The noise of airplanes landing at McCarran International Airport competed with the sound of ducks quacking across the street at Sunset Park, but the eight Paradise Elementary fifth-graders enrolled in an environmental science program for urban youth didn’t seem to mind. As 11-yearold Brittney Nunn nibbled on Pepperidge Farm cheddar cheese goldfish, she spotted a creature poking its head out of a hole a few feet from their picnic table at the park. “Look, there’s a gopher!” she said. The seven other kids around her craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the animal — actually a ground squirrel — that most had never seen.
Brittney would go on to reel in a real fish from the park’s lake after participating in a science lesson from Daphne Sewing, who oversees the Discover Mojave-Outdoor World program. Children in the program visit Sunset Park and other local sites to get a taste of the recreational activities — fishing, birdwatching, canoeing — they can enjoy on public lands.
Connecting children to nature so that they may become stewards of public lands as adults is a cornerstone of UNLV’s Public Lands Institute (PLI), which collaborates with federal, state, and nonprofit partners to implement conservation, education, and research programs. Through one of its partnerships, the PLI provides the infrastructure to efficiently carry out programs that cut across the purview of Southern Nevada’s four federal land management agencies — U.S. Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and U.S. Forest Service, which comprise the Southern Nevada Agency Partnership.
Cooperative Conservation
The roots of the PLI can be traced to the desert trails within Southern Nevada’s 7 million acres of public lands, where geoscientist Peg Rees, now associate vice president for research and community outreach, has spent nearly 30 years as both a researcher and outdoors enthusiast.
“The people from the federal agencies hang out there too, and we started talking about their need for a community partner,” she says. “UNLV turned out to be the right partner, and now both sides are seeing real benefits.” In 1998, the federal agencies began receiving funding through the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act. The act authorized government land sales in Clark County and required that the proceeds — nearly $2 billion so far — remain in Nevada for schools, water infrastructure, conservation initiatives, and other programs. The act grew out of the demands that the area’s explosive growth and tourism industry were placing on the valley’s natural resources.
But under the act, the federal agencies are prevented from hiring full-time employees to implement the programs, and they didn’t have a formal mechanism for working together on the many projects that would overlap their jurisdictions, including programs to rebuild trails, curb illegal dumping, and implement science education programs. The university fills that gap, LaNelda Rolley, spokeswoman for the PLI, says.
In early 2004 Rees and representatives of the federal agencies developed a list of projects and programs that the agencies wanted to accomplish that also matched the university’s strategic mission. By May of that year, the initiative was established and a year later it was approved by the regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education as the Public Lands Institute.
Many of the projects are part of a national effort to encourage and implement cooperative conservation, first proposed by the White House nearly four years ago. The goal of the Cooperative Conservation Initiative is to empower federal land managers to form partnerships within local communities to better care for the land and its wildlife, according to Gale Norton, U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
“By promoting these partnerships, we not only leverage federal conservation dollars with private funds but also tap into the ingenuity and local knowledge of the people who live and work on the land,” Norton has stated.
Stewardship for Tomorrow
The PLI also hopes that cooperative conservation will build community understanding of land management issues amidst the steady influx of new residents.
“There’s a lot of work to be done to educate adults and help them understand the ramifications of their decisions,” Rees says. “Those new to the valley don’t know the unique challenges we face in terms of natural resources. And even longtime Nevadans don’t realize the luxury they have in being able to take a walk just about anywhere they want.”
Programs like Discover Mojave are aimed at educating the next generation of land management decision makers. “Without them, this may be the first generation not to have any connection with the land,” Rolley says.
Child advocacy expert Richard Louv, author of The Last Child in the Woods, has dubbed the issue the “nature deficit disorder” and argues that in today’s technologically advanced world, children are more apt to stay indoors playing video games, surfing the Internet, or watching television.
Other factors, such as urban children’s lack of access to natural areas, parents’ fear of strangers and illnesses such as Lyme disease, and schools’ emphasis on homework and testing all play a role. Yet new research shows that enjoying nature can ease depression, obesity, and attention-deficit disorder, according to Louv. And a team of UNLV professors has shown that, at least in the short term, exposing urban youth to outdoor programs does have positive effects.
Lori Olafson, Gregg Schraw, and Michelle Weibel, members of the educational psychology department and the Center for Evaluation and Assessment, along with PLI educational curriculum coordinator Jeanne Klockow, performed the first part of the study last summer and their findings were accepted for presentation at an international research conference.
Roughly 99 percent of children experienced substantial growth of skills and knowledge related to each activity, according to the study. Children also demonstrated strong positive attitudes about the experiences.
The study is part of a larger project to determine if informal educational programs — such as Discover Mojave and the Forever Earth floating classroom at Lake Mead — improve students’ formal classroom learning.
“These outdoor programs geared toward kids who have little connection to outdoor activities are very successful,” Schraw says. “The students gained a substantial amount of knowledge, they had high performance capabilities, and we saw attitude changes.”
Sewing, the project manager for Discover Mojave-Outdoor World, says: “We’re hoping that the desire to learn about their environment will continue into their adulthood, and they will adopt healthy lifestyles.”
The next study phase involves the students’ teachers, who were given a checklist to track classroom behavior such as participation and completion of assignments for the students who were involved in the Discover Mojave program, Klockow says.
Research into whether outdoor programs influence classroom learning is thin, so these studies are breaking new ground, Klockow says. “There’s little research in this area so there’s nothing much to draw from, but at the same time it’s great because we can be the pioneer,” she says.
Like most of the kids enrolled in the Discover Mojave program, 10-year-old Edwin Harris says he signed up because he likes science, but he’s getting much more out of the program. “I’m learning about all sorts of animals and learning about canoeing,” he says. “I think some kids didn’t sign up because they think it’s boring science, but it’s learning and fun at the same time.”
The most important thing he’s learned so far? “Not to trash any place where animals can go,” Edwin says. “They can get wrapped in pieces of trash and they could actually die.”
Arid Lands Research Unparalleled
In the 1930s, Walking Box Ranch, located off Joshua Tree Highway seven miles west of Searchlight, served as an isolated retreat for Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Built by western actor Rex Bell — who later became lieutenant governor — and his actress-wife Clara Bow, the original “It” girl, the 160-acre ranch is not only rich in history, it’s also home to some 200 native plant species and is designated as a desert tortoise habitat.
In cooperation with the BLM, the PLI has secured preservation funding to restore the original ranch house, with the hope of turning it into a museum. The next step is building a field station to serve as a home base for researchers and students from all disciplines — biologists, geologists, historians, and sociologists.
Other new PLI projects include studying two cultural sites: the Parashant National Monument and the Pueblo Grande de Nevada, also known as the Lost City.
Archaeological evidence indicates that humans have inhabited or used the Parashant site for more than 11,000 years and the geologic history dates back billions of years. Because the site at the northern edge of the Grand Canyon is so remote, an abundance of cultural artifacts still remain. The institute has teamed with UNLV anthropology researchers to study the area.
The Lost City at the northern end of Lake Mead is a complex of villages that was inhabited by early basketmakers sometime after the first century A.D. The area was discovered by explorers in 1826 and later studied by archaeologists in the last century, but the studies are incomplete. The current field investigations, which continue through September 2007, will further map, survey, and test excavations at the site.
“There has been some research done before, most notably by UNLV professor emerita Margaret Lyneis, but this is the opportunity to catalog and track the information and artifacts,” says PLI Director Nancy Flagg.
The PLI’s educational outreach programs will be boosted by the BLM’s Red Rock Desert Leaning Center and Wild Horse and Burro Facility, planned to be sited on the former Oliver Ranch property in Red Rock National Conservation Area. PLI collaborated with a team of teachers and researchers to develop the curriculum for the science school for local fifth-grade students. It will feature indoor and outdoor classrooms, laboratories, trails, and environmental monitoring stations. The center is scheduled to open in January 2009.
UNLV is particularly well-positioned to advance research in arid lands, Rees says. It is the only major research university located in the Mojave Desert, and it’s located in the heart of a rapidly growing urban city.
Researchers here also have unparalleled access to public lands. “As a geologist, I’ve been spoiled here,” she says. “Here in Southern Nevada, we request permits from only four or five agencies depending on where we’re going and what we’re doing. Even that process has been streamlined at UNLV by the establishment of the PLI’s permit office. In other parts of the country, researchers spend most of their time knocking on doors to seek permission to go on land that is owned privately.”
PLI A Model for Federal Programs
As executive director of the institute, Rees is responsible for strategic planning and outreach within the state as well as nationally and internationally to guide and develop the institute. She has worked as an oil exploration geologist and conducted research in Antarctica, China, and the western United States.
Growing up on an almond farm in California’s central valley, Rees developed a love for the outdoors at a young age, and her first college geology course channeled that into a career. “Science is just my excuse for spending so much time outdoors,” she says.
While working as an exploration geologist in Wyoming, Rees says she saw the effect that oil drilling has on open spaces. The conflict between protection and use was a real-life struggle for Rees while conducting scientific research in Antarctica for eight years in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Environmental groups, including Greenpeace, of which she was a member, were fighting to preserve Antarctica and have oil drilling banned, she says.
As a National Science Foundation-funded scientist, she traveled via snowmobiles and sledges through Antarctica for months at a time. As the result of the scientific investigations and environmental activism around the world, the United States’ environmental practices in Antarctica were greatly improved.
Flagg, ’79 BA Elementary Education and ’92 MA English, was chosen to be director of the institute, overseeing the day-to-day management of the projects and staff. She brought extensive experience in educational administration. She was deputy to the chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education for four years and previously worked 20 years at UNLV in various positions, including deputy to the president.
No other such partnership between a university and all four federal land agencies exists nationally, Flagg says, adding that Southern Nevada is unique with its vast amount of public lands abutting a growing urbanized area.
The creative challenge of launching the institute, which is tucked into office space on the second floor of the Boyd School of Law, has attracted a highly credentialed, 28- member staff.
Though it has existed for just two years, the PLI has already garnered national recognition. The White House Conference on Cooperative Conservation, which was held in St. Louis in August, highlighted the Southern Nevada Lands Partnership, of which PLI is a member, as one of the best examples of cooperative conservation in the United States.
And in September, Get Outdoors Nevada, which combines the volunteer efforts of the four federal agencies and is administered by the institute, was among the 25 recipients of the 2005 Take Pride in America National Award presented in Washington, D.C.
Despite the national attention it has received, the institute is only starting to introduce itself to the Southern Nevada community. “Historically, the public has seen universities as ivory towers that primarily do research that has no effect on everyday lives,” Flagg says. “But we are a living, breathing example of UNLV getting out there and having a direct impact on the community and on future generations.”
To help the federal agencies fulfill their initiatives, work teams were established to bring together a representative from each agency and a PLI project manager. This approach allows the team members to draw upon the strengths of each others’ agencies while receiving infrastructure, support, and expertise from the project managers.
The task agreements between PLI and the federal agencies are tightly structured to prevent duplication of efforts and ensure that the projects are managed by qualified staff. Bill Dickinson, superintendent for the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, says the PLI has been invaluable in terms of getting projects off the ground, citing early success with the Discover Mojave and Forever Earth programs, expansion of volunteer rolls for litter cleanup events, and the Cultural Site Stewardship Program.
“The university brings increased resources to the partnership, and it has a wealth of knowledge and expertise in different disciplines,” says Dickinson. “It’s important to note that the Public Lands Institute is serving a broader need. It could be on a national or international level as to what it can bring to public lands management.”
The long-term, overall goal in Rees’ mind is straightforward. “There’s an intrinsic value that we (at the PLI) all hold for public lands, and we want to get more people engaged with caring for our environment.”
