Talking Their Way Into Science

Why do the leaves change color? How did the moon begin? Why are blood veins different colors? Will we ever be able to live on another planet?

These are some of the questions that Karen Gallas, the author of Talking Their Way into Science, asks her first and second grade classes as an integral part of their science curriculum.  This book was required reading for one of my education classes last fall and a jumping off point to conduct a science talk with some neighborhood children.

As part of a class assignment, I asked three neighborhood kids to participate in four science talks, using questions from the book as examples.  Three students, 5th grader Helen, 4th grader John, and 4th grader Solomon, my next door neighbor, wanted to participate (I’ve changed the names for privacy).  Helen and John are siblings and attend Catholic school; Solomon attends public school.

What are Science talks?  Science talks are discussions, formally scheduled, where students inquire into general, open-ended questions together.  Ideally the focus of the talks is on how children respond to a question, not on answering correctly, or being right or certain.  The point is for children to co-construct their ideas, to take risks expressing themselves, to disagree and to learn how to respectfully listen to their peers.  Science talks are about acquiring a discourse.  A discourse is an ongoing conversation. Acquiring means to possess through one’s own efforts. Questions are often created by the children themselves.

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image by Roberto Garcia-S

Now that we have a new president, it feels as though the 21st century has finally started. Of course, I’m still waiting on my jetpack and my robot maid, but in the meantime, there’s lots of amazing stuff being done in every quarter to get the new world jumpstarted.

First off, the incredible organization that helped President Obama win the election is now being transformed into a network of service to renew America. For a long time, the movements for change in this country and around the world have operated largely independently of each other, focused on their own missions without being organized on a larger level. Efforts have been made to connect these autonomous groups, but without massive funding and public awareness, each network only contains a small piece of the puzzle. I’m hoping that USAService.org grows into a nationwide, widely publicized umbrella for everyone who wants to change the world so that we can be aware of what’s going on and work together intelligently.

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I first read Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs in 2000 in the midst of the high-tech boom—of which my company was a small part. After almost a year of 12+ hour days, I was burnt out and in need of a serious break. My boss had responded to my burnt-ness by agreeing to send me overseas for a few months to help get our European operations underway. On the way there, I unwound my hunched shoulders and devoured Microserfs in one sitting—it was the first book I’d had time to read in a looong time.

I had expected a light-hearted book all about the trails and travails of computer programmers in the 1990s, and Microserfs surely delivered that. But I was surprised by the book’s huge heart and love for its geeky, awkward, somewhat inscrutable characters. This book asks some really big questions, as relevant to our post-tech boom lives as they were to life in the first flush of internet fast money. How do we find meaning in a world made up of tidbits of information? When there are no rules or models for relationship, no overarching theme to life? When we’re not even sure how to reach out to each other in the flesh? In this hilarious, sweet, unassuming story, Coupland’s characters find a way.

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image by AlbySpace

What began as a simple question—Hmm…I wonder if Greendisk would recycle my spent lithium ion laptop battery?—led to a nearly two-hour phone conversation with Greendisk’s enthusiastic and visionary CEO, David Beschen. I found out much more than I had anticipated. Greendisk is organized in a way that cooperates with existing businesses and non-profits to make electronic waste recycling a seamless last step in the life cycle of techno trash—computers, VCR’s, laptops, cell phones, CD’s, peripherals, VHS tapes, batteries, etc.

Besides answering my question, David explained to me how Greendisk puts the spotlight on the first “R” of the Waste Hierarchy (Reduce), and has created a structure to handle discarded electronic waste while not creating anything material. Greendisk accepts a large variety of techno trash, the most extensive list of any e-waste recycler in the US.  They are skilled at directing this trash from individual and commercial sources to be sorted and consolidated into component parts.

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The Climate Change exhibit at the Museum of Natural History is currently on display and I encourage everyone who can make the trip to see it to do so. A few weeks ago, I went to learn as much as I could about it. It was very informative, with plenty of interactive exhibits and two short movies.

The exhibit is straight forward and scientific. It clearly presents the evidence supporting the existence of climate change, going into great depth on how the rate at which we are burning fossil fuels has thrown off the balance of the carbon cycle. The carbon cycle is pretty amazing, a checks and balance system between several reservoirs of carbon: the atmosphere, the land (plants and soil), sedimentary rock, the ocean and fossil fuel reserves. Through burning fossil fuels (essentially, burning history) we are releasing a greater proportion of CO2 into the atmosphere that has to be absorbed by the other reservoirs.  The perspective represented in the exhibit doesn’t place blame on humans, but does put the pressure on us to figure out clean ways to generate energy.

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image by Roberto Garcia-S

Good news stories on the environmental front were a little harder to come by this month but all that changed now, with the best news we could have been hoping for—Barack Obama winning the presidential election in a landslide. YES!!!! Like he said, this is our chance, and it really is OURS, to not just set things right, but begin building a new vision. He promised, in an e-mail to all those who gave time, money, talent etc. that he would soon be in touch about the next steps. I can’t think of anything more exciting!

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In nearly every speech and debate this year, “clean coal” has been invoked by both candidates as a real solution to America’s over-dependence on foreign energy. Repeated enough, phrases begin to be accepted as truth. But the promise of “clean coal” is a fairy tale, no more possible than spinning straw into gold.

Taxpayers For Common Sense reports that, since 1978, the United States federal government has spent 2.5 billion dollars developing Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) technology, the prime example of “clean coal.” Thirty years later, there are no U.S. coal plants that capture and sequester carbon. Yet the money still flows. According to New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) officials, there is currently $350 million of federal money on the table for states who are able to build a plant that successfully captures carbon. The “winners” will be announced mid-2009. But with every dollar that continues to be poured into “clean coal” research and development, we all lose.

In the still-hypothetical process of carbon capture, the carbon dioxide produced from burning coal is captured before it is released into the atmosphere. It is then pressurized into liquid form, or supercritical CO2, and injected into rock beds deep underground.

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This video comes via the Discovery Channel and the Honey Bee Network, an organization which travels throughout impoverished regions seeking and innovative designs to make life better, and connecting the dots between designers, entrepreneurs, and larger markets. From their website: “Honey Bee collects pollen without impoverishing the flowers and it connects flower to flower through pollination.”

Shown here are inventors of a tree climber to facilitate getting fruits down from high trees, a bicycle-powered washing machine, a scooter modified to be used by a little person, and my favorite, the amphibious bicycle, whose inventor created it because his love lived across the water, and he couldn’t wait for the boat. “My desperation made me an innovator,” says Md. Saidullah. “Even love needs help from technology.”

I love this video because it shows that, especially with limited resources, human ingenuity can work wonders. What small innovations can we make to improve our lives and the world at large?

With life and the world around us changing faster and faster, something is stirring in us individually and in the collective, both conscious and unconscious. The very planet we are living on and the things we are inventing on it are changing rapidly and might do so beyond recognition. There isn’t a lot we can or have to take for granted. It is challenging to get one’s head around that, to make room for that much complexity, uncertainty and change.

This in an invitation to invent our future in writing, to participate in creating a vision, through a story, together. To let ourselves go and go for it. Stories are powerful, and often reality will arise out of our imagination as much as reality is shaping it, and if those stories arise out of a collective, they will carry even more power and conviction.

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I never considered myself to be a fan of science fiction. But the more I thought about writing this piece, the more I realized that that isn’t exactly true. Ever since I remember one of my eyes was firmly on the future. Watching those first episodes of Star Trek on the hand-me down black and white television with my brother and sister in Germany had a very different effect and importance than watching, say, Heidi or Flipper. There was something in those movies that I was looking to for clues about what was possible, about who we are, and about where we were going as human beings.

And it wasn’t just me. We, humans, as I came to understand, seem to be creatures of the future. As much as we are shaped by the past we are always planning, hoping for, looking forward to, dreading or dreaming the future.

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When you were growing up, your entire family probably had less technology in the house than you currently own as an individual. I could sit here and detail the carbon footprint of a family from the 1950s or 60s versus a family of this century, but ultimately the conclusion would be: With technological advancement comes adoption, and we are total tech whores.

But now we know that our precious devices, the ones we can’t live without, suck up energy, and we have to make an effort to live green. So how do we reconcile the two?

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