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WWP
Educational Outreach Programs
By Jon Marvel, WWP Executive Director
One of Western Watersheds Project's lesser known
but essential efforts is working with high-school and college students to
provide on-site educational experiences about the degradation of public lands in
the West by domestic livestock.
Every other year in the fall for the past seven years I have
participated in a seminar in Elko County, Nevada, with students from Whitman
College in Walla Walla, Wash.
In late September or early October I meet with
25 to 35 students near Jackpot, Nevada, to discuss immediate and longterm
negative impacts of livestock grazing on the Trout Creek watershed in Elko
County.
The Whitman
College program is called "Semester in the West." (See their interesting web
site at:
http://www.semesterinthewest.org.)
The program is organized and directed by Professor Phil Brick, head of the
Department of Politics at Whitman.
Brick specializes in the politics of public
lands and has edited highly regarded books on the subject including "A Wolf in
the Garden: The Land Rights Movement and the New Environmental Debate"
(co-edited with R. McGreggor Cawley) and "Across the Great Divide: Explorations
in Collaborative Conservation in the American West," co-edited with Donald Snow
and Sarah Van de Wetering. His comprehensive program of education about the West
involves a full three months of travel and camping with his students.
During the semester Brick's class meets with
dozens of people who are involved with current and often contentious issues of
public lands management and land tenure as well as wildlife management and the
Endangered Species Act.
The Whitman students are a remarkably open
minded
and interested group, eager to ask questions and share ideas about what they are
experiencing. I have enjoyed each year's outing with them, even when what we
discover on the ground in the form of denuded, devastated public lands is
alarming and unconscionable. The degradation of Trout Creek and its tributary
watersheds is one of many disturbing examples.
"The
program is a learning opportunity for students to
understand the effects of grazing on vegetation in riparian areas," said Brick.
"In Trout Creek, for example, we found ancient, decayed willows some 30 or 40
feet above what remains of the existing stream. You can see where the stream
once was and where it is now, lost in a deeply-incised, canyonlike channel."
Once a year I present a Powerpoint slide show
on livestock grazing and biodiversity created by WWP board member Dr. John
Carter to four environmental science classes at BorahHigh School in Boise, Idaho. I was greatly assisted
by WWP board member Gene Bray, who joined me for all of the classes. (Gene's
mother worked at Borah H.S. from the time it opened in 1959 until 1964.)
The discussions and questions from more than 100
students were thoughtful and encouraging. WWP staff and I prepared a quiz for
students in each of the classes, and the winners
received one of three prizes: a WWP T shirt, a video about grazing in the
Southwest and a poster of the book cover to "Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized
Destruction of the American West." I have also presented a copy of the book to
environmental science teacher Darin Zarbnisky, who kindly invited me to speak to
his classes.
For more info on WWP's Educational Outreach Programs
contact us
by phone at 1-208-788-2290 or
E-mail us
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