I’ve had the joy and privilege over the last year to work with exceptional teammates.

I’d like to share a few examples of people doing exceptional work in support of climate change mitigation:

• The Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health is a shining example.
• My colleague Ed Maibach has written a concise, clear example on environmental messaging being, “Easy, fun and popular.” I love it so much. I want to see this messaging reflected in all of the environmental communication going forwards.
• Al Bandura‘s insight that we can use iterative goal setting as a tool to improve efficacy inspires me. By setting proximal (short term) and distal(long term goals) and periodically reevaluating our successes will help us achieve all of our mitigation strategies.
• Max Boykoff is guiding us on using comedy to improve the cultural normalization of mitigation solutions.
• RepublicEn is supporting stories of bipartisan collaboration for creating clean, renewable energy.
• Climate Matters regularly provides content on the relationship between weather and climate.
• Toby Deml’s Cinema of Change Project improves collective efficacy among social change filmmakers.
• Debra Safer is building support for entertainment-education from Stanford.
• Mark Jacobson at The Solutions Project for improving the cultural normalization of climate solutions.
• John Balbus coordinating the National Climate and Health Assessment and Jay Lemery for writing Enviromedics, both providing examples of how climate change is affecting human health right now.
• Bill Ryerson continues to create stories for positive social change globally.
• Summer Marsh loyally helps me figure out everything else…
• Tom Parkin is jumping in to make a trailer to help visualize climate communication as a comedy.
• Liberum Donum translates my stick figures into beautiful concept art for sharing the stories that are a compilation of everyone above’s research.

I’m grateful to have skilled teammates as collaborators. Please take a look, share and build teams of your own. If you want to learn how, Ed’s paper is a great place to start.

My friend Ed wrote something charming. It’s a concise description of how to use social marketing for environmental and climate communication. Please read it.

Enjoy and Share!

My job title these days is changing and I wear many hats. Most people who have any association with science writing have worked with writers in mostly a technical capacity. My work is a little different than traditional science writing. I’m  exploring creative science writing through what I consider the “cultural integration of science.” Here’s a geography game that I’m playing with my kid and his friends becoming an example of the cultural integration of science.

The game is Countries of the World. Each week, a child in the group chooses a country that they’re interested in learning more about. We read maps, so they know the possible choices, and we’ve been playing this game for about nine months now so the kids have a pretty good idea of what’s on each continent by now. We spend a week learning more about the country that they chose. This gives us enough time to explore most of the kids questions and interests for the topic.

So, here’s how a game about Peru because an organic chemistry lesson:
Cassandria chose Peru. We ate a lot of potatoes, went for an imaginary hike in the Andes, read stories about llamas, and built a variety of home-made pan flutes. And then, we got to textiles. Zev was curious about weaving, so we turned a windowsill into a loom and mimicked traditional weaving patterns. We watched some videos about Peruvian weaving and in one of them they mentioned using cochineal insects to dye wool red and orange colors. These scale insects, that eat cacti, are dried in the sun and ground into a dye powder. Carminic acid is around 20% of the dried insects’ weight and can be extracted to make carmine dye. After a rousing game of imaginary fabric dying, we built a molecule of carminic acid together. The molecule building game started two years ago and is cumulative, so yes, this group of four-year old’s understand basic organic chemistry.

Here’s how a lesson about Mongolia became an energy lesson: Zev chose Mongolia. We built a ger, we cooked boortsog, and we read stories about daily life and ecosystems in Mongolia. We pretended to hunt with eagles and milk horses on the steppe. While playing house in the ger, the kids decided that the rocks anchoring it were the stove and the support post going up the center was the stove pipe. This lead to us cooking suutei tsai in our ger and a discussion of contextual fuel use. What fuels are used in Mongolia? Why? For what? Where do they come from? How do the combination of our choices and the available materials create cultural patterns of energy use? We then discussed a variety of fuel/energy options, added those words to our vocabulary practice and matched the kids toys to them.

It all weaves together (pun intended). It’s easy in small groups, a lot of like stream-of consciousness. The kids define things they’re interested in, and I tie them all together. It’s in the storytelling. What are our cultural stories? How do we share them?

I try to cover each of the arts: dance, visual, music, etc. and the rest seems to fall into place. The kids are left with an understanding of another culture, some geography, reading and writing are incorporated so they get their literacy needs met, math and science get integrated into it all. It becomes a comprehensive narrative.

I’m interested in redefining our cultural stories to explore the ways our culture is changing as a result of rapid technological advancement. I love finding ways of integrating science into entertainment that we already consume and showing how science fits in with existing entertainment and our existing activities. That is what I mean by the “cultural integration of science.”

In 2017 Dinosaur Week got bigger.

Sunday: We went boating at Loch Lomond where we read excerpts from Jurassic Park. (The section where the sauropods peek over the treetops, make trumpeting sounds welcome the humans to the island.)

Monday: My neighbor brought us fish bones that she found at the beach. We boiled them clean and fit them onto a chalk fish outline. We learned about neural spines on the top of fish vertebrae. In the evening, we read about dimetrodon’s and learned that the crest on top is a neural spine sail, like on the top of the fish vertebrae. We constructed Dimetrodon Dragon costume for a bearded dragon.

Tuesday: We baked dinosaur cookies with friends. Sybil, the bearded dragon, pretends to be a Dimetrodon.

Wednesday: We used play dough to talk about fossil imprints left in sedimentary rocks.

In the evening, we baked a dessert dinosaur diorama. It’s a chocolate cake with a grape jello (agarose) ocean, an erupting cream cheese frosting volcano, candy dinosaur eggs and mint trees.

Thursday: Friends came over to read dinosaur stories and eat the prehistoric landscape.

Friday: Chickens arrived in the morning, we talked about how they’re avian dinosaurs. We talked about how both dinosaurs and birds hatch from eggs.

Saturday: We built a volcano, then dyed dinosaur eggs. The kids got to eat chocolate *dinosaur* eggs because it’s now nearly Easter.

Good Toddler Dinosaur Books:
Danny and the Dinosaur by Syd Hoff
Digging Up Dinosaurs by Aliki
The Big, Little Dinosaur by Darlene Geis
Raptors, Fossils, Fins and Fangs by Ray Troll

 

I feel like I need to talk about Halloween before I talk more about Dinosaur Week (2015, 2016). My kid has a reference for skeletal anatomy, so we are able to talk descriptively about comparative anatomy when we talk about fossils.

How did this happen? Every Halloween we talk about bones. They are everywhere in the artwork, so I pin up skeletal anatomy diagrams in my house and we talk about what the bones are called, how they connect, and what their functions are. He’s four now, repetition helps. We do this every year. This year trick-or-treating, he walked down the street and told his friends all about skeletons.

The 2016 Dinosaur Week themes were mammals and microfossils. Dinosaur week got kicked off by a trip to LA where we visited the La Brea Tar Pits. Zev loved the station where researchers were using tiny brushes to sort teeny-tiny microfossils.

We took a walk through a redwood forest, with a handful of plastic dinosaurs. We pretended we were dinosaurs tromping through an ancient forest.
We built a living room dig site:

Next to our dig site was a lab for sorting microfossils. There’s a microscope (the flashlight is the light source), centrifuge, brushes, chisels and picks etc.:

We visited the Mammoth exhibit at the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose.  Zev chose to pretend that the substrait that you’re supposed to brush away from the big mammal fossils was actually microfossils. So, we sorted microfossils and looked at them under the real microscopes.

We brought our brushes to the park and made a paleontology dig site in the sand box. We found a hadrosaur. We excavated the fossil bones (large sticks) and matched them to a hadrosaur skeleton. We brought a few small samples home to run a genetic analysis on in our laboratory.

After analyzing our results, we made a poster to share our research with our peers:

Somehow I accidentally forgot to share Dinosaur Week here, for the last three years… I think it was because it wasn’t really a planned activity. It started out with me passing out toy dinosaurs as an afikomen prize to the kids after Passover, and substituting a fossilized megalodon tooth for the traditional lamb bone on the Seder plate. The kids got excited about dinosaurs. I love paleontology. It was an easy sell.

It started out simple, and has become an annual family tradition.

In 2015 for Dinosaur week we built a field camp for our paleontology research in the living room and read dinosaur books in our tent with a flashlight. I baked a boston creme pie. We ate it in our field camp. We fed the ducks at the pond near our house and talked about avian dinosaurs.

I cannot recommend enough Dinosaur Rock. I love it.

 

Zev came come one day and started building himself a play-dough gel electrophoresis apparatus, so we decided to try to make one at home. Here’s what we came up with… a video describing the protocol, and some at home instructions.

It’s a gel electrophoresis home project for kiddos. Have fun!