Lost Worlds: Life in the Balance

Good morning. Although I couldn't be with you on Wednesday, I gather I was with many of you in spirit. I started out the week with a biodiversity experience in Los Alamos. I was out at the lab to have some meetings around outreach and science literacy and found myself not able to get to the lab and skirting forest fires everywhere I went. So I finally decided to get out of Los Alamos and ended up spending 10 hours in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, which probably many of you did, if not in Dallas/Fort Worth, elsewhere around the country, and got in here at 3 o'clock on Thursday morning. So, I'm delighted to be here and very excited to be able to talk to you about some of the stuff that we've been doing here at the museum around biodiversity.

Let me start by saying what an exciting project I think this is. It's a terrific team with Bayley and Jeff and JoAnna, an incredibly important topic, and a very, very powerful tool to reach out to the public. We've spent a lot of our time, as JoAnna mentioned, in the last three years thinking about biodiversity and thinking about ways of bringing this topic to people at the museum, in schools, at home and in the community. This is a wonderful way for us to take the work that we've done, to start working with new partners such as yourselves, and to have an even bigger impact on public understanding of biodiversity and engage people in all the important issues that are involved in biodiversity.

I want to do two things this morning. One is to talk a little bit about why I think biodiversity is such a powerful educational tool and has so many teachable moments. The other thing, and I'm a little afraid of this because I think I'm going to sound like I work for the Home Shopping Network or QVC, I want to go over some of the resources that we have and that are available to you here at the museum. You don't have to take notes because I'll get you a list of them in the next couple of days.

You've heard from some of our colleagues here at the museum and others about the importance of biodiversity and about the concepts of the diversity of life and the interconnectedness of the diversity on earth, the threats to biodiversity, and what people can do. As I said, what I want to focus on is biodiversity as a teachable moment. I think there are so many reasons why biodiversity is a powerful tool for educators. If we think about biodiversity, it affects every one of our lives. Everybody lives somewhere, everybody exists in a variety of systems, whether it's their local community, the local habitat, the local environment or in the global environment. It's something that touches on every one of our lives. It's also very much in the news. Every day you pick up the newspaper and there are issues—whether it's about population, whether it's about development, whether it's about pollution. And it's also in the curriculum. If you look at the national science education standards, if you look at their scope and sequence, if you look at the elementary-school level, there are units on animals' habitats, communities. If you look at the middle-school level, life sciences, and at the high school level, biology. It's a real opportunity to connect to people, to connect to schools, to connect to communities.

The other thing that I want to emphasize is that biodiversity is one of those wonderful topics where the issues are both local and global. You can start with people's lives. You can start with the local issues, and then move back and forth between local and global perspectives. People are constantly thinking about, Who am I, where do I fit in, how am I connected? And this is a great opportunity to start to address some of those questions.

In terms of the resources that are available here at the museum, I just want to touch on a few of them, and I'll give you a comprehensive list, if not before you leave—we'll mail them out to you after you go home. The museum has really concentrated its first outreach efforts in biodiversity, as I said before, on working on materials and activities focused on home, community and school. I think you all have seen a magazine that we developed in concert with the Hall of Biodiversity, It Takes All Kinds to Make a World, and also in collaboration with the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. This was originally aimed at 8 to 11-year-olds, but we found that it's a primer for adults and all sorts of people. We've distributed about a half a million of these on site at the museum, and also about 2 million through our collaboration with Time for Kids. It's also gone out to about 100,000 teachers. It's available on our web site, and you can download it or use it right there. I should say that a lot of these materials were developed in connection with the education department's National Center for Science Literacy, Education and Technology, the museum's outreach arm.

There is a piece that's available on the web called Endangered. It was developed in connection with an exhibition on endangered species developed largely by Sharon Simpson, and it's a wonderful compendium of information about endangered species, available in Spanish and in English, and a resource for programs and for curriculum with wonderful stories, illustrations and information.

You all got a copy of Scientists on Biodiversity? There'll be a new edition of this coming out within the next year that will be published by the New Press and distributed by W.W. Norton —some updated materials, new illustrations and a few new pieces, again done in connection with the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. Let me pause here for a second and just say that we've had tremendous support here from the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. You'll hear from Meg later today. You've heard from Eleanor Sterling. We've also had terrific support from the scientific community here at the museum. Another important thing about biodiversity is the availability of local resources. In fact, whether it's the local garden club, the local conservation group, local chapters of national advocacy or environmental groups, or people at the local university or college, there's a way to tie into the science and also discover that there are issues in the local community.

Sharon will be talking about the curriculum that we've developed called "Biodiversity Counts," that's been used in 41 states and a province of Canada, and has been field tested in about 100 schools around the country. It's a middle-school curriculum to get kids out of the classroom and into their local environment and to start them looking at issues of biodiversity in an active way.

Let me just take one more minute and focus on an unusual collaboration, a wonderfully productive collaboration that we had with a school called El Fuente Academy for Peace and Justice. El Fuente is a community-based organization located in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. It's largely a Latino/Puerto Rican community. El Fuente started its own school about six years ago, I guess. And every year, El Fuente has a six-week, project-based unit that they do. They pick a theme, and then they marshal all the resources in the school around that theme. About two years ago, they focused on biodiversity. And when you talk about adapting an issue to local concerns, to me this is sort of the best that can happen. We worked with the teachers from El Fuente and gave them the resources, some of which I've just shown you, on biodiversity. We brought them in and talked to them about biodiversity, steeped them in the content, and they took off from there. At the end of the six week period, they had a festival on biodiversity. That festival on biodiversity was in the community, and included street theater, rap songs, music that the students had written specifically for the event. There was a book fair, for which students had written books in both Spanish and English for younger children that they had illustrated and then bound and thus created a library on biodiversity for kids in the community and elsewhere. They conducted a survey of the impact of dry-cleaning fluids on health in the community, because in the Williamsburg community there is an abundance of dry-cleaning establishments. So they did a survey of the impact of those businesses on people who live in the area. They created an organic greenmarket for the community, bringing in organically grown materials from farms in the New York area. It just went on and on and on. They did videotapes. They took the perspectives of biodiversity from the museum. They took the information from the scientists and really looked at the issues in terms of their own needs in the community. I think that's the most powerful model of outreach and the kind of partnership that we're eager to support and work with. It's too bad that there was no way to have anybody from El Fuente here today, but if you're interested in any of their projects, we'd be happy to put you in touch with those folks.

Let me finish up with one more and then turn it over to Sharon. If you go to our web site, www.amnh.org, you'll find a wealth of material. There are curriculum materials. There are materials from conferences that the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation has organized -three conferences specifically: one on extinction called "Humans and Other Catastrophes," another one on health called "The Value of Plants, Animals, and Microbes to Human Health," and one this Spring on urban sprawl, which has a tag line that I love, which is "It's Not Nice to Fragment Mother Nature." There you'll find resources. You'll find speakers' names. You'll find, in some cases, transcripts of the actual conference. From our collaboration with Discovery Channel Online, we have a variety of expeditions, including one that involves Kefyn Catley looking for new species of spiders in western Australia. There's another one involving humpback whales in Madagascar and collecting DNA samples. And there's also one involving Eleanor Sterling looking at issues of conservation in Bolivia. Again, wonderful resources, with daily dispatches from the field of visual material and additional references. On our Web site, there's also a field guide for parents and young children, which sometimes we call "kiddie systematics." This is a series of activities and templates for parents to use with young children when they're outside—a walk through the park, a walk at the beach, looking at birds, looking at shells, looking at rocks and dealing with basic concepts of sorting and classification. There's also a lovely piece on that Web site about helping parents to ask open-ended questions. So I commend that one to you as well.

Finally, and you've seen this in the Hall of Biodiversity, there's the "Biobulletin." Many of you know how common it once was for museums to take a vibrant topic, create an exhibition, and then never change it for 20 or 30 years. We probably have done that as much as anybody else in the world. So starting with the Hall of Biodiversity, we were looking for ways to update the exhibitions and to bring into the Hall recent information from both research and from the field. We created the Biobulletin and the Earth Event Wall and, finally, the Astrobulletin in the Rose Center. But as important as those video pieces are in the Hall of Biodiversity, I think even more important are the in-depth materials that exist on the kiosks in those halls, and also on the web site. And so, archived on the web site are the stories from the last three years from the Biobulletin—again, each one is almost a book about the topic it deals with—and then resources and links to other places.

I think I'm going to stop there with my shopping list and my sales pitch, and just end with two thoughts. One is that we are eager to support you in whatever way we can. Most of the materials I've talked about are available either on the web, or we can share them with you at no cost. The other thing is that we're eager to learn from you. We've done a lot of work here. I know you've all been very active in the field as well, and we're eager to find ways to develop partnerships, to develop conversations and dialogue about how we promote these issues and this kind of educational effort. So I welcome your questions, your inquiries about how we can work with you, and also the ways in which we can learn from your efforts. Thanks very much.