By Christopher Peake
Green Right Now
Aquariums are wonderful places to spend a summer day: if the weather is cool you can stay outdoors, if it’s hot there are indoor exhibits. Menacing sharks, beautifully-colored fish, gliding sea turtles, manta rays, sea snakes, sea horses, penguins and birds and river otters and performing orcas and porpoises all represent what is most beautiful and exciting about the waters of Planet Earth.
But they also represent a world that is disappearing quicker than we thought possible, and this is where aquariums hold a key to the future of water creatures.
Aquariums have realized that they must conduct research and they must also show us what is alive, what is dying and what we can do to balance it all. And so they tie their exhibits and their activities back to conservation, and tell us how we can help.
[Read more →]
May 26th, 2009
By Harriet Blake
The best teachers inspire. Their grasp and excitement of a subject is contagious. Talking to Bertha Vazquez, Susan Vincent and Patrick Curley, you can’t come away without absorbing at least a sliver of their passion for the environment.
This month the National Environmental Education Foundation recognized Vazquez, Vincent and Curley for their innovative approaches to environmental education. Bertha Vazquez, a middle school teacher at a magnet school in Coral Gables, Fla., won the Richard C. Bartlett Education Award, named after the chairman of the Nature Conservancy of Texas. Patrick Curley, a middle and high-school teacher who works with at-risk students in Jacksonville, NC, and Susan Vincent, an earth and marine science teacher in East Harlem, NY, won certificates of merit.
“Kids have always related to the environment,” says Vazquez, who teaches at George Washington Carver Middle School in the Miami-Dade school system. “Teachers need to look for real-life connections that kids can relate to.”
[Read more →]
Related Topics: · ecology, energy independence, environmental education, environmental schools, George Washington Carver Middle School, green education, Miami, National Environmental Education Foundation, New York City, North Carolina, Onslow County Schools, Schools, science careers, Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem
