Ivy Merriot
thinks they've all been working hard, so suggests sealskin drums
and moonlit dancing.
Welcome to Footprint Island, an imaginary paradise where four
Montana high school students and a teacher moved to measure their
impact on the environment. More like "Cast Away" than "Temptation
Island," Footprint Island was actually a fantasy island located
at Montana State University-Bozeman for four recent days.
Finkbeiner is a sophomore at Belgrade High School. Mathers is a
junior at CM Russell High School in Great Falls. Cory is a
home-schooled sophomore from Bozeman. Stewart is a junior at
Bozeman High School. Merriot is director of the Montana
Polytechnic Institute in Bozeman.
Footprint Island was represented by brown paper on a blue wall at
the Burns Telecommunications Center (BTC), but it offered hot
springs and plenty of fish. During their first imagined year on
the island, the students grew gardens, built houses, wove baskets
and scavenged for supplies. Merriot inventoried fish and tried to
increase the ones the students liked to eat. She also went rock
climbing and took showers in the waterfalls.
"I never knew all the things that affect the environment and all
the energy it takes to do some things," Mathers commented.
"I'm getting a lot out of it," Cory added. "I'm finding out the
little things I do make a big difference."
That was one point of the exercise, according to John Usher and
other organizers at the BTC. The students went to the island to
measure their ecological footprints and see how their actions
affect the environment.
The purpose was also to help students think more creatively and
find innovative solutions. If you ate Finkbeiner's horse and
turned its hooves into gelatin, for example, would you regret it
when it came time to plow the garden? If your neighbors played
drums and danced all night, would you move to another island?
Would a shovel work as a harpoon?
"You have to think out of the box," Merriot said.
The students collected information on their own to give them a
basis for making those kinds of decisions. Once they got to
Bozeman, they interviewed MSU scientists Lisa Graumlich, Jeremy
Littell, Gil Geesey and Clayton Marlow. They visited a water
purification plant and compared consumer habits at Costco and the
Community Food Co-Op. They watched Tom Hanks' character survive
island life in the movie "Cast Away."
"They actually leaped way ahead of where we expected them to be,"
Merriot said as the week progressed. "This takes quite a
different type of thinking than a 4.0 does."
George Tuthill, who co-authored the grant that made the
experience possible, told the students, "I'm so impressed with
what you are doing. ... Creativity and hard work seems to be the
key here."
Footprint Island was part of a larger program called Base Camp
Earth, said Kim Obbink, BTC director and co-author of the grant
with Tuthill. Free to participants and funded by the National
Science Foundation, Base Camp Earth is bringing four students and
a teacher to MSU three times this school year. Each team and
theme is different, but they all explore a contemporary science
issue. "Life in Extreme Environments" was held in October.
Footprint Island ran from Jan. 23 through 26. The third event
will probably be held in March.
All three sessions--complete with photos, video and story will be
described on the Internet so other students and teachers can
learn from them, Obbink said. Ken Eklund, a web writer who spent
the entire four days with the students, will turn Footprint
Island into a virtual field trip. The complete web site should be
ready in May or June.
"We hope this will be a model for other scientists who have
outreach components to their research," Obbink said.
For more information or to find out how to participate in the
next session of Base Camp Earth, check the web at
http://basecampearth.org.
