Class Awareness : Ventura Students Raise Funds to Help Preserve Rain Forest in Belize

After raising enough money last year to save one acre of the Brazilian rain forest, seventh-graders at Ventura’s Anacapa Middle School made a simple request of their teacher.

“They said, ‘Why don’t you go down and see what they’re doing with our money?’ ” teacher Marcia Greycloud recalled.

So she did.

Not to the Amazon, but to the Costa Rican jungle on a trip sponsored by a nonprofit environmental group.

And after touching, smelling and seeing for herself the exotic animals and lush flora of the region, Greycloud returned to her classroom this school year with a renewed passion and determination to help slow the rain forest’s destruction.

Now she is trying to ignite the same desire in her students.

Brightly colored posters of the rain forest’s dense foliage line Greycloud’s classroom.

Dried remains of two-inch-long beetles and other jungle insects lie in a glass case for children’s inspection. And tiny terrariums that model the rain forest’s ecosystem sit in the classroom’s windows.

But Greycloud’s lessons on the rain forest go beyond a typical science curriculum that examines different types of jungle species.

She urges her students to consider the threat to such animals as the white-faced monkey or fruit-eating bat, and then to do something about it. As the giant blue-and-yellow banner above her blackboard declares: “Save the Earth.”

The message seems to be getting through.

A group of eighth-graders who first learned last year about the rain forest in Greycloud’s class spent several days recently hawking T-shirts for $13.50 apiece outside the school cafeteria.

They sold 138 shirts, raising enough funds to “adopt” 16 acres of rain forest in Belize.

Under a program run by the nonprofit Texas-based Earth Foundation, the educational arm of the Nature Conservancy, the money from Anacapa is going toward replanting and maintenance of a 229,000-acre rain forest preserve in Belize. In all, 3,000 American schools are helping save about 5 million forested acres around the world.

That is only a fraction of the 76 million acres lost each year, according to San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network. And it compares to 1.8 billion acres remaining worldwide.

The T-shirts sold at Anacapa, and furnished by the Earth Foundation, feature lifelike pictures of tigers and other jungle animals or sport written slogans such as “Recycle or Die.”

One shirt went to seventh-grader Noah Gordon, who said he looks forward to being in eighth grade next year so that he can join the fund-raising committee.

“I’m mostly thinking about all the animals,” the 13-year-old said. “I’m worried about all the animals in there becoming extinct. I want to be a zoologist when I grow up, but there might not be any animals left to study.”

Many of Noah’s classmates share his grim outlook.

“Plants and animals are becoming extinct, like, basically every day,” 13-year-old Matt Stanger said. And the corporations and people who are burning or cutting the rain forest “are just doing it ‘cause they want money. They don’t care.”

Armed with facts they have learned in Greycloud’s class, several children said they are concerned about possible global warming caused by the carbon dioxide that is released when rain forests are burned.

“They’re ruining the ozone by burning it down,” 13-year-old Travis Dasnoit said. “And it’s taking away animals’ homes.”

Indeed, the outlook for the rain forest warrants concern.

Although rain forests now cover 6% of the Earth’s land area, they used to cover 14% and will vanish within 20 years at the current rate of destruction, Earth Foundation reports.

Already, the burning or cutting of rain forests to clear land for cattle grazing, farming, mining or just to harvest wood has destroyed 52% of the tropical forests in Africa, 42% in Asia, 37% in Central America and 36% in the Amazon, the environmental group says.

Faced with such statistics, people feel helpless, said Sandy Doss, Earth Foundation’s educational coordinator. The pessimism is particularly common among children.

“Most people, when they see all this, they think, ‘How can I do anything about all that? I have no way to make an impact there,’ ” Doss said. “So they shut down.”

And, she said, “if you do a survey of what kids think environmentally, usually the response is very dismal. Their attitude of what things are going to look like in 10 to 15 years is pretty bad.”

The best antidote for such a gloomy outlook, Doss said, is action, taking small steps to try to save the rain forest such as Greycloud’s students are doing at Anacapa.

In addition to the T-shirt sales, Greycloud plans a letter-writing campaign by her seventh-graders. One target: Mitsubishi Corp., which has been cutting rain forests in Asia for packaging material.

Such student activism sparks a sense of hope and purpose among students, Doss said.

“We call it problem-solving,” she said. “It gives them ownership. It gives them problem-solving skills.”

Although destruction of the rain forest may seem a heavy topic for middle school students, such lessons may be a key to the problem’s solution, some students said.

“The adults, they’re not really learning about it,” Travis said. “They need somebody to do it.”

Or, as Noah said: “It kind of makes you think.”