This is the Environment Show. It's about our stewardship of the Earth and the beauty
and mystery of life in all its forms. I'm Peter Burley.
Coming up, President Clinton initiates a policy to increase use of biomass fuels as a substitute
for oil, coal, and gas. Can it work? Clues above the origins of life may be found in the
tales of comets, which are made up of ice and dust that were in space when the Earth began.
Results of our last Environment Show quits. Trash is part of the ecosystem in Baja, California,
and the Ospreys like it. And on the Earth calendar, a spike of pink and orange blazes in the
grasslands of Maine. These stories and more coming up on the Environment Show.
You're listening to the Environment Show, and I'm Peter Burley. President Clinton is hoping to
reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and decrease emissions from these energy sources. He recently
issued an executive order titled, Developing and Promoting Biobased Products and Bioenergy.
It's a long-term commitment designed to replace coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium with farm
products such as crop residue. But as the Environment Show Stephen Westcott reports, not everyone is
optimistic about the viability of biomass fuels. In the memorandum, President Clinton ordered the
secretaries of agriculture and energy and the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency
to prepare a report outlining possible programs that would triple the use of biomass fuels in the
United States by the year 2010. Currently, about 3 percent of national energy use comes from biomass.
Scientists tell us this decade is probably the warmest in the thousand years.
But the heat and drought of this summer, the natural disasters of the last few years,
are probably only a taste of what is to come unless we act now to deal with this challenge.
Bioenergy is a means to achieve all of these objectives. To heat our homes, to fuel our vehicles,
to power our factories while producing virtually no greenhouse gas pollution.
Professor Robert Brown is Director of the Center for Sustainable Environmental Technology
at Iowa State University. Brown has worked with and researched biomass fuels and says the term
biomass includes a lot of different materials. I define biomass as anything of recent biological
origin. So that would include sewage, manure on the farms in Iowa. It would include residue from
a corn harvest, material left over and building furniture from wood, as well as material that we
would grow with very purpose of using it for fuel in that what we call a dedicated energy crop.
So all of those are possibilities and would be part of the fuel mix if we were to consider biomass.
There's a lot of potential for biomass products ranging from additional crops grown by farmers
to utilizing waste from chicken farms. Some companies are also using biomass products to replace
polystyrene and disposable cups and plates. Biomass products like wood chips can be a substitute for
coal in the generation of electricity and provide cleaner air. Ethanol, a fuel made from corn and
other products, could replace gasoline in some cases. Not surprisingly, those in the oil industry
are skeptical about the potential of biomass fuel. The industry has a lot to lose if our reliance
on fossil fuels is reduced. John Felmy, Director of Policy Analysis and Statistics for the American
Petroleum Institute says one of the limits to biomass products is that they are often grown
away from population sources and have to be transported at high costs. He says federal subsidies
would be needed to really make biomass programs work. The second concern we have is that the part of
the source of the administration's proposing this is they call it a zero carbon technology,
which it really isn't. It's got a broad range of environmental costs involved. It certainly
is not an environmentally-benign activity because you've got planting, growing, harvesting, and
transport of this stuff. In fact, that all takes energy. In fact, this type of cellulosic operations
uses about one gallon of petroleum for about seven gallons of ethanol. It certainly isn't a zero carbon
zero energy source. Petroleum industry officials are not the only people wondering whether biomass fuels
provide viable alternatives. Professor Brown says while we have technologies that can be used today,
the biomass industry still has a long way to go. The analogy would be when we first start using
petroleum resources, basically we simply boiled it and got off the the caracene and dumped the
rest. In a sense, we're doing the same thing with bio resources. We can only use right now some
of the highest quality of biomass resources. We can only use them in the simplest least efficient
applications. I would have to include use of ethanol in automobiles is a fairly inefficient
use of those resources. We're in a sense boiling off the best fraction of the biomass in terms of
the cornstarch. Basically, don't have good use for the rest of the biomass produced from the
corn. Some have estimated that as much as 20 to 30 percent of our total fossil fuel energy use
could be substituted with biomass. But Professor Brown says technological advances are needed
in the field of electrical generation to make biomass viable. Overall, Professor Brown describes
President Clinton's effort as ambitious. He says biomass resources are available,
it's a matter of whether it is economical to use them. Given today's economic climate of stable
gas and oil prices and a strong economy, Professor Brown believes it will be difficult to make
the president's vision a reality. If suddenly industry and consumers were told they were going
to have to limit carbon dioxide emissions, for example, that would be a whole new game and would
change the prospects for biomass. Biomass has either low or no or even negative net emissions
of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when it is substituted for fossil energy. In that case,
the prospects for biomass would be extremely bright. Secretary's Glickman and Richardson,
as well as Administrator Browner, have four months to formulate plans to promote the use of
bio-based products and bioenergy. Whether the US will be using three times the amount of biomass
products in a little more than a decade remains to be seen. For the Environment Show, I'm Steven
Westcott.
Continuing our series on the search for the origins of life, we talk today with Professor Bill
Irvin, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He studies
comments and explains how they can provide clues to answering the fundamental question of how life
got started. Comments are objects that have essentially been in a deep freeze ever since the solar
system formed four and a half billion years ago and you put something in a deep freeze to preserve it.
So we think comments preserve evidence better than any other objects that we know about
of the chemistry of the early solar system and the processes that occurred in the early solar system.
And in fact, perhaps going back even further to the interstellar material, the interstellar clouds
out of which the solar system formed. Irvin says one of the comments we know most about is
Halley's comment because a spacecraft was able to observe it.
The solid particles in Halley's comment are between a third and a half organic matter.
Now I should say that comments contain both solid particles and frozen gases, that is,
is of various kinds, and the mix is different in one comment from another. But for the solid particles,
as I said, a third or a half of that material, at least in the case of one comment, was organic.
Now when I say organic, I don't mean stuff that's been made by living organisms,
but carbon-containing material. Since the building blocks of life come from this organic material,
the next question is where the organic matter came from in the first place.
One thought is that this material is produced in interstellar space, in what we call interstellar clouds,
before the solar system formed and before the comments formed. Now how would it be produced there?
Well in these dense interstellar clouds, which we can study, for example, by radio astronomy,
which is what I do. Again there is gas and there are little particles, and the particles are
probably partly rocky material, which accrete coats of ice on them, and then this ice gets processed
by getting zapped with high energy radiation from stars and can be transformed into a more complex
molecule, probably some of these organic molecules that we see.
Urban points out that by applying energy to a mixture of gases like water vapor, ammonia,
and methane in the laboratory, it's fairly easy to produce molecules like amino acids,
which are the building blocks of proteins. The question then is whether the building blocks of
life on Earth came from space, or were produced here on Earth, or came from both places?
That probably depends primarily on what the nature of the primitive atmosphere was on Earth,
about which there's still a lot of argument. It gets related to questions such as how rapidly did
the Earth's core form, so there wasn't certainly nearly as much oxygen as there is now.
But the question is, did hydrogen really predominate over oxygen or not in those early days? If it did,
then the experiments that have been done in the lab suggest that you could make a lot of stuff
that you would want to start life with here on the Earth. On the other hand, if the atmosphere
were sort of intermediate between how it is now and the very hydrogen-rich atmosphere of a planet
like, say, Jupiter, then it's much harder to make these molecules and the inventory coming from
outside might have played a critical role. For a scientist who studies comets, this is a special
time because Earth was visited by a comet which all of us were able to see over an extended period.
It was hailbop. From comet hailbop and its immediate predecessor, the year before,
comet Yakutaki, we've essentially tripled the number of known constituents of comets,
the molecular constituents in these ises. We found a whole range of compounds all
away from a phoemic acid, which is what ants make when they sting you, to a range of different
cyanide compounds, a range of different sulfur-containing compounds, some exotic, at least to astronomers,
organic molecules like methylformate. And one of the interesting thing about this suite of molecules
that we've discovered is that essentially all of them we also find in these interstellar clouds.
Irving's research into the nature and composition of the icy material that makes up comets
provides clues about the nature of the Earth and its atmosphere billions of years ago.
It also suggests what organic material was reaching our planet from space. Hopefully,
all of this will help us determine how life on Earth began. He also points out that an archaeologist
studying tombs of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt found evidence that human interest in comets
is not a recent phenomenon. On some tombs from that time, from more than 2,000 years before
Christ, there are inscriptions describing how the king is going to journey in his royal boat
to meet the sun god after his death, where he describes a celestial object which we now think
is a comet, an object that which has the hieroglyphs for a star and for hair. And we know the Greeks
called comets hairy stars. So it appears that comets are present in the literature of mankind,
almost as far back as the written literature goes back more than 4,000 years ago.
Bill Irving is professor of astronomy at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
The
coverage of the origins of life is made possible by NASA. Through support for the New York
Center for studies of the origins of life, it's located at the New York State University at Albany,
the Rensseler Polytechnic Institute, and the College of St. Rose. The environment show is a
national production and is made possible by the W. Walton Jones Foundation, the William Bingham
Foundation, the Turner Foundation, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, and Heming's Motor News, the monthly
Bible of a collector car hobby, www.hemmings.com
We hope you'll contact us here in the environment show. Our email address is green at wamc.org.
Reach us through the internet www.enn.com slash envshodw
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It's not a single listener got it right.
We can only assume that the machine we recorded was playing in the wrong key.
If you know of a can eater that digests in the key of G instead of C, let us know.
We all have places that are special to us, for some it's a city street, for others it's
deep in the wilderness.
For author Bruce Berger, it's Baja California, where it's considered a privilege to have
your electricity turned off.
In this portrait of place, Berger reads from his book, Almost in Island, Travels in Baja
California.
The newcomer to Guerrero Negro, midway down Baja California's Pacific Coast, may find
it small but monotonous.
A town whose single task is to tend the world's largest evaporative salt operation.
Fences made from a local yaka bloom on the ground, but the more curious bloom is overhead.
Among the posts and wires that distribute electricity from the diesel generating plant, ospreys
have assembled their vast shaggy nests.
Over a post forms a corner, a so-called fish eagle may toss its salad of sticks and trash.
On the last day of every month, at dusk, in the brief time when all the ospreys are back
home from foraging and still visible, Mexican environmental officials pile into their salt
eaten pickups and tear through the streets, racing the dark to see how many nests are
occupied.
And in which I participated, turned up 33 ospreys, which particularly pleased the officials
in that there were only three nesting pairs in all of France.
Bird electricutions are rare, but over the years so many damp sticks have been dropped across
the wires, shorting the current and blackening parts of town, that enraged citizens at one
point persuaded the power company to dismantle all the nests.
To the delight of the environmental officials, the birds immediately rebuilt.
The officials then talked to the power company into building platforms for the nests and
persuaded the public that the privilege of hosting ospreys was worth the odd blackout.
If ospreys are best counted by night, their domain is best savored by day.
Fewer than half of the ospreys have taken advantage of the pallets nailed up by the power
company.
By osprey standards, it is more chic to rig the nest on the electrical system and to innovate
with burlap and plastic bags.
The prize, I decided on a house tour, went to a creation whose few sticks were engulfed
by palm fronds, strips of canvas, turquoise fishnet, torn clothing, bits of rope, a garland
of plastic ivy, a hem of blue tarp, a fan belt, a hanger, pantyhose and shredded viscween,
an entire airborne landfill upon which the architect glared at me through the pinhole of
his yellow eye as if daring me to dispute his taste.
Once, on learning that the town had been struck by gale-force wind, I called a friend there
in alarm.
The storm had knocked over the satellite dish that made life by the salt ponds bearable,
but of more concern to him as well as to me was that nests had been swept to the ground,
killing at least one mature osprey and chick full damage unknown.
I had to see for myself.
As I pulled into town two days later, I was reassured to see so much rubbish clinging
to the poles.
Of the 19 nests, all but three had hung tough.
I sped to my favorite.
Most of the nests few sticks had been blown away, leaving nearly pure trash.
As I stared at a newly unveiled paintbrush, a huge form glided into sight.
There was a shriek from the nest, a small head creamed from the refuse, and fish fresh
from the brine, past, parent to child, in sheer defiance against the sky.
That was author Bruce Berger, reading from his book Almost an Island, Travels in Baja,
California.
Published by the University of Arizona Press.
And now it's time for the Earth Calendar.
As you listen to this show, northern blazing stars are blooming in Maine.
Nancy Sphere, Director of Science and Stewardship for the Nature Conservancy in Maine, describes
the wild flowers.
It starts blooming at the top.
It's basically one long spike with individual flower heads along that spike.
It starts blooming at the top and will continue down the stem until the last flower is the
bloom or at the bottom of the stalk.
Actually, it's a beautiful plant.
It's almost a fuchsia, sort of a pink purple color.
The plant grows about anywhere between a foot to two feet in height.
So it's a relatively robust plant.
I would call this particular plant a stunningly beautiful plant.
Northern blazing stars are mostly found in southwestern Maine.
Nancy describes the landscape as gently rolling, sand-plane grassland.
Well, actually, northern blazing star is only found in four locations in Maine.
It's considered to be a rare plant in the state.
And the largest population is found at Kennybund Plains.
And then the next largest population is found on wild barons, which is actually adjacent
to Kennybund Plains.
The other two sites where I've seen it, basically, has just been one individual plant that I've
seen at a time.
If you go to Kennybund Plains, there are actually millions of plants that are found out there,
and it's probably the world's largest population.
The Nature Conservancy manages more than 630 acres in Kennybund Plains, where the northern
blazing star is found.
Nancy says development of the sandy grasslands in Maine is one reason for their decline.
Another is reduced to instances of fire.
She says like many other plants, northern blazing stars rely on fires to help them reproduce.
Today, the Nature Conservancy does do prescribed burns on the Kennybund Plains as part of its
management efforts.
Nancy says the northern blazing star is not the only wild plant blooming in southern Maine
at this time of year.
The other plant that's blooming this time of year that's considered to be rare in the
state is tooth white copped aster.
Basically, it's a plant that has very small white flower heads.
It's also, it's in the same family as the northern blazing star, which is the composite
family.
When I was a child, one of my favorite stories was about a bull named Ferdinand.
He was raised to be a fighting bull, but instead of snorting and poing the ground, he would
sit under a tree in the field and watch the flowers.
Perhaps the world would be more peaceful if bullies like Milosevic and Kadathi went to
the fields of Maine and watched the blazing star.
You're listening to the Environment Show and I'm Peter Burley.
This is the Environment Show and I'm Peter Burley.
Still ahead.
Environmental education on TV, high school and in the neighborhood.
We talk with Bill Nye, the science guy, who through his TV show has become one of America's
best known children's educators.
He tells us why our pants fall down and it's all part of explaining the wonders of the
natural world.
We meet kids who are studying watersheds and planting trees.
They're in a vocational environmental program, which is one of the first of its kind.
Stay with us.
We are a talking green and I'm Peter Burley.
Here on the Environment Show, we try to show that everything is interconnected.
We try to celebrate nature and have folks understand that we can all make a difference.
We may or we may not succeed, but today we talk to a man who really is getting the environmental
message across and he's doing it for people who have the biggest impact on the planet
and in the future and that's our kids.
My guest is Bill Nye, the science guy and he is host, writer and inspiration for the
PBS Children's Television program which bears his name.
Bill Nye, the science guy.
Bill, welcome to the Environment Show.
Oh, it's so good to be here, Peter.
Bill, you're described as a man with a mission.
What is the message that you're trying to get across in your program?
My mission is to get people excited about science, especially young people so that in the
future we'll have enough scientists to solve the world's problems.
And I will argue that from a scientific standpoint, it's in everybody's best interest to preserve
the environment as best as we can because we're part of the ecosystem, we're part of the
environment.
So we want to remain part of the environment.
We have to take care of it.
Although our extinction is inevitable, I've been told.
Well, the scientist told me that, said that no creature is around, there was around 50
million years ago.
That's not a hurry.
So we'll back up now.
50 million years is quite a while.
You could do a lot of radio in 50 million years.
Bill, your program is a mix of comedy and illustration and obviously you are trying to
get science across.
Have you discovered over the years that something's worked better than others?
What is it that makes kids really get the message?
Well, you say kids.
I guess the first thing is I don't, I prefer not to talk to kids as though they can't understand
things.
You talk to the viewer of any age in the same way.
The big difference between somebody, to me, the big difference between somebody who's
10, and I pick 10 years old as an example based on research.
The time you're 10, and there's in you and an adult really is your experience.
10-year-old, for the most part, 12-year-old, can understand pretty much anything that's
presented to him.
Calculus and electrophoresis of the oxy-rabbonic-acid molecules, that takes time to accumulate that
knowledge.
But the fundamental understanding by the time you're in fourth grade is pretty good.
So, my advice to anyone who wants to try this is never talk down to the viewer.
Never talk down to anyone.
Just treat them as a peer.
People respond to that.
And then as far as the jokes and the comedy, you know, to television, my show is a television
show.
And primarily it has to be funny.
I mean, it has to be entertaining.
Excuse me, it has to be entertaining.
And in order to make something entertaining, one good way to go is to make it funny.
And one of the things that characterizes your program is some very articulate kids
who take the viewer through some of the experiments that you do and so on.
But they also a source of advice to you.
I got to tell you not so much.
But we do let them do the, we do encourage them to do the demonstration.
And then that's how they stumble across things that you can't tell them about.
They have to see it for themselves.
And the big thing is, if the kid, the actor, does it for himself or herself, it is hoped
that he or she will also get caught up in the charm of it, the unexpected nature of
it, the coolness of the demonstration.
And so then that enthusiasm will come across on the air.
That raises a fundamental question about science education.
Educators have said to me that they've been doing it all wrong, that you've got to let
the kids or the students collect data and then form hypotheses about what it means,
rather than have some scientists tell them what the scientist or his colleagues.
Well that's the thing about science education.
This thing about science education, to me, makes it so much more interesting, so much
more charming, so much cooler than other disciplines.
With all due respect to historians and English literature professors.
The thing about science that's so elegant and beautiful is if anybody does the science
demonstration, the science experiment for him or herself, it will work the same for
that person as it does for anyone.
So when you do it for yourself, when you do the demonstration or the experiment for yourself,
you have it, you understand it in a way that no one can take from you.
No one can influence your opinion about it because you did it for yourself.
And this is what I like to call the passion beauty and joy of science.
As near as anybody can tell, the PB and J, near as anybody can tell the stuff, this information
exists outside of us, doesn't matter who doesn't, doesn't matter who tries it.
Comes out the same and that's what's, or if it goes wrong, it goes wrong in the same
way for everyone at the same point.
And that's the beauty of it, that's the wonderful nature.
So if you're a science educator, one of the things you got to do is let the students,
the student, the viewer, fool around with it for him or herself.
And once they do that, nobody can change it.
I mean, there it is.
It's cool.
One of the things that happens on your program though is you've got a lot of people doing
things.
Are there times when it doesn't work or the wrong thing happens?
Things go horribly wrong, yes.
Oh yeah.
There's a couple of things about that.
First of all, we have shown things going wrong a few times.
We've shown problems in the pressure show, we're trying to get this, turn this glass of
water upside down, then turn this bucket of water upside down.
And it doesn't work for all.
But the drawback of doing too much of that is it becomes hard to watch.
You just want to change channels.
If things aren't working, if you light the fuse and nothing blows up, it's just not that
interesting.
So you have to limit how much of that you do.
It is instructive to see it go wrong because it shows you that when you try it for yourself
and it doesn't work in first, it's okay.
Keep fooling with it so you get it to work.
And this is how many great discoveries were made by accident, trying one thing and finding
something else.
Do you find a fair amount of your programming tends to drift toward what we conventionally
think of as environmental issues?
Well, yeah, I guess.
Absolutely.
And the reason is, the show is, the shows rather are grouped basically three ways.
What people would call physical science, which would be physics and chemistry.
Life science, which is biology, and half of the life science shows are about the human
body.
And then the third category is planetary science, which for me includes astronomy and earth
science.
So whenever you're going to study the earth, you're pretty much going to run into an environmental
issue immediately.
You can't go very far in earth science without coming across something that has to do with
the environment.
And that raises the interesting question.
It's hard to deal with the earth and the environment without running into issues that people
feel pretty passionately about on opposite sides of the fence, whether it be climate change
or whether it be genetically engineered crops or what have you.
How do you deal with that kind of issue?
Well, yeah, as they say, just try to show the science.
Don't try to show too many opinions, show the science.
And for example, here's a show that might have been controversial.
It's the wetland show, which is one of our most popular shows.
People, we got a letter, we got a letter from a law firm that wants to use the show in
their presentation about something or other.
But you can show or you can demonstrate very easily that it's actually cheaper to preserve
wetlands and let the wetlands soak up the flood than to develop the wetland and create
all these human-made flood control systems, you know, wears and channels and stuff.
And you can show that very easily.
That's so you can say that that's having a political opinion or you could say it's good
science.
I mean, so we, I guess now and then we take a stand on stuff, but not that much.
And the other thing that's just not that hard to figure out is that if everybody throws
away an aluminum can, pretty soon you're going to have a bunch of aluminum cans lying around.
If you have 250 million, include Canada, you have 300 million people throwing cans out
the window, let's say one can a week.
It doesn't take long at all to have what we would like to call billions and billions of
aluminum cans all over the place.
And that would be bad.
I mean, a frightening world buried in cans.
Well, not buried in cans, but it's just wasteful.
It's, first of all, they're unsightly, of course.
But the amount of energy needed to make an aluminum can from scratch, from boxite or is
about nine times greater than the amount of energy it takes to make it from an old can.
Because a boxite, the reduction of aluminum takes electricity.
It's the metal.
You don't melt it down.
You zap it down.
So that's just an example.
So is that having an environmental opinion, is that being a crazed, irrational environmentalist
or is that just science?
I don't know.
Okay.
You tell me.
I'll tell you it's both.
Since we're on the environmental side of the fence, why?
Well, I mean, there's no question there.
The thing is that, as I like to say, the people say, we have to save the earth.
We have to preserve the earth.
The earth's going to be fine.
Whether or not humans are here to enjoy it is the question.
So our goal, my goal in the show, would be to point out, to make it clear that humans
are part of the ecosystem.
Humans are part of the environment.
We're not a separate, unnatural thing.
And beavers build dams and they change things.
Humans build all kinds of things and change things.
So we just have to do it in a way that lets us to continue our species to pass our genes
on, not wipe ourselves out.
The earth will be here whether or not we manage to do that.
And indeed, we have, on a number of times, covered the issue of fire on the environmental
show.
And there are ecosystems that now clearly were managed by humans with fire long, long before
Europeans hit the U.S.
So you were right.
It hit North America, let's say.
Hit the North America.
People have been here for a long time.
Tell me, your show moves very rapidly.
And for those of us that grew up before the TV and internet generation, do you have any
sense of how much the kids come out with when it's over or the viewer?
How do you test for that?
While we do focus group research, in fact, that's part of our funding from the U.S.
National Science Foundation requires that we do research to see how well the show is
being received.
And it's doing it does very well.
Repetition is very important.
Humans are very important.
And what you show has to be compelling.
The big thing for people who say to me, well, the show goes so fast, doesn't have to be
so fast.
And I just tell you, it's not for you then.
If you don't like it, don't watch it.
But it's very successful for kids.
And the example I give you is watch yourself no matter how old you are.
Next time you're at the dentist office, at the doctor's office.
And you're reading those magazines.
And I say reading.
You're enjoying those magazines.
Watch how fast you flip pages.
You flip pages at way faster than you can read them.
You just step, step, step, and you don't think that's a big deal.
So when television does that, it's not a big deal either to a modern viewer.
But if you grew up at a time, and I did too, or television was so cool, was so fascinating,
was so compelling, you just couldn't take your eyes off it, no matter how slowly things
were happening on television.
That's you're just not used to watching television that way.
And the other thing I give you an example is somebody who has a remote control.
Watch how fast you change the channel.
You change the channel.
You go click, click, click.
I don't want to watch that.
I don't want to watch lifetime.
I don't want to watch the woman's network.
I don't want to watch CNN.
I don't want to watch headline news.
I don't want to watch the chainsaw channel.
You go click, click, click, click faster than I can say it.
And then you settle on something that you want to watch.
So our show does that for you.
Okay.
I can tell you if you don't like it, then don't watch it.
Bill, what do you think the parents ought to be doing?
And give their kids a better appreciation of science and perhaps to prepare them to get
wisdom from you as a click spy.
The big thing I tell people is don't think you have to have all the answers.
If you're a parent, if you come across something you don't know, let's look it up.
Let's figure it out.
Let's write it down, put it in the refrigerator, figure it out later.
And many things don't have all the answers.
And the second thing is I always tell people, go ahead and try it.
Just try it.
And as I say, make a mess and then clean it up.
Make cleaning up the mess part of the process.
Part of it all is the wonder of it.
The wonder of science, the wonder of nature.
How do you convey that?
Say it again.
Say how do you convey that, the notion of the wonder of it all.
I can't think about it.
That's how I do it.
I mean, if you actually, I tell people, if you stop and think what it means, that the
earth goes around the sun, held in orbit by this invisible force called gravity, that
also makes your pants hang straight down.
That's astonishing.
That every particle of your pants is being pulled down by the earth.
And every particle of the earth is being pulled by the sun.
And the sun is pulling on the earth.
And the sun is pulling on your pants.
If you can actually stop and absorb that, more power to you.
Because every day, you just think to myself, that is astonishing.
Okay.
Well, I'm afraid we have to pause while I pull up my trousers.
My guests has been, sir, an author of the television program, Bill Nye, a science guy.
If you've got comments about what he has said, give us a call.
Our number is 1-888-49-Green.
We have been talking green.
And I'm Peter Burley.
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As you heard, Bill Nye, the science guy, say, the key to getting kids interested in science
in the Environment is making experiments fun through hands-on experiences.
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, there's a high school program that does just that.
Through what's called the Penny Pack Initiative, high school kids plant trees in local neighborhoods
and learn how trees stop erosion and improve air and water quality.
The program runs from June 29 through August 9 during the summer vacation.
Students applying to the program sponsored in part by some federal agencies belong to
the Abraham Lincoln High School Horticultural and Environmental Academies.
Reporter Glenn Busby recently spoke with four people who were involved in the project.
Danny Micah is program director for the Philadelphia High School Academies Inc.
Fred Suffian is environmental planner with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Joe Bartlett is a senior teacher at the Environmental Technology Academy at Lincoln High School.
And Ruth Charles is a student at Lincoln High who participated in the program.
Ruth, you know, this is normally a time when you'd be out for summer vacation and things
like that.
We're just kind of curious about your interest in taking part in this program.
Did you tell us about that?
Well, I wasn't really really know what the program was about when I first started.
But once I started during the program, I really wasn't impressed on how things were going
on how we were finding how we could improve the sewer sheds in the schools area.
I learned a lot of things from doing this program.
I learned a lot of trees and how I could take data and put into the computer and how I
could give us just a sense of what would happen in 10 years or 20 years and what happens.
And I thought that was really good and how we could help up the school's neighborhood.
And this summer we're going out into the neighborhoods and the action people if they want trees
to help improve the water.
Basically, we're trying to explain to them the way the water flows.
We're trying to stop the pressure of the how water flows and by doing that we could plant
more trees.
We're asking people if they want trees and for their property or on the sidewalks.
Is this something that you were interested in before you got into the program or?
No, this is something I got interested in when I started when I got into it last year.
But I started last year.
This is my second year.
Are there other environmental issues that you are concerned with, though?
I think this could help the air because tree does give oxygen.
It could really benefit the person that's getting the tree because they can save them energy
from not using their air conditioners all the time.
And I guess it could protect their house too also in that point.
Is there any chance that this might influence you into going into a career in environment?
Yes.
I'm thinking about going into a career of environmental business.
Joe, does this program that you're involved in now differ from other science programs
that you've done or environmental programs?
Well, this particular program, we have heard of the program here, the environmental
technology academy here at Lincoln High School.
I'm not so sure there's no other one like in the country.
It's a high level vocational technical program.
Vocational program is correct, but it's one that requires the students to remain in the
college track.
Most vocational classes kind of exclude college because they don't have time to get on
the college track courses.
But our students come in extra period of day and so upon graduation, they take a double
period each day of environmental technology for three years, 10th, 11th and 12th grade.
So upon graduation, they have the best of both worlds.
If they wish to go to work directly in some related field in the environment, they have
excellent training and they're prepared to go entry level plus two, which is what
I'm told by the employer.
But if colleges are preference, they have remained in the college track and they can
go into college.
And indeed, majority of our students do go into college.
Now since this environmental approach that we take does involve an awful lot of work
with the negative side, the super fun side has man and so forth.
We do emphasize we call the positive side when that is the streams and the environments.
And we are fortunately, specifically located next to a beautiful seven mile long park system
in Philadelphia.
And we are able to get out and use that as kind of like a living laboratory.
In fact, we've just got back from having spent the morning down in the park, we're moving
some invasive species and rebuilding an erosion control.
So this particular program, some of the one involved in the trees, fit in very nicely
with our overall program and the students can certainly see the benefit from it and it's
really worked out quite nicely for us.
So we've just second year involved in this.
Would this be considered a pilot program for more children to get involved in environmental
issues?
Well, it could be a pilot program, but at least based on the interest that it develops
to the number of visitors that we should receive from around the world, I don't sure how
many have modeled after it because so many of the does require extra work on the part
of the children.
They do have to have to come an extra period early in the morning and fit it in.
We'd like to think of it as a model and it does offer both.
It's a model requires a lot of logistical cooperation, but we have an awful lot of interest
and all other people say how great it is and some have a temper to model it to some extent.
But I'm not sure any have been able to do it to the degree that we have.
Yeah, it sounds like you've been real successful.
I was curious from Fred and then Connie, if this is seen as a real effective way for teaching
young people about environmental issues, if the EPA, the government plans on trying to
go ahead and implement more of these type programs around the country.
I'd say absolutely.
The program that I work in in EPA is the non-point source pollution control program.
The cornerstone of that program is education and technical assistance, which differs from
the traditional EPA program, which is basically enforcing clean water and clean air laws.
The program is a fairly small program, but everyone realizes that the future to environmental
protection is really educating the young people and getting them to be stewards and getting
them to be champions of the environment.
The people that are going to be running the country 10 and 20, 30 years from now, essentially
the program that we're all invested in here and talking about today is unique in the
fact that it's really hands-on.
And I think that's how we're keeping the students' interests and getting more students
to be interested because not only are we talking about it in the classroom and doing calculations,
we're using the latest in technology and computer technology, which can branch out into
a whole host of careers, but also we're having hands-on activities where the students actually
go out or do in community service.
They're building a better relationship with the neighborhood and ultimately we're
planning trees, so they're actually getting environmental technology skills, computer
skills, horticultural skills, and even developing better social skills and able to, you know,
better relating with older adults and even a lot of senior citizens that live in this
surrounding neighborhoods.
And we definitely think this is kind of like the way to invest.
And I just want to add to what Fred said, the Philadelphia High School Academy's ink
is a private, independent intermediary organization.
We have 11 different career areas in addition to environmental technology and we start it
way back in 1969 and, you know, we always had as an idea to link businesses with the schools
and another unique feature other than the hands-on that Fred mentioned is the idea that
we have people like Fred, the EPA, environmental law firms, environmental businesses that
really help to set the tone of the program.
That was reporter Glenn Busby talking with four participants in the Penny Pack Initiative,
a program designed to educate high school kids about science and environmental issues.
The program is operated through the Abraham Lincoln High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Thanks for being with us in this week's Environment Show.
I'm Peter Burley.
President Clinton wants to ween us from coal and oil.
Comet tales may have clues about how life began and fish hawks seem oblivious to all of
this.
You could get the cosmic significance by ordering a copy of the show, number 504, called
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The Environment Show is a national production which is solely responsible for its content.
Helen Shartock is executive producer, Stephen Westcott is producer, and the show is made
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Be good to the earth and join us next week for the Environment Show.
