On a crisp late-January morning in 2001, I’m on my way to Paul Martin’s ranch in southern Sonoma County, California. The ten miles from Petaluma (a city of about fifty thousand) to Martin’s ranch, and the ten from there to the coast, traverse rolling grassy hills, dotted with stands of oak, bay, and buckeye. Dairy and sheep-ranching country. I bicycle here sometimes, and the endless undulations are familiar. These hills know only two colors, golden brown and green. Since it’s winter, the land is emerald.
Past Two Rock Presbyterian Church, large cardboard “STRAW” signs mark the ranch’s driveway. I park by an open structure sheltering 10- or 12-foot-high stacks of hay bales. Laurette Rogers, director of STRAW (Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed), greets me. “Listen to the meadowlarks!” she exclaims. “I don’t recall ever seeing so many here.”
From where we’re standing, Stemple Creek’s route through the pastureland is easy to trace by the lines of willows, interspersed with oaks, extending several feet on either side of the creek. The foliage is high and thick at the east end of the property, where STRAW did its first planting in 1993. Farther west, where the students will be planting today, it thins out considerably. “When we came for our first planting,” Rogers says, “I didn’t realize that that was the creek. It looked more like a drainage ditch.”
The day’s workers, fourth- and fifth-graders from Lagunitas and Wade Thomas Schools, arrive. I had envisioned big yellow school buses, but a line of sedans, station wagons, and SUVs, driven by parents, pulls in. About forty kids pile and run to climb the hay bales. “Off, right now,” yells Rogers. “We’ve been doing these projects for years without any injuries, and we’re not going to have the first one today.” Later she confides, “When I’m in the classroom, I’m very mellow. Out here, I get intense.” Her carefulness is one reason Paul Martin trusts STRAW on his property.
Rogers directs the students’ eyes to the lush growth in the original planting. “See those trees? The sprigs you’re planting today will be that tall by the time you’re in high school.” The students pull calf-high rubber boots over their shoes and line up for work gloves. They’re divided into groups of four, each accompanied by a teacher or parent. Each team is issued a heavy digging bar, about six feet long and an inch in diameter, with one pointed end. After a final reminder, “Last chance to use the portable toilet,” students, parents, and teachers trek across a muddy field to the creek. They’re led by Boone Vale, a staffer from Prunuske Chatham, Inc., a design and construction firm specializing in restoration that is overseeing today’s restoration. Staff members from Prunuske Chatham and STRAW have already been out to the worksite, to lay temporary board bridges across the creek and double-check that Paul Martin’s electric fences are turned off. On the other side of a barbed wire fence, a herd of Holsteins turns its full attention to the noisy newcomers.
The creek is three or four feet wide, a few inches deep, down 2-foot embankments. The Prunuske Chatham workers have placed flags at the places they chose for planting the willows. Boone Vale shows the students how to use the digging bars, three or four people at a time, pounding them into the ground, wiggling them around, pounding again, until they’ve dug a narrow hole a couple of feet deep. He hands out 3-foot-long willow sprigs, a half-inch in diameter, cut from trees on the property. He shows the students how to tell which end is “up,” how to plant them and tamp down the earth. Recent rains have left the ground soft, making digging and planting easier. The children invent songs and chants to accompany themselves as they take turns with the digging bars. They work for about ninety minutes, break for lunch, then get back to work. By the time they leave, they’ve planted more than three hundred willow sprigs.
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STRAW originated in 1992 at Brookside School, about twenty-five miles north of San Francisco, where Laurette Rogers taught fourth grade.
She had showed her class a National Geographic film on rainforest destruction. “It was filled with haunting music and pictures of chainsaws,” recalls Aaron Mihaly, a fourth-grader in 1992 and later a member of Harvard’s class of 2005. A depressing discussion about endangered species followed, until one student raised his hand. “But what can we do?” “I looked into his eyes,” says Rogers, “and somehow I just couldn’t give him a pat answer about letter writing and making donations.”
Because Brookside School had recently made a commitment to environmental project-based learning, Rogers had the flexibility to propose to her class that they choose and design a project around which to organize lessons. She turned to Meryl Sundove, a trainer for a now-defunct California State Adopt-A-Species Program. Rogers gave her a couple of criteria: she wanted the species to be local, and she wanted it to be obscure, to counter the bias toward beautiful and charismatic species being the most worth saving. Sundove suggested a trout, a salmon, and the California freshwater shrimp, Syncaris pacifica (about the size of a child’s little finger), now found only in fifteen creeks in Marin, Sonoma, and Napa Counties. The students voted for the shrimp, but they weren’t enthusiastic. “We didn’t expect to like it,” Rogers says.
In retrospect, “the shrimp were perfect,” says Aaron Mihaly. “We weren’t joining someone else’s campaign to save a distant cuddly animal. No one had ever heard of them, so we had to use our creativity to interest other people. They fit our image of ourselves…we were just a little fourth-grade class. If we didn’t work on them, no one else was going to.”
Meryl Sundove offered Rogers the key: “Pick any species. Go into depth about its life. Find out all about it, and you’ll fall in love with it.” The class did. They found that the shrimp are beautiful, almost transparent creatures. The males are up to 1-1/2 inches long, the females up to 2-1/2 inches long, with rust-colored spots. They’ve been in local creeks since the time of the dinosaurs (a fact the fourth-graders loved). They are the creeks’ garbage collectors, feeding on dead and decaying plant material. Because they are terrible swimmers, they must cling to riparian roots in order not to be washed away.
Rogers learned an important lesson the first year. Most people think that nine- and ten-year-olds need to see immediate payoffs. But her students worked for six months on the shrimp before they ever saw one. (When they did, “There was this big, ‘Ahhh.’ You’d think they had seen a movie star.”) They kept focused even after learning it would probably take fifty to a hundred years for the restorations to have a significant impact on the shrimp’s habitat. They talked about taking their grandchildren to see their work, and telling them, “We did that.”
Rogers refused to predigest material for her students. She gave them original scientific papers on the shrimp; each forth-grader was responsible for understanding and accurately reporting the most important information from one to two pages of a paper, including figuring out the scientific jargon. Students analyzed the data for each of the fifteen creeks where the shrimp live. They worked in class two hours a week, but frequently put in more time on weekends or after finishing other lessons. Other classroom lessons kept coming back to the shrimp—shrimp drawings during art lessons; shrimp poems, songs, and fairy tales during language arts sessions.
The students learned that shrimp are threatened primarily because of habitat destruction around the streams where they live. Dairy, beef, and sheep ranches are the agricultural mainstays of west Marin and Sonoma Counties. The students discovered that the shrimp habitats were pressured by the damming of creeks, petroleum and chemical runoff, manure in the water, and sedimentation from soil erosion cause by stock trampling the creek banks and grazing the foliage that could otherwise stabilize the soil. It wasn’t just cows, though. It was also off-road vehicles, and dumping of trash, and damage by potato farmers. And it wasn’t just the shrimp that were affected. They turned out to be one strand of a web that includes trees, grasses, aquatic insects, songbirds, creeks, estuaries, and the entire San Francisco Bay. The students began to understand the “shrimp problem” as a watershed problem.
They learned that Native Americans used to eat the shrimp, which are now so rare that no one, including scientific researchers, can even touch one without a permit. They also saw the story of how “their” shrimp was repeated over and over again for other endangered species. (The only other known Syncaris species, Syncaris pasadenae, became extinct when the Rose Bowl was built over its entire habitat in the early 1920s.)
The class chose to focus on Stemple Creek, one of the most deteriorated, which flows from the hills of Petaluma, through about ten miles of cattle ranches, before passing into Estero de San Antonio. They made presentations to meetings of the local Resource Conservation District and the Stemple Creek/Estero de San Antonio Watershed Program. Liza Prunuske, co-founder of Prunuske-Chatham, introduced the class to Paul Martin. He was concerned about erosion, and wanted to improve his pasturage, but he also remembered the Valley quail he had grown up with and hoped to see them again on his land. However, he didn’t know if he wanted a lot of fourth-graders running around on his property or environmentalists descending on him and dictating how he could run his business. As he tells the story, “I wasn’t sure what they were up to. Then Laurette told me that she had told her students to imagine what it would be like if someone came into your bedroom and said, ‘From now on, you can’t get anything out of your closet—none of the toys, clothes, or anything.’ You can imagine the kids saying, ‘But that’s our property, what do you mean?’ Then Laurette told the kids that’s how unfair it would be if they went to the rancher and started telling him what to do. After I heard that story I knew would be all right, and we started working together.”
Martin, now coordinator of environmental services for the Western United dairymen, had another goal. He wanted “citified people” to know what his life was like. When the class came to his ranch, he brought out milk and ice cream, and reminded the students where they had come from. He helped them understand the economic pressures on family farmers, workdays that begin at 2:00 a.m., and why ranchers sometimes don’t have the time or money for restoration work that they would like to do. “See that man?” he once asked a group of students who had come to a ranchers’ meeting. “He’ll be eating beans tonight. Five nights a week, that’s all he can afford.”
In March of 1993, the class did its first planting on the Martin ranch. Martin had already fenced off part of the creek, to keep the cattle from returning and undoing the work. The class planted willows and blackberries along the creek banks. “In our area, you get more bang for the buck with willows than anything else,” says Rogers. “Students can see results. In four months, the sprigs they plant will have branches three to four feet long. In two years, they’ll look like little trees. They stabilize the soil. They provide shade to cool the water and reduce evaporation. Birds nest in them, and bring in seeds of other trees like alders and oak.”
Students have returned to Stemple Creek every year since. The first plantings are now a tall, dense growth that blocks sight of the creek. Five years after the first plantings, the Valley quail, which Martin remembered from his childhood, came back. Songbirds are nesting in the trees. And, to everyone’s surprise, California freshwater shrimp—which were not expected to reestablish themselves for decades—had migrated downstream by 1999 and begun clinging to the roots of willows planted by students six years earlier. It’s many years too early to know whether the shrimp will establish long-term residence at the restored sites, multiply, and eventually be rescued from their endangered status, but the results from the first few years are encouraging.
* * *
For the Brookside fourth-graders, the natural ecology of shrimp, cattle, willows, and streams overlapped with the social ecology of schools, agricultural economics, politics, and conflict resolution. Their “let’s help a species” project eventually evolved into STRAW, a network of teachers (eighty to a hundred in three dozen schools), students, parents, ranchers, businesses, public agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and foundations. Since 1998, approximately 9,000 students have participated in 145 STRAW restorations on rural and urban creeks. They have planted approximately 15,000 native plants and restored more than seven miles of creek bank.
The first year’s project didn’t end with doing one planting. The fourth-graders wrote letters to government officials, testified at hearings before local government bodies and Congressional committees, addressed educational conferences, and [raised] a total of $100,000 for shrimp protection.
The project gained an ally when the Center for Ecoliteracy (CEL), then a new foundation, became a sponsor. “The Shrimp Project was an ideal model of an integrated curriculum,” says Fritjof Capra, CEL co-founder. “Lessons were organized around an issue kids were passionate about. They developed ecological values out of firsthand experience. They got excited about shrimp, which led them to learn about the problems caused by cows. They had to take into account ranchers’ ideas. To write letters to City Hall, they had to learn to spell well.”
“The Shrimp Project was like a pebble thrown into the water,” Laurette Rogers writes at the end of The California Freshwater Shrimp Project, her book on the project. “It did many things we did not know it would do. It touched many people we did not know it would touch. As for the students, then-fourth grader Megan summed up her work on the project, “I think this project changed everything we thought we could do. I always thought kids meant nothing. I really enjoyed doing this, it was fun and I felt like our class just knew exactly what to do. I feel that it did show me that kids can make a difference in the world, and we are not just little dots.”
Michael K. Stone is Senior Editor for the Center for Ecoliteracy. Excerpted by permission of Sierra Club Books from Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World, copyright (c) 2005 by Collective Heritage Institute." To read more, visit the Bioneers Store. For more on STRAW, visit The Bay Institute.
