Southern States - Karnataka-Bangalore   

A rewarding experience for students

By Alladi Jayasri

BANGALORE June 14. For many high schools students in the City, the summer vacations that just ended is bound to be not just unforgettable, but a veritable education in ecology. The Vacation Training Programme on Bioresources, organised by ATREE (Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment), a three-week residential programme, is all about preparing the new generation in managing the earth.

For ATREE, it was heartening to note that announcements in the media brought in many applications from school students, who wanted to sign on from Bangalore, Mysore, and even Riyadh. There was no charge, but ATREE selected 25 students and took them through the course, something that has become necessary, thanks to the havoc wrought on natural resources by man over the past two centuries.

Field trips to research institutes, bird sanctuaries, and national parks, project sites where bioresource conservation is going on were planned for the students. At the Central Institute for Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (CIMAP), the Ranganathittu bird sanctuary, the Biligiri Rangana Hills, Bannerghatta National Park, ATREE's Navadarshanam project in Anekal, the BAIF BIRD K in Tiptur, and the University of Agricultural Sciences field station in Mudigere, the students learnt how to identify, measure, and monitor bioresources, the threats facing them and what people could do about it.

These students were the lucky ones to see how GIS (Geographical Information Systems) had emerged as a tool to aid conservation, and to study forest and vegetation patterns. In some projects, they saw that GIS and GPS, and remote sensing could even be applied in solid waste management, entomological studies and experiments, and in a host of other innovative ways that the children could think of themselves.

Understanding the science of ecology and the social benefits of alternative methods of living that would not tax the bioresources meant that the children were put through their paces in everything from apiculture, sericulture, and horticulture too.

The most exciting part was to discover how nature works, but it was just as shattering to see how man's interference with it had upset the fragile balance. And finally, it was a sobering thought that this was the mess that children of the future were to inherit.

ATREE's initiative aimed to show that given the state of the environment, the least that grown-ups could do was to teach children how to improve matters, for their own sake. And it has worked.

By the time the three-week course ended, the 25 children were familiar with all that ails the environment, and some of the blessings too, and how they could maximise the potential of these blessings to improve everything that is wrong with the environment.

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