Great Educational Opportunity Lies in Our Own Back Yard
Dear Editor:
The walls of Gulf Specimen are covered with the drawings of children, of sharks, sea turtles, starfish and fish, and notes of appreciation saying how much they enjoyed their visit. Every day school buses roll up, and happy excited children pour out into the pavilion to get an orientation lecture, before heading off to the touch tanks, or going down to the Living Dock and pulling up crab traps, or going out in the marsh and pulling nets to explore the abundance of marine life. There are schools from Leon County, Gadsden, Franklin, Bay and other surrounding counties, but Wakulla County is rarely among them. The reason we're told: there's no money for buses, transportation or the five dollar per student group admission. One teacher had booked ten field trips for her kindergarten classes, and promptly withdrew it, even though the school is only four miles away.
Two decades ago, the Wakulla County school superintendent ordered teachers not to bring their classes to Gulf Specimen Marine Lab. Although the reasons were never stated, I was fighting the development oriented power structure and environmental education was an anathema. It wasn't just Gulf Specimen that was singled out, the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, which also has a good environmental education program, also saw few students from Wakulla. Kids took bus rides to the Jacksonville Zoo, they went to shopping malls in Tallahassee, but never saw Wakulla Springs.
Then the administration changed, teachers were no longer prohibited from bringing their classes to us. However school Superintendent David Miller never once darkened our doors, despite repeated invitations. If he were to come, as I hope he will after reading this, he's likely to see fifty to a hundred happy, excited children picking up hermit crab and live sea shells in our touch tanks, or screaming with delight as the sharks and sea turtles cruise by in the big concrete pools. He would see our walls covered with illustrations, photographs, and text blocks, and hear our staff deliver lectures on marine life. For the little ones, we talk about "Sponge Bob" and "Nemo", for the older ones, we talk about environment and the need to take care of the ocean, to understand the ecosystems, and not to litter which destroys the food chain. For the high schoolers, we talk about the cancer research we're involved with, and how we've provided toadfishes and sponges that were sent into outer space aboard the space shuttle.
Over thirteen hundred schools and research laboratories depend on the specimens that we supply, and over the past forty years over three hundred scientific papers published have been published in referred journals that cite the contributions of Gulf Specimen.
If David were to come, he might meet a teacher from Georgia who has been bringing her elementary school down here for the past nineteen years! She won't mince words, telling him that Gulf Specimen Marine Lab has the best field trip in the region. I could show him the letters that the Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck wrote encouraging me to go on with my vision of starting Gulf Specimen Marine Lab. There are opportunities to teach creative writing, drawing upon our skills as authors who have published books and articles in National Geographic, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated and other magazines.
Hopefully all this might convince him that the kids in our county need to know more about the place they live, the water they drink, the seafood they eat and empower them to protect our rapidly diminishing resources. We must look to the future. If the world's going to survive, it has to depend on kids. Wakulla County has an opportunity with Gulf Specimen, FSU Marine Lab, Wakulla Springs and the St. Marks Refuge to have one of the best environmental education programs in the country. Others travel long distances to see them (we just had a class from Jackson County visit this morning) but for Wakulla schools these could be cheap and easy field trips because they are so close.
We need new minds and ideas to solve the problems facing our society, with new approaches to energy. Students could learn where oil comes from, and how it was generated by the same lipid rich phytoplankton that exists in the ocean today, and how it might one day be farmed to produce petroleum. We would like to tell them about the German scientists who discovered that the snapping shrimp we provide, generate hydrogen and causes underwater explosions with tremendous heat and light with its snapping claw. Some child, seeing a model we hope to build someday, might design a new piston based on that claw that could power our vehicles with sea water. We can show them how we are already cooling and heating our tanks with geothermal energy, and saving on our light bills. There are many things we can do. For this future to happen, we must bury the hatchet, put aside old disputes, and join together to teach our students about their environment with a spirit of cooperation.
Local News 
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