Category: WOLResources

Resource Material – The Legacy Worldview (Teach The Children)

Here are the Internet Resources for the Environmental Education Blog Essay 

 

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Emma Marris on Wolves, New Conservation & Kids In Nature
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Interactive Web Sites For Environmental Education
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Dr. Scott Sampson is a valued subscriber of this blog. I am in total agreement with his views on bringing young people in Nature. I became acquainted with Scott through his personal blog site and his post called the “The Whirlpool of Life”  http://www.scottsampson.net/index.php?page=education  
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Scott now works with naturerocks.org , a part of THe Nature Conservancy. His inaugural post is called What’s All the Fuss About Kids and Nature?  http://www.naturerocks.org/whats-all-the-fuss-about-kids-and-nature.xml
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Mother Nature is one of the best parents a child can have. A wonderful collection of comments by various parents on how Nature can become an important part of a child’s life.
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Environmental education projects in the great outdoors are among the best ways to teach skills that cut across curriculum
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The park ranger or the naturalist may be becoming an endangered species. Very sad because place-based environmental education is a powerful way to bring people back to Nature.
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A New Dark Age Looms
As our  Earth warms, our historical understanding of Nature will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected, though it will be difficult to say what will change, by how much, and when.
Our grandchildren could grow up knowing less about the planet than we do today. This is not a legacy we want to leave them. Yet we are on the verge of ensuring that this happens.
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Children need nature; nature needs children
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A significant number of my readers are educators. Their contribution is vital to the strength of a nation and to the conservation of Nature because the strength of a nation and a society and the preservation of Nature starts with great education opportunities for all. Here are three great videos that focus on education.
“Making sure all our students get a great education, find a career that’s fulfilling and rewarding, and have a chance to live out their dreams … wouldn’t just make us a more successful country — it would also make us a more fair and just one.” — Bill Gates
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Let Kids Run Wild in the Woods
What if everybody picked a flower? Maybe they’d care more about nature.
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Exploring Our Connections to Nature.  In this environmental education lesson module, students will explore how their lives are linked to everything in their communities and ecosystems at varying scales. Through personal and group exploration, students will begin to understand our role in our ecosystem and how the decisions we make directly affect all living things.
How systems thinking applies to education
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This amazing set of short videos takes science students on a ‘never-before-filmed’ journey exploring animal bodies, behaviors and evolutionary development.
Shape of Life is a series of free short classroom videos that beautifully illustrate the evolution of the animal kingdom on planet earth. Based upon an original PBS Series, Shape of Life, is especially designed for students and teachers who want a first-hand account of how animals adapt and thrive. The series focuses on diversity, biodiversity, adaptability, body structure, design, behaviors, and the innovative scientists who explore these creatures.
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Deb Perryman – an award winning Environmental Education teacher from Elgin, Illinois who oversees the National Biodiversity Teach-In [ http://nationalbiodiversityteachin.com/  ] which is run by her students. This is my second year working with Deb and I’m privileged to be one of the speakers. Here is a video of  her story [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6QWApC04LI ]
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Connections In Nature – A Webinar Presentation
This is a webinar presentation that I gave to the National Biodiversity Teachin earlier this year.
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ECOSYSTEMS AND HOW THEY WORK: CONNECTIONS IN NATURE
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A “slideshare” presentation on connections in Nature. I like this one and may be using it in my classroom
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Some good images of food webs from Pinterest. These are things that can be used in your classroom presentations on connections in Nature.
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Food Webs: Concepts and Applications from the Knowledge Project
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What is the difference between a food web and a food chain?
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A really great series of lessons by he BBC on feeding relationships
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Energy flow in ecosystems. A wikipedia page
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Systems Thinking Concepts For Environmental Education

Resource Material – Effective Conservation Practices

Here are the Internet resources for the Effective Conservation Practices blog essay .

 

A ray of hope. Fewer than 100 vaquitas—an elusive porpoise found only in the Sea of Cortez—are left on Earth. But there are new recent sightings of this rare marine mammal.
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While many people are calling for relisting of gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act, others are saying that it is time to completely reform wildlife management in the United States. Event organizers for Speak for Wolves: Yellowstone 2014 have developed the following five keys to reforming wildlife management in America:
* Ban trapping/snaring on all federal public lands.
* End grazing on all federal public lands.
* Abolish the predator-control department of the USDA Wildlife Services.
* Reform how state fish and game agencies operate.
* Introduce legislation to protect all predators, including wolves, from sport hunting, trapping, and snaring.
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280 acres bought for Highway 17 mountain lion tunnel
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A cougar that did not need to be killed. “Recent research in predator ecology suggests that killing animals like cougars (or wolves, coyotes and bears) only increases conflicts with humans. Though this information is widely known in ecological circles, apparently the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife hasn’t read any new science in decades because they continue to foster the myth that indiscriminate killing of predators will reduce conflicts. “
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The wolf’s uncertain future. Another excellent article by Cristina Eisenberg
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As people earn more, they want to eat more meat. But what if eating meat wrecks the planet? An interesting commentary by Bill Gates
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Walt Reid on Conservation Bright Spots & Systems Versus Species Thinking
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“Novel ecosystems” are a Trojan horse for conservation
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Safe Passages, or How Did The Grizzly Bear Cross The Road?
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Why wild animals need wildlife corridors
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Ranchers find ways to live with wolves despite deaths of dogs, horses, cattle
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A wonderful video portraying the great value of estuaries.
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Why you need to care about wildlife conservation
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Should we conserve for Nature’s sake, or for Our Own?
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Restoration of Riparian Areas Following the Removal of Cattle in the Northwestern Great Basin
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Cattle damage to riverbanks can be undone
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How does eating meat impact your water footprint? it requires 1,799 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat. One steer consumes over one million gallons of water over its short lifetime.
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So many conservationists and biologists get side-tracked trying to “manage” wild spaces that they forget that even seemingly small changes in an ecological environment can have big consequences.
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Wyoming Stock Growers Land Trust Conserves Ranch for Agriculture & Sage Grouse
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Bernie Kraus’ talk on TED about Nature’s sounds
He has been recording wild soundscapes — the wind in the trees, the chirping of birds, the subtle sounds of insect larvae — for 45 years. In that time, he has seen many environments radically altered by humans, sometimes even by practices thought to be environmentally safe. A surprising look at what we can learn through nature’s symphonies, from the grunting of a sea anemone to the sad calls of a beaver in mourning.
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Why the Passenger Pigeon Went Extinct
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Gardening the forest. You can’t manage a forest with chainsaws or by culling wildlife. The US Forest service, and other government agencies, are wrong. They don’t understand how ecosystems work.
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The Netherlands has 600 bridges to help animals get across highways safely!
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Down by the River
A riverbank restoration revives a desert city
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Monarch population increases amid plans to build 1500-mile migration corridor
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A ‘Bee Highway’ Was Built in Oslo to Protect Pollinators
One-third of Norway’s 200 wild bee species are endangered. Environmentalists hope this innovative ‘highway’ will help save them.
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For More Wonder, Rewild The World
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How Wolves Change Rivers
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The 9 limits of our planet … and how we’ve raced past 4 of them
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Conservation In The Anthropocene – Beyond Solitude and Fragility
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Our Dangerous Conservation Crisis –  Our challenge in conserving wild creatures is human ecology—the world’s dominant, disrupting ecological force.
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American Prairie Reserve’s mission to create a reserve of more than three million acres represents one of the largest conservation projects in the United States today.
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The Deceit of Yes/No Conservation
If you care about a healthy planet, conservation and environmental groups should stop selling environmental choices as simple, and concerned citizens should expand their understanding of global markets and dynamics to understand what’s truly at stake.
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Conservation’s blind spot: The case for conflict transformation in wildlife conservation
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Passive Restoration
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More on the positive ecological effect of the wolf restoration at Yellowstone National Park
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A ‘Bee Highway’ Was Built in Oslo to Protect Pollinators
One-third of Norway’s 200 wild bee species are endangered. Environmentalists hope this innovative ‘highway’ will help save them.
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Monarch population increases amid plans to build 1500-mile migration corridor
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Videographer Mike Foster visits the White Mountains of Arizona to observe volunteer efforts to manage the reintroduction of the Mexican Gray Wolf. The video summarizes the recent history of the wolf, its relationship to the human population, the wolf’s effect on the Rocky Mountain Elk and sheep and the practice of fladry fencing. Included are interviews with volunteers stating their purpose and perspectives as well as an interview with a representative from the Arizona Game and Fish.
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Sequel to Lords of Nature — Non Lethal Predation in Idaho
This is a video on non-lethal wolf control. A short sequel to the great “Lords of Nature” video that describes the reintroduction of the gray wolf at Yellowstone National Park.  Narrated by Peter Coyote, Green Fire Productions has created a captivating documentary that goes behind the scenes with leading scientists to explore the role top predators play in restoring and maintaining ecosystems and biodiversity. In this segment, hear from ranchers in Idaho who are learning to coexist with wolves.
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I Love to see international conservation programs like his
Biologists from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico Collaborate for North America’s Fastest Land Animal
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The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation and Who Pays for It
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Resource Material – Environmental Ethics

Here is the Internet resource list for the Environmental Ethics blog essay .

 

Principles of an Ecological Morality: Integrating Values and Ethics for Natural and Human Systems. Part of my blog essay on Environmental Ethics comes from this essay.
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Understanding Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic
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Why Edward Abbey Still Matters
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Donald Trump and the decline of America’s moral character
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Moral ecology and climate change
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Pope Francis’s Vision of a Moral Ecology Will Challenge Both Republicans and Democrats
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Environmental Ethics from Wikipedia
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Shepherds of Creation: Moral Ecology in a Technocratic Age
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Deep Ecology & Virtue Ethics
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Environmental Ethics
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The Ecological Crisis: A Moral Problem
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The ethics of killing large carnivores. Nowhere in the scientific literature,  is hunting for fun, for the enjoyment of killing, or for the acquisition of trophies defended.
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Balance In Nature. Modern Western  thought versus the indigenous approach to Nature.
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Sacred Matter by David Suzuki
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A sad commentary on the invasion of mankind into Nature without respect for other creatures.
Many people still aren’t comfortable admitting they’re animals. And this supremacist attitude is reflected in everything they do in regard to our fellow species. Anyone who has been following the wolf issue since gray wolves were removed from the Endangered Species List in a handful of backward states has certainly noticed a rapid backslide pertaining to how wolves are perceived, treated and “managed” by those bent on dragging us back to the dark ages for animals—the Nineteenth Century—when concepts like bounties, culls and contest huntgs were commonplace. Hunters and ranchers in the tri-state area surrounding Yellowstone National Park, as well as in the Great Lakes region, are doing everything they can to resurrect the gory glory days of the 1800s, and wolves are paying the ultimate price. See: http://exposingthebiggame.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/2013-the-year-of-the-big-backslide/
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25 Years of Catholic Ecology – More Powerful Than Ever
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Bigger Than Science, Bigger Than Religion
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The Great Remembering – Delta S
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From Trophy Hunting to Species Extinction.   A mounted head or showing off your wealth is apparently more valuable than a species threatened with extinction.
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Setting Aside Half The Earth For ‘Rewilding’: The Ethical Dimension.
The famous biologist and naturalist, E.O.Wilson, would do this by establishing huge biodiversity parks to protect, restore and connect habitats at a continental scale. Local people would be integrated into these parks as environmental educators, managers and rangers – a model drawn from existing large-scale conservation projects.
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Scientists say that we are super good at killing stuff. Humans don’t really need another reason to feel like the greatest species on Earth, so far removed from Nature that we can basically do whatever we want with it. Scientists in British Columbia have officially dubbed us “super predators.”
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The morality of immigration politics. Ecological impact of the border wall between Mexico and the United States
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Highly recommended!!! A new collaborative virtual story map that that helps communicate the nuances and realities of the borderlands.
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What would Trump’s wall mean for wildlife?
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Scientific American report. Building a border wall is an act of self-sabotage,
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NPR report – The Environmental Consequences Of A Wall On The U.S.-Mexico Border
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Newsweek – THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER WALL
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Splitting the Land in Two: Ecological Effects of Border Militarization
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Washington Post –  Border walls are bad for wildlife
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KCET – Trump’s border wall would be a disaster for wildlife
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University of Texas law school briefing document on the impact of a border wall. Excellent analysis
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Resource Material – Nature’s Energy Flow

Here is the Internet resource list for the  Nature’s Energy Flow blog essay .

 

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Energy Flow and Matter Cycle in Living Systems – An excellent high school instruction video
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Energy Flow In Living Systems – An excellent summary video designed for a high school class. The teacher in this video, Judy Wages, has a wonderful series of videos on YouTube. You can subscribe to her entire series.
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Is everything in this universe just pure energy?
This page includes a documentary video called “Thunderbolts of the Gods”
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Energy Powers All Living Systems
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Food chains and food webs
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Food Webs and Energy Pyramids: Bedrocks of Biodiversity
Trophic cascades. 
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Trophic levels of food chains
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What Are the Trophic Levels in Our Ecosystem?
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What are some good examples of trophic cascades like the wolves of Yellowstone?
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Trophic cascade basics
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A Wolf’s Role in the Ecosystem – The Trophic Cascade
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Killer Whales Are Causing A Trophic Cascade
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How Sea Otters Help Save The Planet
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Ecosystem Effects by Removing Sharks & Trophic Cascades
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Resource Material – Living Systems and Systems Thinking

Here is the Internet resource list for the living systems blog essay .
 
Wikipedia Living Systems Theory
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A Basic Written Description Of Living Systems Theory
Waking Up In An Ecological Age – Molly Young Brown. An EXCELLENT summary of the history of modern systems/holistic thinking in ecology
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Living Systems Theory  An excellent and easily readable summary of livings systems theory. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
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Why natural networks are more stable than man-made networks
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Scientists review worldwide rise of “network of networks”. Further indications that there is a unity of interconnectedness in Nature.
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Uncovering complex network structures in Nature
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BBC production: The Web of Life : Documentary on the Interconnection of All Living Things
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5 ways ‘systems thinking’ can jumpstart action
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Network thinking in ecology and evolution
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Earth’s Web of Life – A blog essay
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The Web of Life:A New Understanding of Living Systems By Fritjof Capra. This is a good, short summary of his important book
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Biodiversity: The Web Of Life. A video
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Celebrating The Beauty of Living Systems – Video
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The Unity of Living Systems
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 An overview of systems thinking
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Systems Thinking has been defined as an approach to problem solving, by viewing “problems” as parts of an overall system, rather than reacting to specific part, outcomes or events and potentially contributing to further development of unintended consequences. Systems thinking is not one thing but a set of habits or practices
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From Learning For Sustainability
Standing in contrast to positivist and reductionist thinking, systems thinking sets out to view systems in a holistic manner. Consistent with systems philosophy, systems thinking concerns an understanding of a system by examining the linkages and interactions between the elements that comprise the whole of the system.
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Can Systems Thinking Actually Solve Sustainability Challenges?
Systems thinking is a trans-disciplinary “framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots” (Peter Senge). Therefore, a systems thinker frames a problem in terms of a pattern of behavior over time, instead of focusing on particular events. Instead of microscopic, they strive for macroscopic, seeing beyond the details to the context of relationships in which they are embedded. Today, it is used by academics and practitioners alike to address sustainability challenges.
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A Teachers’ Guidebook for Applying Systems Thinking to Environmental Education Curricula for Grades 9-12
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Food Security and Sustainability: Systems thinking and environmental sustainability
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Introduction To Systems Thinking: A slideshare presentation
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Ecological Interactions. A nice written summary.
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A written summary of a very interesting lecture about food webs given by Jennifer Dunne at Santa Fe Institute. She portrays a hidden order in ecosystems using the studies of ecology and network theory.
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Chief Seattle’s Web of Life
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The Interconnected Web Of Life: We Are One
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Fritjof Capra, The Systems View of Life.    An outline of the new understanding of life that is now emerging at the forefront of science. It is a conception of life based on systemic thinking and some of the new concepts and mathematical techniques of complexity theory. It allows us for the first time to integrate the biological, cognitive, and social dimensions of life”
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The Hidden Power Laws of Ecosystems
A comprehensive description and review of the Gaia hypothesis
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Gaia Theory Website
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Trees and plants communicate and interact with each other. Sophisticated, underground, fungal networks  connect the trees and plants of an ecosystem. This symbiosis enables the purposeful sharing of resources, consequently helping the whole system of trees and plants to flourish. Here are four resources on the subject.
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Do Trees Communicate With Each Other? A very interesting video on how trees inter-communicate.
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What is an old-growth forest? 
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From the State of Minnesota. A nice web site on old-growth forests.
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The Networked Beauty of Forests. A very interesting video.
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Biodiversity enhances ecosystem multifunctionality across trophic levels and habitats
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My focus on connections in Nature includes evolution.
This web page is an exciting story about the discovery of an “anatomical mix between fish and a land-living animal.”
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Supporting native pollinators,.
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Feedback loops allow living organisms to maintain homeostasis
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The predominance of quarter-power scaling in biology
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Scaling : The surprising mathematics of life and civilzation
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Self Organization In Biology
Self–organization is a process where some form of overall order or coordination arises out of the local interactions between smaller component parts of an initially disordered system. The process of self–organization can be spontaneous, is not necessarily controlled by any agent outside of the system, and is leaderless.
Self-organized structures rely on a continuous input of energy to be maintained.  Biological systems challenge us because they consume energy, and are therefore far from thermal equilibrium. Thus classical thermodynamics, which has been so successful in developing an atomic understanding of physical and chemical properties such as temperature and pressure, does not apply to these systems. Instead of self-assembling into a lowest energy state, such as a crystal, these energy-dissipating components self-organize into highly dynamic structures, through which there us a constant flux of energy and material.
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The wikipedia definition of superorganism
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A detailed explanation of how many life systems are organized and maintained without a leader
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Bird flocks, zebra stripes, honeybee swarms: Self-organization in biological systems. A brief slide show that summarizes the famous book by Scott Camazine
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Lecture notes on self organization that offer great clarity
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Richard Golden; Characteristics of Self-Organizing Systems. A resource for teachers 1997.

Resource Material – Infinite Growth On A Finite Planet

Here is an Internet resource list of further reading to supplement my blog essay entitled “The Fantasy of Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet” 
 
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David Attenborough narrates “How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth?” (BBC). An excellent documentary on the problem of human overpopulation.
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Externalities –  David Suzuki speaks about the the fallacy of conventional economics – a belief that there are no limits to growth – and makes an emotional appeal to economists to include the biosphere and life itself in their economic models.
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Human impact on the natural environment
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David Suzuki speaks about overpopulation
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Overpopulation – The Future of Planet Earth
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Overpopulation vs. Overconsumption
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Overpopulation — The More The Merrier???
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What You Should Know About Human Overpopulation. It took from the dawn of humanity until the 19th century to reach a billion people on the planet. It took just over 200 years afterwards to add 6.2 billion more. With more and more people and ever dwindling resources, what are we to do?
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Alexandra Paul on human overpopulation. http://alexandrapaul.com/activism/overpopulation/
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Population and the Environment: The Global Challenge
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Nova’s web page on population and the environment
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Wikipedia on Human Overpopulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation
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Why current population overgrowth is costing us the earth.
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The interrelationship between population and environment.
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Humans interfere with nature’s balance — Consider pythons and poinsettias
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Man in the Realm of Nature
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Should we intervene in Nature to Help Animals?
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Damming evidence of human interference
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Natural and Human Disturbances That Affect An Ecosystem
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Biology Curriculum: HUMAN IMPACT ON THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT
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Natural and Human Impacts on Wildlife
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Human Activities that Affect the Ecosystem
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How Do Humans Affect the Environment?
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Human-caused environmental change: Impacts on plant diversity and evolution
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