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CES Delegation Visits Japan
 THE CHESAPEAKE Bay and the Seto Inland Sea, although separated by 6,700 miles, are not that far removed from one another ideologically. The future welfare of both coastal seas and a successful coexistence between these natural resources and the civilizations they sustain depend on how citizens manage them.
That was the message conveyed to more than 1,100 delegates from 41 countries at the fifth international conference on the Environmental Management of Enclosed Coastal Seas (EMECS), held in November in Kobe, Japan.
As conference moderator, Wayne Bell, director of the College's Center for the Environment and Society, stressed the importance of environmental education, not only to empower local communities to take charge of their future, but also to enhance the quality of science and math education offered to young schoolchildren. Bell, along with Andrew Stein '99, program manager for the Center, and senior Michael Scozzafava, were part of a larger Maryland delegation to the conference that included K-12 school educators.
"Japan was awesome," says Stein. "It was a fantastic opportunity to talk with people who are doing the same things I'm doing, and to see how different countries cope with the same pressures we face: industry, agriculture, urban sprawl. Japan is unique because their reclamation efforts are changing the ecosystem. They are now becoming aware that when they fill in areas to develop, they are losing wetlands and the natural filtering system."
Stein and Scozzafava both participated in the education fair, where they learned about grass-roots efforts taking place all over the world. Bell and Stein gave a presentation promoting the use of environmental studies as a comprehensive method to teach science, mathematics and technology to primary and secondary school students.
"We in this field have witnessed how environmental studies engenders stewardship," says Bell, "but it is also a great way to teach science."
Bell believes that by using authentic environmental data gathering and analysis techniques in the classroom, environmental studies does not need to remain a "soft" part of science education. Rather, students understanding of fundamental scientific and technological concepts will be enhanced as they see "science in action" through environmental projects involving sophisticated instrumentation, compilation of measurements and statistics, and interpretation of data using graphs and satellite imagery.
"Unfortunately, these resources are seldom interpreted for use by K-12 educators, but they need to be," says Bell. "Together with Andrew Stein and Erin Fowler '01, I have developed an example that uses the Chesapeake Bay as a paradigm to demonstrate how such interpretation can assist educators in teaching important principles in physical oceanography and marine ecology."
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