To:	E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation
From:	Peter Alden
Date:	June 18, 2006
Re:	Biodiversity Education Opportunities.

	The foundation’s Harvard area office is slated to focus on biodiversity education amongst several roles.
	While cognizant of world biodiversity issues and opportunities, I believe the EOWBF should initially focus a portion of our energies on our home country, the U.S.A.
	There is a shocking disconnect with nature amongst our youth (and far too many adults). Natural illiteracy is rampant spawning books like “The Last Child in the Woods”.
Local flora and fauna are rarely taught these days. Biology is ever more the domain of the microscope, the cell, DNA, medicine. Microbiology has usurped Macrobiology (study of living plants, fungi, invertebrates and vertebrates larger than 1 mm.).
	We must reconnect people to nature in their home areas first. Creating naturalists at the local level, using them to inventory local biodiversity (and invasives), and guiding them to invest in ecosystem health and land & water protection over a wider area would be our goal.
	Our challenges might include some of these:
 
Incorporate local biodiversity species and issues into standard state and federal mandated science exams.
	All students would be required to learn 100 plants & fungi and 100 animals of his/her hometown or county in elementary school, 200 of each for junior/middle school, 300 of each for high school. These would be chosen by committee of local naturalists and include commonest, keystone, prettiest, most dangerous, most invasive, endangered. Students would recognize by sight/sound, know 3 key facts about it and its importance. They would write short essays on 5 (ES), 10 (J/M), 15 (HS) local environmental issues.
	Research current presence of local biodiversity species and issues in testing nationwide. Create website (or use Discoverlife) for illustrating those 600+ species selected by town/county nationwide out of roughly 10,000 likely to be selected, and adding key facts. Let each town select its issues from a larger list of topics and add local concerns. Let teachers and students print out paper field guides tailored to their towns for use in class and field. Consider how best to get local biodiversity into curriculums.

Facilitate Nature/Biodiversity Clubs in Schools.
	Junior, middle, and high schools and colleges often have dozens of athletic and special interest clubs from the football team to the French Club. There should also be a Nature or Biodiversity Club that meets after school and on weekend field trips. Search for successful existing ones. Members would focus on learning, seeing and mapping all local visible biodiversity. They would aid any environmental club work days,and encourage members of athletic squads to join weekend and summer activities.
	Mini BioBlitz competitions could be held between Biodiversity Clubs from neighboring schools over a 2-4 hour “game”. Such events might encourage subgroups to really focus on just fungi, ferns, flowers, birds, vernal pools and involve young mammal trackers and fishermen.
Town and Neighborhood Nature/Biodiversity Clubs
	Visitors from the U.K. often ask how to contact our town nature club. We say we don’t have one. Why isn’t there a town nature club and in larger towns perhaps a neighborhood nature club? What can all these newly trained school naturalists join when beyond school? With the biodiversity crisis and invasive alien plant crisis needing more people who care and know, there should be such clubs that work with town DNR heads to update local biodiversity sightings and invasive plant populations in every town. How can we facilitate thousands of new clubs? 

Suitcases of Binoculars & Field Guides
	Many schools force kids to go on nature walks, but few of those kids have field guides and fewer have binoculars. Most schools have 100 balls, 100 computers, 100 microscopes and 10 sets of titles protected in the teacher’s reference room for borrowing.
None have 30 binoculars for borrowing. Without binoculars those kids see nothing. The students in the Biodiversity Club need binoculars. But the schools are all over budget.
	Every school should have 1 or 2 rolling secure suitcases full of close-focusing, waterproof, relatively inexpensive binoculars and local field guides. Each item would be numbered for easy checkout and checkin. The suitcase(s) can be reserved by teachers, the biodiversity club, and individual binoculars can be borrowed for the weekend like a book.
	Each rolling suitcase would have EOWilson Biodiversity Foundation logo and that of the individual(s) and/or local organization(s)/businesses that donated the $2-3000 per suitcase. The foundation organizes the binoculars & books for a fair price and solicits sponsors, no taxpayer money is involved, and the donators get publicity and every student learns how to use binoculars to behold the beauty of birds, butterflies, dragonflies and wild flowers up close. Ten percent will get hooked on nature for life.

Organizing the component species of biodiversity locally and nationally.
	The foundation should review all existing web and paper databases that are organizing the taxonomic skeleton of all classes of life (especially visible) life in the US and Canada. We should review distributional data, such as do we have state, park, watershed, county, town lists. How easy is it to get at, update? What groups of organisms are most neglected in the what/where initially. Every state should have a web-based (and paper?) checklist of all visible organisms broken down by county. From this we can flesh out and refine local distributions via the nature clubs and experts. We then refine identification, habitat, ecology facts via illustrations, text and maps on net and paper.
	A major concern is the lack of coordinated standardized rules for the creation and establishment of useful unique English (common) names for all visible organisms. Much progress has made in standardizing a parallel universe of English names for birds, mammals, herps, fish, butterflies and dragonflies. Little progress has been made in plants, fungi, lichens, mosses, and most invertebrates. There’s 200,000 English names in use for 22,000 US vascular plants! In some smaller insects and spiders with many species and few visible field marks, only a generic or family name may be necessary.
	We should aid the proliferation of electronic and paper field guides to ever more groups of biodiversity at ever smaller geographical and seasonal parameters.
	Our goal should be 100,000,000 people here who know and care about 500 of their local biodiversity species and a dozen ecosystem issues, young and old.