Granny knew best!

Inez Liftig

My Granny Julie was not formally schooled in the science of ecology but, growing up poor in the hills of East Kentucky, she quickly learned to respect, protect, and make use of what nature had to offer.

Granny vehemently declared that spraying insecticides to kill the bean or potato beetles was not good. She said that the chemicals would get into our water and poison us, and kill the minnows, crawdads, and other critters living in the creek. So, pesticides were strictly banned on our property. Consequently, my cousins and I spent many hours carrying out Granny’s favorite method of exterminating the offending critters. During growing season, we scoured the rows of beans and potatoes to find and crush patches of beetle eggs and cast the adult insects into jars of warm soapy water to drown.

Granny also understood the valuable role that other creatures played in our ecosystem. She often made up elaborate stories about what would happen if we harmed the damselflies, crawdads, salamanders, bats, or toads in the fields and streams where we played. She identified edible and medicinal plants, showed us how to make wonderful toys from plant pith and bark, and demonstrated how to build hideouts out of fallen branches and brush.

She was a firm believer in what goes around comes around. Mistreat nature and sooner or later that mistreatment will come back to you. She understood the interconnectedness of plants, animals, soil, and human actions in the delicate the web of life—something too few of us understand today. Clearly, she would be heartsick and frightened about recent stories on environmental abuses. For example:

• The Baltimore Oriole and other birds are losing nesting and feeding grounds to overdevelopment, which also threatens the migration of the White Stork, the Monarch Butterfly, and other species.
• Some researchers feel that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma brought on by decades of poaching, culling and habitat loss.
• There is a looming pollination crisis in North America because a mite infestation is decimating honeybee colonies—the chief pollinator of our vegetable, fruit, seed, and nut crops.

Unfortunately, most people never feel connected to nature in the way my grandmother did. Many urban and suburban dwellers are rarely outside in nature except in pristine, managed places such as lawns, gardens, parks, or golf courses. Most of us fail to consider the environmental chain reaction that can result when we reach for chemicals to rid our yards of dandelions, crabgrass, slugs, ticks, mosquitoes, and chiggers. People have become so obsessed with controlling nature that commercial lawn treatments and pesticides applications are common even in areas where there are drinking wells, streams, and wetlands.

If our citizens are ever to be effective stewards of our environment, acting responsibly needs to be modeled and taught at home, and reinforced by the school and the rest of the community. This issue of Science Scope has some good lessons to use as starters for building environmental awareness. You’ll find articles that teach students about food webs, follow the trickle-down effect of melting glaciers in Antarctica, and explore frog malformations.

We must also get our students out of the classroom and into the field as often as possible, and find activities and teaching strategies that will connect students to the world around them (see Books, Biodiversity, and Beyond on page 36 for suggestions). We need to develop a population with a strong environmental sense of stewardship. To do this, each of us must reconnect with our natural environment. Sit outside and listen to the sounds around you, take a course at the local Audubon Center, sign up for community nature walks, keep a garden, or convince the golf course to plant some wild patches for the pollinators. Now that the old folks are gone, we must become the “grannies” to the next generation.

Inez Liftig, Editor

P.S. What ‘s your thinking about assigning students to specific lab groups? Is it necessary? If so, what is an effective way to manage it with a homogenous class? Send me an email at zenisci8@aol.com.

Resources

Fly Away Home: The Monarch Migration Mystery—
www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/science/03butter.html?
ex=1317528000&en=1a4feb95185332f7&ei=5088

An Elephant Crackup?—
www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html?
ex=1165381200&en=7b1e2f7bc24a7052&ei=5070

Holden, C. 2006. Looming pollinator crisis in North America. Science 314 (5798): 397.

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