talking about species that are “useful to humans”—as opposed to species that are not—is like calling a steering wheel “useful to driving” because it’s the part of the car you personally see and interact with most
Nature education is a complete disaster in so many ways—it’s good at getting people to care about “nature” in an individual, hands-on way, but ecologically it’s a failure.
It’s easy to convince people that opossums and butterflies and snakes are cool. You can get an extreme arachnophobe cooing over jumping spiders or gently shutting tarantulas out of the house in a matter of months—don’t get me wrong, it’s hard work compared to selling them on kitten, but living things have innate charisma.
But how do you sell them on systems? On relationship webs? On largely invisible, interconnected, interdependent cycles that you can’t meaningfully display in a terrarium or on a food web poster? Ecology is like an enormous game of non-Euclidean, fourth-dimensional Jenga in which some of the pieces have gone missing and others have been replaced with tubes of chapstick or sticks of half-melted butter.
But you have to, because inconvenient scientists are ignored and widespred ecological ignorance is all the permission slip that corporate and political actors need to keep poking at the unholy geometry of that Jenga tower.
We did an activity that almost (but doesn’t quite) accomplish this at the zoo (not quite because it befits a more formal program setting, you can’t do it with one person who asks ‘so why are birds so important anyway?’). We had cards with ~20 or so different animals and plants (and rocks, water, and the sun) on necklaces. Kids would each choose a thing, and stand in a big circle.
I would be the sun, and talk about the different ways things in an ecosystem are related. Then I would point to a kid with a plant and say “Plants use my light to do photosynthesis and grow” and pass them a ball of string. We’d continue like that until every kid was holding a bit of the string, and we’d created a huge messy web.
Then I’d yell something like “Everybody, did you hear that everyone these days is eating frog legs. Frog, you just went extinct!” and I’d make a kid get out of the web. And we’d start breaking our web. Remove rocks, that cascades across the web. Divert the river, that cascades across the web. Kids could declare new connections (ie a hawk can say “I eat rats too, not just frogs!” and grab the string coming from the rat), but eventually, in most cases, the ecosystem left would have holes in it, and be falling to the floor where it used to be held. Often times predators would be in sudden competition over limited prey.
It was a good way to illustrate to kids that nothing in nature exists in a vacuum, and that removing or changing things in an ecosystem can put it into disarray, and raise problems in the future even if a new equilibrium can be reached.
Then they’d all be bummed because it paints a grim picture of the world around them and the state it’s in, so we’d eat a parent acceptable treat to raise spirits afterward.
