121 Badges

Jun. 27, 2008 - Environmental Science Revisited

Soumei and Keitaro worked on their Environmental Science experiments today. Hint: You MUST have the book for this badge. Some of them the boys can do without the booklet. Not this one. I bought another copy because getting the one from the Scout library means waiting until a meeting. Found another source, however! Merit Badge Online has several of them scanned in and available as .pdf files. Very useful! Of course, for badges that require a lot of field work, not as practical as the booklet :-).

It was very cute watching them try to blow oil off the surface of water. It is, of course, written around the Valdez spill -- and it neglects to mention the rapid recovery and the record harvests of pink salmon since the spill. No, not arguing that it was a good thing. Just that God in His wisdom knows and has a plan. Can we, as mere mortals, actually do something unrecoverable? Doubtful. We are to be good stewards of the earth, but I would never put the burden of "save the earth" on a 12-year old! Okay, off soapbox for now.

The nice thing about the badges is that they give us jumping-off points. I'm not the science-geek type, and these are nice overviews for further study. The class is Saturday. Wish I could be a fly on the wall!