Nature a Teacher

Mother nature a great teacher

Local outdoor opportunities for the entire family

By Tammy Marashlian
Signal Staff Writer tmarashlian@the-signal.com December 15, 2008

When it comes to teaching kids about nature, parents can turn a park into a classroom, a park ranger into a teacher and hiking into homework.
By exposing kids to nature as early as possible, children can appreciate the natural world and learn about the environment first hand.
Why nature?
"Teaching them to appreciate nature is really the main focus," said Frank Hoffman, recreations services supervisor and education director at Placerita Canyon Nature Center.
"We want to make sure that we can do everything we can do to get kids into the environment," Hoffman said.
Understanding the environment means kids will understand the importance of recycling and saving energy, he said.
And hiking is a great way to exercise.
"The U.S. is fighting obesity more than any other country in the world," said Dianne Erskine-Hellrigel, president of the Community Hiking Club.
Instead of jogging on a treadmill or riding an indoor bike, Erskine-Hellrigel said families can have fun exercising together by hiking.
Getting outside as soon as possible will reduce what she calls "nature deficit disorder," which is a "complete detachment from anything natural or wild," she said.
The sooner kids are exposed to the natural world, the sooner they will show an interest in helping the environment when they are older, she said.
A different lesson
Interacting with Mother Nature gives kids a different appreciation for the earth and how to treat it with respect as they continue to grow.
Kids can feel the wind on their face, see a hawk flying in the sky and smell the sages of the outdoors, Hoffman said.
"I totally incorporate all the senses when I lead my hikes," he said. "I engage all of their senses from sight and smell to touch."
The experience is also engaging for parents.
"While I think I'm talking to children, I get parents with open ears," he said.
In many instances, Hoffman said parents who visited Placerita Nature Center when they were kids bring their own families.
"I see a lot of grandparents here bringing children," he said.
How to meet nature
The Santa Clarita Valley is home to acres of open space and parks, which serve as perfect locations for families to learn about nature together.
At the Placerita Canyon Nature Center, parents and kids can take part in weekly family hikes, Hoffman said.
Other activities include a weekly animal presentation, beginning birder lessons and a junior ranger program.
Next month, Placerita will bring back its camp fire program where families can learn about nature while sipping hot chocolate and eating snacks.
As junior rangers, kids can learn about everything involving the environment, Hoffman said.
The experience can also teach children how to interact with dangerous animals and plants, Hoffman said.
But with dozens of county and city parks, families have many options of where they want to learn about nature, ranging from Castaic Lake to Vasquez Rocks Natural Area.
Even visiting the farm animals at William S. Hart Park and Museum can introduce kids to undomesticated animals.
"There's a myriad of opportunities," he said.
Erskine-Hellrigel teaches an eco class and hosts hikes for kids frequently.
"They really need to bond with nature," she said.
However Erskine-Hellrigel reminds parents that they need to keep track of their kids when they go hiking.
Other ways include writing an eco journal about what kids spot in the natural world, she said.
No matter what program families participate in, it comes down to just being outside.
"This is better than watching TV," Hoffman said. "This is real life."

From wikipedia…….
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic.
The word nature is derived from the Latin word natura, or "essential qualities, innate disposition", and in ancient times, literally meant "birth".[1] Natura was a Latin translation of the Greek word physis (φύσις), which originally related to the intrinsic characteristics that plants, animals, and other features of the world develop of their own accord.[2][3] The concept of nature as a whole, the physical universe, is one of several expansions of the original notion; it began with certain core applications of the word φύσις by pre-Socratic philosophers, and has steadily gained currency ever since. This usage was confirmed during the advent of modern scientific method in the last several centuries.[4][5]
Within the various uses of the word today, "nature" may refer to the general realm of various types of living plants and animals, and in some cases to the processes associated with inanimate objects–the way that particular types of things exist and change of their own accord, such as the weather and geology of the Earth, and the matter and energy of which all these things are composed. It is often taken to mean the "natural environment" or wilderness–wild animals, rocks, forest, beaches, and in general those things that have not been substantially altered by human intervention, or which persist despite human intervention. For, example, manufactured objects and human interaction generally are not considered part of nature, unless qualified as, for example, "human nature" or "the whole of nature". This more traditional concept of natural things which can still be found today implies a distinction between the natural and the artificial, with the artificial being understood as that which has been brought into being by a human consciousness or a human mind. Depending on the particular context, the term "natural" might also be distinguished from the unnatural, the supernatural, or what is man-made (man-made).
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Nature is a great teacher—her millions of years of evolution is practically a free text book for sustainably designed products and businesses. Janine Benyus calls it “Biomimicry”, which, she explained to a full house at last night’s Entrepreneurs for Sustainability event at Cleveland Institute of Art's Aitken Auditorium, involves engineers, scientists and business leaders learning from plants, animals and sometimes entire ecosystems that display great skill in adapting to harsh conditions or create "products" without burning fossil fuels.
Many, like the conch shell, are masters of self-assembly—gathering calcium carbonate from the sea which reacts with its surface to form (without heat) mother-of-pearl a thousand times tougher than ceramics formed in kilns, Benyus says.
“Cleveland is particularly suited to do biomimicry,” she says, "with twenty-seven universities, NASA-Glenn, the Cleveland Clinic and all of the biological know-how. It’s about seeing a technological world that’s already been created, but maybe just overlooked.”
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University studied the conch shell and mimicked its process to invent an ultra-durable thin film product. A number of the university's materials scientists are working on “biomimetic” applications, including Eric Baer, who developed eyeglasses that don’t curve by studying the thousands of tiny layers that make up an octopus’ eyes. CWRU’s Harirara Baskaran is developing a tank-less scuba mask that is modeled after fish gills, and engineering students are studying cockroaches to develop “biorobotics that will boldly go where no one else will,” Benyus says. At the Cleveland Clinic, researchers are studying the Siberian ground squirrel’s heart and the way it handles hibernation to unlock the mysteries of arrhythmias.
“The real magic act is mimicking a whole ecosystem to make whole economies,” Benyus says. A prairie, for example, is diverse and self-sustaining, so it’s a model for a farm that protects soils, resist its own pests, but with some tweaks, grows food for human consumption (an idea being tested). “Life creates the conditions conducive to life.”
Companies such as CO2 Solution in Quebec City, Canada have discovered a business opportunity in reducing carbon emissions. They studied how organisms capture calcium to produce limestone for the design of a smokestack scrubber that’s an enzyme, carbonic anhydrase, which extracts CO2 from flue gases, creating bicarbonate which can then be stored underground or turned into a range of substances (e.g. baking soda, chalk, limestone).
Architect Mick Pearce collaborated with engineers at Arup Associates to build a mid-rise building in Harare, Zimbabwe that has no air-conditioning, yet stays cool thanks to a termite-inspired ventilation system. The firm Morphotex studied how peacocks change colors to develop its chemical-free “structural color” (completely transparent layers that reflect light to produce color) application.
Locally, Benyus recognized Great Lakes Brewing Co. for mimicking nature’s way of reusing its waste—the brew pub sends its spent grains to local bread maker Zoss and to local pig farmers for bread and pork sold in its restaurant. Cleveland’s efforts to expand on cogeneration or district heating mimics the way trees in a forest spread their waste in the form of fertilizer to shrubs up to half-a-mile away. Benyus noted the Cuyahoga County Energy Task Force’s exploration of wind turbines in Lake Erie will need to solve the issue of ice forming on the tower from waves, and that BioPower Systems is looking at the design of a tuna fish’s tail which has a way of flattening waves and capturing their energy.
Benyus was introduced by Jim Hartzler, VP of Interface, which produces recyclable carpet tiles. Interface consulted with Benyus in the development of a glueless adhesive for their carpets which mimics the incredible stickiness of gecko toes. The importance of an art school hosting Benyus, Hartzler says, is that artists and designers, like biomimics, help us see the world in new ways.