From Micro to Macro: Exploring Nature with Mountain Empire
Picture This
I want you to imagine something tiny in nature. A leaf. No, an ant on a leaf. Let’s go even further: the micro legs of that ant. Picture that for a moment.
Now I want you to expand outwards. Look at the ant as a whole, then the leaf, then the branch it resides on. Glance at the tree, then zoom out to see the whole macro forest it’s a part of.
Finally, I want you to picture yourself. Where do you fit into this wild and vast world?
A zoomed-in picture of pink flowers
The Adventure Begins
On three Wednesdays, Apprentice Lucinda, Ms. Brooke, Ms. Sam, and I trekked out to the Mountain Empire Unified School District in Pine Valley, a place whose abounding green hills, towering trees, and surrounding heat were a stark contrast to the cool, coastal location at Cabrillo National Monument where the Ecologik Institute normally works.
Despite this contrast, I noticed a lot of similarities. For one, incredible biodiversity abounded around me. I found myself stopping to look at the leaves on the oaks and marveling at the huge variety of wildflowers. Second, there is a bright, curious, and welcoming community of young scientists eagerly waiting to explore.
Micro to Macro
In collaboration with Blue Dot Education, a wonderful nonprofit that uses education to promote environmental stewardship and uplift communities, we explored nature and our place in it with these young scientists from Mountain Empire Junior and High School. Our goal was to help youth create personal connections with nature by introducing them to a variety of ways to DDexplore the world around them.
On the first day, we started at the micro level, sketching out a singular square inch and looking through magnifying glasses and cameras to explore the tiny details of the world around us. We then took a macro perspective, using a drone to view the whole school and the hills beyond. At the end of our first day, I was feeling pretty tired. The nervous jitters of meeting new people combined with the long drive were beginning to wear me down. But then we did something that Blue Dot Education calls “the final word.” We all went around in a circle and shared a word that described our experience of the day or what we were feeling. What our participants had to say warmed my heart. Here are a few of the words: fun, glad, awesome-possum, curious, powerful, satisfied, energized, excited, happy, anticipating, and amazing.
A student smiles while holding a camera
On the second day, we continued our exploration - with a hike! After a quick iNaturalist introduction, we loaded into vans and headed to a nearby campsite. Despite the space being only a few minutes from the school, most of our group had never been there. As one student said, "I lived here since I was 7 and never been out here. It's a new experience for so many people." We walked along a stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail (one of my absolute favorite trails!), logging biodiversity on iNaturalist and interacting with nature on a personal level. Before heading out for the day, we reflected on the poem “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver. If you haven’t read it before, I highly recommend you check it out. And if you have read it before, then you know how absolutely magical our experience was. At the end of the day, one participant said something to Ms. Sam that made my heart leap: “How do I become a scientist like you?”
A student uses a headset and remote to pilot a drone
The final day of our exploration came way too soon and I found myself dreading saying goodbye to this amazing community of explorers. To commemorate our time together, we created vision boards that depicted how we saw ourselves in nature. We used photos that we took, magazine cut-outs, and art supplies to express our thoughts and feelings. We got to exhibit our creations on a four-sided display. Around our creations, we taped more pictures, doodled with paint pens, and wrote words to describe our experience. The end result was something magical - a physical representation of the emotional connection we made with nature, ourselves, and each other.
A word cluster with the “Final Word” words
A student and instructor walk together down a trail
Looking to the Future
It’s been a couple of weeks since our last visit to the Mountain Empire School District. I still think often about the fun we had exploring together. While I miss being there, I know that this is not the end of our educational journey in nature. Hopefully, our exploration can serve as an example of the importance of getting youth out in nature and inspire more organizations and schools to utilize their outdoor spaces.
An instructor writes “Community Science is the BEST science” on the display
About the Author: Hi! I’m Mayumi L. I was a participant in Virtual EcoLogik in 2020 and fell in love with the program. I came back as a CESAP Apprentice in 2021 and now I’m an intern working on Science Communication projects like our Community Workshops and social media!
