hall is the workroom used by the archeologists and anthropologists who are engaged in the shell midden excavation that we reported on earlier this month.  (See the story.) The word from Dr. Brian Robinson, who is leading this effort, is that they are finding a large number of artifacts and that this effort will add useful insight to the research that was done at this same site in the 1920s.

Later this week Dr. Kathy Tonnesen will be returning to continue work on the Acadia National Park Research Opportunities Catalog. The catalog will provide researchers with an overview of the scientific work that is most important and most needed by the Park. The catalog will also identify the areas in which the Park can serve as a valuable resource and outdoor laboratory for scientific questions that reach beyond the Park’s own management concerns. Dr. Tonnesen’s work this summer builds on a set of workshops earlier this year that engaged 50 scientists in identifying Park needs. For more insight into this work, see our news story from back in March, or — for even more detail — review the notes from the working sessions with the scientists.

Then, this weekend, Dr. Dan Decker, professor in the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell, will arrive to begin his tenure as Acadia National Park’s Scientist in Residence this summer. He will help the park develop a strategic wildlife management plan that integrates concerns about wildlife populations and ecosystem health with human dimensions and interactions.  Visit the Human Dimensions Research Unit website at Cornell for more information about Dr. Decker’s work. 

In a couple weeks Dr. Elizabeth Jakob of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst will arrive to resume her spider research. For the last three years, Dr. Jakob and her team from the University of Massachusetts have been studying an invasive European spider, Linyphia triangularis, in Acadia National Park. Her work is documenting the extent and spread of the invasion on Schoodic and is studying the impact of the invasion on native spider species.

Seeing all of this activity at the former medical/dental building is exciting for a number of reasons.  First, all of this work will give us a better understanding of the natural and cultural resources at Acadia–which is, of course, the reason for creating Acadia Partners and SERC.  But is also good just to see these facilities in use. The climate here at Schoodic is not gentle, and buildings that are not opened and put to use deteriorate. One key to preserving this facility so that it can serve the Park over the long term is putting it to work now. As I walk around campus, I sometimes have a real sense that the clock is running in the race to realize the potential of this research and teaching campus.

I also enjoy seeing this new surge of activity because I live and work here on Schoodic. If we are successful in this effort to turn the Schoodic Education and Research Center into a place that attracts scientists, educators, artists, and students, the Center will become an important part of the community here on the Schoodic Peninsula and in the towns stretching along the coast. It already generates economic activity, and more use will result in more of that. But use of these facilities is important for reasons that go beyond dollars and cents.  Seeing the students working on research projects in this building with me this summer–and seeing students with laptops under umbrellas on the deck of the Schooner Club– reminds me of the potential to use SERC as a place that attracts young people and that engages them in interesting, useful work.

We’ve gotten something important started here.