ECOSTART at the San Pedro River
By Anne Browning-Aiken, Floyd Gray, and Denisse Fisher

Nowhere is water so beautiful as in the desert, for nowhere else is it so scarce. By definition, water, like a human being or a tree or a bird or a song, gains value by rarity, singularity, isolation.

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Students and teachers dipped their nets and test tubes into the San Pedro River and rediscovered the surprising beauty of a desert river. On a cold Monday morning in November, students and teachers from Pima Vocational High School piled out of a large van to look at a pink, purple and green topographic map of the San Pedro watershed and learned how to "read the landscape." The caravan then hiked down to the river from the San Pedro House. None of the students had ever seen a running river in Arizona before.

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On another morning in November a group of 19 teachers from Buena High School in Sierra Vista learned how to monitor water quality and how the San Pedro River, as part of a binational watershed, plays a strong role in land use planning with local communities. The group also discovered that the Sierra Vista wastewater treatment plant recharged treated water into the local aquifer while the ponds offered a haven for ducks, coots and hawks. None of the teachers regretted giving up their Saturday to be on the river.

The San Pedro River and its associated riparian habitat represent critical wildlife corridor in the Sonoran Desert region and exist within the framework of fragile surface and groundwater conditions. Competing natural resource use within the watersheds threatens the stability of the habitat. ECOSTART, supported by Arizona Project WET, the Udall Foundation and the University of Arizona Foundation, provides students and teachers an opportunity to understand how communities can help or hinder the survival of a riparian ecosystem. ECOSTART's educational priorities are to: 1) expand the existing program to include elements of Project WET, GLOBE, TOXRAP (Environmental and Health Sciences Institute resources), and the NOAA Climate Science Program on a wider binational scale, 2) reach more students by increasing the number of teacher trainers, and 3) build student (future stakeholders) interest and understanding of natural resource sciences, as a career.

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What is immediately apparent about these students is their enthusiasm about keeping the river as it is. They learned how to answer "How do we know a river is threatened?" and began to answer "why do we care?" and "what can we do about it?"

Buena High School teachers visited the San Pedro as part of a two-day workshop held November 18-19 which provided continuing education credits. The teachers attended the workshop in order to improve their own and their students' understanding of geography and ecological processes and to build the capacity of themselves and their students to apply scientific understanding to regional water issues. During the first day of the workshop the teachers learned how people's perceptions affect the values they give to various water uses in an exercise called "Choices and Preferences." They learned the value of different measures of water quality through the use of water kits and through a "Macrobenthic Bugs Bioassessment." They expanded their understanding of how a watershed works through map reading exercises and discovered how to use Global Positioning System (GPS) units for monitoring water quality accurately. Through a series of exercises entitled "Dustbowls and Failed Levees," teachers learned how to link study of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath to other climate events on the web and how climate variability and water resources are related. They discovered how water management on the US-Mexico border is partly shaped by national policies and agreements and partly by watershed partnerships between stakeholders, water-related agencies, and NGOs, such as the Upper San Pedro Partnership.

For ECOSTART, these fieldtrips serve as catalysts for thinking about how to plan ongoing hands-on workshops with students and teachers in southern Arizona and how to build more bridges between the university and the students and teachers from schools in the area. Since 2002 ECOSTART has held teacher/student workshops and fieldtrips in Cananea and Naco, Sonora, and Cochise County, Arizona. These workshops cover the properties of water, water quality, drought, geography, and ecosystem functioning, riparian habitat, and community health and decision-making.

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Some of the lessons learned by the ECOSTART team from their experiences thus far include:

• Instruction for teachers has to be multidisciplinary in order to meet teachers' needs and state teaching requirements;
• Instructional teams should first become familiar with local water issues and learn what the teachers have already experienced in environmental education and want to accomplish/gain from further professional development;
  
• Community resources such as museums, water companies, newspapers, and forums effectively supplement and complement academic and professional experience;
  
• Workshops should be geared to specific grade levels with an emphasis on alternative teaching strategies;
  
• Organizers should recognize that communities may give priority to other
  issues such as economic growth and health;
  
• Discussions and activities on water resource use and conservation can be linked with weather observations and drought indicators.
  

ECOSTART links the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy, the GLOBE Program at Sustainability of semi-Arid Hydrology and Riparian Areas (SAHRA), the Department of Geosciences, and Climate Assessment for the Southwest at the University of Arizona, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, with Project WET at the Water Resources Research Center and the Water Wise Program in Sierra Vista, Cochise County, through teacher workshops, classroom assistance and student/teacher field trips designed to address community and school needs for improved knowledge and understanding of relationships between a geographic sense of place, ecosystem functioning, climate, and natural resource use.

For more information about ECOSTART please visit http://www.udallcenter.arizona.edu/programs/usmex/ecostart/index.html.