 the university campus. In the middle of the city, we also are in a school where 90% of the entire play space outside is asphalt, virtually an urban desert. So we're going to re-sculpture part of the shape of the land now. First of all, we're going to take some dirt out of here. This pond has to be a little bit wider. Just do a little bit of excavation here. Some of that will be used as fell on the bottom of the pond because it's a little too deep right now. Then we'll be taking some of this leaf mold and spreading it out here and over there where the redwood grove is going to be. And it has a first priority anyway. So the kids will be able to come out here and plant their seedlings. So a lot of change. A lot of people working pretty hard without much money trying to make a learning ground out of a playground. No education. We're talking about everything that is connected to everything else. That is, the total environment is a reflection of life. And education should be part of that concept, including the very important emphasis of changing social habits and attitudes of people. And that's been one of the severe problems of our country and throughout the world. We all know about that. This kind of dramatic change of an outdoor environment, of an unused space such as school play yards, this can be done in any community. The change of behavior of children has been incredible. But also, listen for different sounds, use your sense of smell. And in a while, we'll stop up here and taste a few different things, feel the texture of some of the different types of bark, so forth, on the various trees. As we go along, if you see anything that you want to touch, reach out and touch it. As you come through here, I want you to see how the bark on this tree feels. And then we'll contrast that with a tree with a slew of the bark and perhaps one with a rougher bark. You can't eat them. The young tender leaf and the bulb part is edible. Someone like to taste a little piece of water high, sir? OK, left side powder, please. See what it tastes like. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. OK, here I have one. OK, hold what you got. All right. You still want to go ahead? All right, the part that we would eat, of course. And it is recommended if you're going to eat it, that they must be cooked. They tell me fried is the most tasty this way. The young tender leaf and the bulb part. The inside of this bulb part is sort of like the life reserves that you're wearing. This is what enables the hyacinths to float all over the place. Because they don't have roots that will go all the way to the bottom. They did, and they can be easily controlled. So they sort of got their own free hand as to where they can go. Would anybody like to try a piece? Just so you know, it could taste worse, right? Tastes OK to me. Anybody else? Now hold it so it won't bite you. Just look inside what I'm holding open, right in here. You see the babies in there? Oh, yeah. They're nursing from the mother inside there. They're not going to come out for about three months all together. And they're only about maybe three quarters of an inch long. But when they're born, you can hold 16 baby possums in a teaspoon. That's really small. Can you see back there? Oh, real little. Yeah, and the possum's the only marsupial who has a pouch in this country. It's the only one. Almost all the rest are found in Australia. Tom, let's talk later. He's blue. Son, pick the one up from the ground. And pull him up over your eye. Pick up on your teeth. So sucky. Wait him back. He's smooth. He's smooth. He's smooth. Look at that. He's red. He's red. Look at that. He's red. He's red. I like this. I like the way he's got it. I don't know why. I don't know why. I don't know why. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I like it from the back of the rail. I see it as a red one. Wait a minute. What does it feel like? It's slimmery. Slimmery and cold? What it was, it's slimmery. I never took a bath by a deer. I never put it in animals before. Like a deer. A deer and stuff like that. Getting a whole snake's alligator. Here you can see him close up. He can feel him and touch him. It's more fun than you do at school. What we're going to do now is see how many different sounds we can hear. See how much we can identify that we hear. So I want you to listen to the wind in the leaves. I want you to listen for birds, insects. Maybe you can hear lizards running through the leaves. But let's be perfectly quiet. And each one of us see how many different things we can hear. Atlanta starts around 6 in the morning and doesn't end until around 11 at night. And even then it's loud. And it's just a constant problem with us. I'm Annette Cook. I'm 15 years old. I'm a student at Grady High School in Atlanta, Georgia in the Environmental Studies Project. I'm doing a project on noise pollution in Atlanta. Noise is a big problem in Atlanta because it is a growing city. And you have all forms of transportation and building and construction sites. This type of thing that raise the noise level is a great deal. What are you doing? Taking sound level readings of traffic. Oh, the noise of the city? Yeah. City noises. Traffic noises as downtown is compared with maybe outside of town, some other place like that. And I'm using a sound level meter. It's pretty high quality. And most of the readings have been between 70 and 80 decibels except like when a truck comes by or a bus and then it can get over 80, between 80 and 90 decibels. Is it hurting our ears? You wasn't for too long. It could. It just don't stand out in the cold. And it doesn't begin to hurt until it's above 130. But you can be affected by it below that. And it's not crazy at all to go around and see how loud it is because the people in the businesses sometimes don't realize how loud it is or they don't pay too much attention to it. So people like me don't go out and do it. Nobody will. Noise is a problem, but it doesn't have to be a problem of such a great degree that it is. Because there are ways to muffle jackhammers. You connect power with noise. And the less loud something is, you say, well, it's not working as well. But this isn't true, but it's just the way people have been brought up. So until people become aware that noise is a problem, they're not going to try to make cars quieter or airplanes quieter or trains quieter. But it doesn't have to be as loud as it is. If I can talk to people about what I've done and about what I hope to find, then it gets them interested sometimes. And I can talk to them about things that they can do to maybe help the noise problem if I find it in that certain place. It is a problem. And most of the times they will listen, whether they can do anything about it at that particular time or not, it's up to them. But still, I help other people become aware of noise as a problem. Trains going by now and airplanes overhead. And this is a supposedly quiet residential area in Atlanta. But it's not any quieter than maybe downtown Atlanta or maybe around 10 decibels quieter. So there's no place to escape. Well, that's the pain threshold. And if you're listening to a rock band or something, and they get up higher than that, you can physically feel it. I think if I get enough people interested and they in turn get enough people interested, then maybe we can change some public attitudes about noise so that if the people demanded enough, then companies, airplanes, airports, this type will cut down on their noise levels. And they can do it. And there are ways they know how to do it, but as long as people don't want it, they're not going to do anything about it. And I think that I hope that I can help change some attitudes about that and then maybe get enough people up so that we can do something about it and reduce the noise in Atlanta. At the present time, we know less about San Francisco Bay than we do about the Baltic Sea, and it's obvious to everyone the pressures on our bay are far greater. So we managed to formulate a program which would involve bringing students to a marine station, which is now located at Point Melotti, where they would receive training and the various methods used by governmental agencies, local agencies for testing water quality and for assessing the populations of various animals. The end result of this being done by a series of schools would form a baseline or profile of what the bay is like so that any changes in the future could be compared against it. Now, in San Francisco Bay, not all of the animals that live out there swim in the water. We aren't going to catch everything in the net. We named some animals earlier like worms and clams and certain types of shrimp and crabs. Where do they live? Under rocks. Under rocks and where else? Now, out there where they are, it's muddy. In the mud. Yeah, in the mud. So when we do surveys, we have to some way survey the mud that's underneath the water here. Okay, to take a sample of this, we use what we call a bio-core sample. You carry this up to the mud. Take this cork out. There goes your watch. Ah, my fear stuck. Wait a minute. Okay. Oh, God. Now what? Now what? Now pull it up. Okay, now bring it towards shore. Now somebody can bring that hand down to us. Bring it right down here. Might not be no mud. Set it right down here. And shake it up and down. Well, there are several things operating here with students. One is you can get them involved in the actual collection of data and an assumption that I'm making is that one's behavior is predicated upon knowledge. And to many of the students that come here, they learn about the environment by going out. They see things they didn't see before. Okay, the third and final survey that we're going to do today is what we call a rocky intertidal survey. Now, for the animals that live under the rocks, we couldn't very well use that core sample that we used earlier, right? A little lift about. So what we're going to do is be looking underneath the rocks. We're going to turn some over carefully. Look underneath and see what we can find. First off, what side of the rocks did the algae grow on? Top or bottom? Top. If we turn it upside down after we're done looking, what's going to happen to the algae? It's going to die. Yeah, it's not going to get sunlight. And the animals that live underneath may dry out. So be very careful when you lift up a rock that you replace it exactly the same way as you found it. Okay, without crushing anything underneath. You have to learn to look, to see. And one of the things we're trying to have students realize is that if they look and can see their opinions, their feelings will be changed. And hopefully, if they learn to respect these organisms, to take a look and realize what's around, when people say certain types of things, like a lowly snail is dying, and that it is an important thing. There's pure science being taught, but we're also trying to get at feelings by training the students by having them monitor what are called field stations or bodies of water along this riverbed complex to collect data, to have students do this at various schools and put it together in an organized way to actually generate some good hard data on the bay. One of the things we're doing here is to work with the students so that as they grow older and assume more responsibilities, they will care enough about their environment that the immediate pressures of life can be put aside occasionally so that they will render some decisions that are what I would call environmentally sound. For their future, the future of their children, et cetera. Maybe the world can be saved. He can work just about anywhere where there's a home that needs some kind of attention that has not been given to it. It's just like a child that needs to be loved and given some attention where it is not given. And the community will smile about it more or less in front. We're giving the students of John Adams High School a chance to learn a little bit about carpentry and remodeling homes. It was a condemned home due to two reasons. One, because of the conditions that it's in, there are many factors in it like crack plaster and holes in the walls and many things that weren't up to code and so forth that have to be. The plumbing's bad, the electrical work is bad and the paint is chipped and so forth and it just has to be done. The students of the class are in school approximately half of the day, which is about three hours to three and a half hours. And then they're here the other half of the day. And by having a project as such and being able to get away from the school to another environment where we can all get together and work together and make up our minds about what changes we want to do to the house and what we want it to be and draw up an ideal in our own minds what it is to be. It brings out a new feeling and a different type of air to the class itself. Things seem to be one of the greater things they like. Roofing seem to be another. Working with the plumbers and the electricians seem to be another. Hanging the wallpaper was good for about four or five of the students. Attitude-wise, they depend on the skill itself. They change to a like and to a dislike depending on the job, those that have been exposed to it some. I get a kick out of knowing what it was and what it can be and to sit up and look at a home before it's done you sit back and you think well, I don't know what we can do to this place especially before you don't know before you learn anything about the job itself and you sit back and look at it and you just think there's no kind of hope for it then eventually when you get into it you can begin to see it form and you can begin to see it mold and then before you know it, it's together. Go for a little higher there go clean to the ceiling like that because you got brush marks in there you catch that little spot right there see that little tip? but don't wipe it out too good because you can hide a lot of mistakes there yeah, that's a good job and how about scraping them off a little bit more they're in here and let's get these a little bit better and don't get to run that heel on the tile so we can clean that up and leave those spots right in here too to kind of catch them a little bit okay? how are you doing? Young Charles? How do you do it? see these spots right there they're from the fingerprint department can you get to them? to the future of the neighborhood this project brings about many changes in their minds and also in their hearts they think about their children and wanting to have nice things and nice things for the children to have they like to have nice places for the friends to come so remodeling a home brings about a change in the attitudes throughout the street and community I hope that one of the houses that I'm able to do I may be able to get into mountains I like things nice and so do other people from the time I've been old enough to walk I've been up in the mountains and the hills I was made very aware of nature by my parents I'm Ann Weaver and I've taken a major in environmental education through Huxley College it's a self-designed major in environmental education basically I designed it in order to bring together both the ecological aspects of the natural world and the human aspects it's important to me somehow to convey that it isn't just nature it's nature's application to our lives and the way we relate with other people I feel more comfortable when I'm in accord with nature and so in trying to do that I felt that I should live what I believe in and so by incorporating that into a major hopefully I can work through that in some kind of job situation I'm working with the Lummi Indian Tribe on an aquaculture project which is a culturing of oysters and fish and they're most concerned with growing them and improved methods so we're working with them trying to add some of our knowledge and science to their techniques that they've grown up using the culmination of environmental education because we're working with people in relationships and we're working with the outdoors, with nature trying to create a better kind of system for cultural people and their values are just as involved more involved than ours and so we're learning from them not just techniques that they've used but cultural ideas as well that just vacuums pumps it through yeah it just pumps through I'm very impressed with the Lummi's they're the most dedicated people that I've ever met we're also setting up a monitoring system where we keep track of the temperature both the air and the water and the salinity so we can tell as a basis what kinds of systems that the animals grow in that we're working with and we're trying to figure out more about ecosystems in general and increase the understanding of that area in the courses some of the things we use to reach some kind of a further growth is a fantasy exercise where we try and understand where we are what kinds of things we'd like to create in a new society okay we're going to be involved in a fantasy exercise today and we're going to be dealing with the idea of trying to really get into some of the human aspects of what it means to be a participant in this planet because it's really important that you become a full human being as a prerequisite to really getting into dealing with environmental issues environmental problems because if you don't know who you are and where you're at and what you need you're never going to be able to solve any problems so John's going to be reading the setting that we're going to be involved in go ahead John for the next few minutes you're going to share an imaginary journey now these are the circumstances you and the others in your group are standing on an island beach blue water stretching out to the horizon in one direction brown land rising up to nearby hilltops in the other direction now the important part in some way or other all the rest of the people in the world have been destroyed by some catastrophe you and the others in your group are the only people left on earth alive you are entirely on your own so take over now and decide what to do in this situation any notions or any ideas hey what are we going to do I think I think maybe the first thing we ought to start thinking about are just the bare essentials to get us through the next couple of days here I agree what are we going to need we need water yeah we're going to need food and water can somebody know anything about fish because there's a lot of water around here yeah I can get some stuff out of the the reef maybe some fish and maybe some if there are any plants down there we could dig some stuff out out there probably our major problem will be more psychological than physical so I think the first thing we ought to do is start thinking about our minds instead of our stomachs or the tropical area will handle our stomachs fairly well I think you've got a good idea we should probably start just by trying to basically confront in reality where we are really and where we're going and where we can go 30 years have passed you are all now approaching your mid 60s and you are approaching the end of your lives you've raised a generation of people on the island your children and now another generation is coming up and you are the old and wise ones as you die you take with you, as each one of you dies you take with you all that man has known of his past history and so forth and as so far as you know you're the last people on earth so decide what you think it would be important for your society to know I guess I'd say that it's the most important thing that you can do is learn to be yourself and to know yourself and then learn how to trust other people and be honest with them and learn how to love them I think we ought to worry about a little bit the inner relationships what Jim has said about people realizing their full nature and the tragedy and not getting hung up in those same problems of value systems where men can't cry I think that's really important the full expression of people and nature here has been a real big part of that we're dependent upon nature and hopefully we haven't altered it too much and I hope that maybe through just our examples the way that we've we've lived that this is the best thing we can pass on to them as an 805 by a four wheeler the freeway from I really try not to use the automobile as much as possible in fact one of the explicit decisions I made when I moved down into this area was to move to a location where I would be close to work and I wouldn't have to depend on my automobile my name is Eugene Leong and I'm a graduate student in the environmental science and engineering program at UCLA the way the program is presently set up a student enters in after his bachelor's degree or master's after completion of the master's degree he spends about another year and a half taking additional courses that will broaden his background so that he can attack the environmental problems takes courses in the social sciences and he takes courses in cognate fields different than his master's degree courses he then works in an intern program outside of the university either in a government agency or private industry and I'm doing my intern here at TRW working primarily on air pollution problems the project that I'm working right now is developing a mobile source control strategy that will help Los Angeles meet their quality standards as set forth by the Clean Air Act of 1970 I view myself as being in part an experiment and perhaps we do need more broadly based individuals they must have a strong technical background so they can understand the technical nature of the problem and yet at the same time they have to have a very strong economic, legal, political background so they can understand how the real world operates I welcome the chance to apply a lot of the training that I've gotten from the university into this problem and certainly it is a very relevant problem which makes it extremely interesting and here in Los Angeles we have a case now where the maximum technology does not even come close to solving the problem in other words if every car on the road today was as clean as this proposed 1975-76 standards the air pollution problem would still be above the ambient air quality standards in other words regardless of what we do the sheer number of people we have in the basin, the sheer number of gallons of gasoline consumed prohibits us from solving the problem it's an area which is extremely complex and we don't know how to predict what happens when we try to impose strategies which try to change the lifestyles or habits of the people in the basin we don't know how to force people into carpools without having them we don't know how to get people to take public transit or alternative modes of transportation we grow uphill, live in an environment which isn't nearly as polluted you do not clean our problems that have taken 20 or 30 years to build up, you don't clean those problems up overnight if we expect our children to live as we have or our children's children to live we have to change our lifestyles and start conserving many of our resources we're consuming resources at an enormous rate and as people educate themselves more their individual activities will have less of an impact on the environment and they'll be able to influence other people so that their activities will also have less of an impact on the environment and by this type of interaction hopefully we can it sounds very nice but I really mean it, we can do a lot to reverse the present chance of our past generation where we were basically exploiting the environment I think we're just at the beginning you know, within the last decade we're becoming much more aware of our activities impact on the environment and as a result of this awareness we realize that if we don't change our ways that we're going to destroy the environment that we have left in this world and Santa Barbara happened to be one of those beautiful rare places now why should it be engulfed with people more and more people believe me, if you took a vote throughout these United States the people would say save some places you know, save a Yosemite save up some national parks so they're preserved for archonacy save a beautiful coastline there used to be a beautiful horizon line out there there was the ocean and the islands beyond and now there's these vertical things and they're all still in oil on our beaches and that was the thing that turned the corner in the whole ecology movement here in Santa Barbara and we're still turning that corner the situation that Santa Barbara faces is that a major developer a railroad plans to develop a large portion of this coastal area into a hotel convention center a restaurant commercial strip the city lacks a planning department or facilities to really analyze that project the community environmental council is attempting to assist the city in coming up with perhaps more imaginative plans for the area we're very much concerned with the future of this area because it is the last and largest remaining open space in the city traditionally it has been used as a recreational area cross from that area is a neglected area because of the presence of the railroad tracks these tracks will be shifting in approximately three to five years to come into alignment with the freeway and when this is moved the whole area will be developed at a recent meeting we met with developers who wished to put in the hotel in the convention center along with some 25 other organizations you said that this was going to lay the cornerstone for the development of the entire waterfront how does SPAC conceive of this development on the entire waterfront? we think that it's going to be the beginning of development there is no coordinated waterfront development down there now we don't know the results of our hotel we have done economic studies we feel it's going to be successful and if it generates the revenues and the traffic that we expect then future development of our property and other properties in the area will take off from it you're talking about attracting more people from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara I think you've got the whole wrong idea we're trying to stop people coming from Santa Barbara because every time an artist draws a beautiful picture they think that's beautiful they're still living on the old misconception that growth is progress that's basically what it is and that's a lie growth is destruction growth is cancerous I'm talking about here and I'm talking about many many cases in California we don't want to see the city go rampant in growth but when you talk about who are the citizens people who are on the opposite viewpoint are citizens people who are responsible for the city government where there is no tax dollars today are also citizens of the community this city is in desperate need of tax dollars at this time what we need is a negotiator not a conflict of interest and fights but a negotiator who can bring the different points of view together our role in environmental education is in some ways unique we're trying to work on the general education level of the entire Santa Barbara community one of the first projects of the community environmental council was the creation of the El Mirasol polyculture farm which is a 4.6 acre piece of land just three blocks from the business district now push a really critical thing is to get the soil tight around the root system so there isn't a lot of air and a lot of space so you press the soil it'll stand up by itself it's not a problem you gotta dig it really deep so the roots possibly one of the most important aspects of the El Mirasol project and the smaller organic garden is that some of these respond to people's need to actually participate in both creating their own environment and realizing the basic principles of ecology so they experience everything by doing at the El Mirasol and the garden and this is what we think has been at one of the crucial gaps in education especially in environmental education we're seeing classes in the schools become more interested we believe that the response to everybody and that's the whole purpose of the council is to find projects which can cross each boundaries the future of our city in many ways depends on the future consciousness of the people involved how they can learn to determine what kind of environment they wish to live in where the city needs to grow both culturally and physically and where it needs to hold fast in other words it's traditions, maintaining its scale so that people can relate to it as a region can relate to it as a city because this ultimately this feel of scale and relationship is the key in my estimation to an active citizenry this is sort of like a time machine I'm sure you know a little bit about time machines if you've read any science fiction or anything we have built a time machine that cost a lot of money and you're going back somewhere in the 17 and early 1800s on a ship that was very common back then carried all sorts of people and all sorts of material and you'll get an idea of what it was like to travel on one of these to see how the crew functions and to do a little bit of it yourself okay now we'll wrap it when I talked about a cube of sugar that you put in the water shaking around it disappears you know it's in there but you can't see it oxygen does the same thing well how do we get it well let me tell you something here if this was white that would tell us okay buddy you don't have to take a test any further there's no oxygen in the water at all fortunately though it's sort of brownish yellow and that says okay Joe there's some oxygen in there we don't know how much but at least there's some so you better test further to find out how much that's what we're going to do now the one part per million of oxygen what's going to happen here you think how do I know when to stop how many drops you think it's going to take to turn clear all right that will be three parts per million of oxygen all right let's see now you have to shake it in between each drop shake it okay that's good that's good all right so far the water contains at least two parts per million doesn't it you know you'll learn even more from your regular teachers back in school there's a two fold purpose for this ship the main one to show people make them aware of what the Hudson is how it's been made into what it is and where it's going if we don't do anything with it or try to alter it in some way we're all dependent on these waters the Hudson the plankton in it and all the life right on down to the ocean and if we don't start getting aware now humanity as we know it will no longer exist