Video

Student Conservation Association Hosts Let's Move Outside Event

June 26, 2012

Transcript

 [intro music]

Today, here at Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, we have a day of service with 100 volunteers where we'll be doing three primary service projects for stewardship for the land. We'll be removing invasives. We'll be doing seedings. We'll be doing some mulching. We'll be doing some pulling of exotic plants and weeds and then setting up the garden for the summer work program for our partners here with the youth programs and summer camps.

We have found out that by having them be engaged with the outdoors, their learning capacity increases ten-fold in terms of their math, their science, and their reading comprehension. So, these kinds of projects are very, very important.

Today, it's about giving these young people an opportunity to learn about how to do restoration work, how to do tree planting all that kind of thing, so that they can carry those skills forward in their life and also do something good for the park in the meantime.

For me, when I first started with S.C.A., I had no idea that there was so many green spaces in the Washington, D.C. area. I wasn't very active in my neighborhood, so now that I'm out I do trail work. Students do trail work. They are outside all summer being active, interacting with the environment in a very, very sustainable manner.
 
Right now, we're just doing a little bit of labor, outside, which, of course, we want to get people outside more, and just having a good time really.

One of the things that we know is that kids are plugged in and we want them to unplug and come outside. We want them to learn about nature. We want them to learn about the applied side of science to see the world in terms of what and where they can touch the outdoors.

If our young are not interested or involved in nature, or feel any reason for it. It will go. It will be taken. It'll be built over. It'll be torn down and destroyed.

Without us cleaning up, there would be no one else to do it. So, in order for us to enjoy it, we must first clean it up.

[outro music]