Solving for Pattern

Whole Earth, Spring, 2001 by Michael K. Stone

Fourth-graders' love of a shrimp has built a human web for changing education, ranching, government, philanthropy, and parenting.

On a crisp late-January morning, I'm on my way to Paul Martin's ranch in southern Sonoma County, California. The ten miles from Petaluma (a city of about 50,000) to Paul's ranch, and the ten from there to the coast, traverse g rolling grassy hills, dotted with stands of oak, bay, and buckeye. Dairy and sheep-ranching country. I bicycle here sometimes, and the endless undulations are familiar. These hills know only two colors, golden brown and green. Since it's winter, the land is emerald.

Past Two Rock Presbyterian Church, large cardboard "STRAW" signs mark Paul's driveway. I park by an open structure sheltering 10- or 12-foot-high stacks of hay bales. Laurette Rogers, director of STRAW (Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed), greets me. "Listen to the meadowlarks!" she exclaims. "I don't recall ever seeing so many here."

From where we're standing, Stemple Creek's route through the pastureland is easy to trace by the lines of willows, interspersed with oaks, extending several feet on either side of the creek. The foliage is high and thick at the east end of the property, where STRAW did its first planting eight years ago. Farther west, where the students will be planting today, it thins out considerably. "When we came for our first planting," Laurette says, "I didn't realize that that was the creek. It looked more like a drainage ditch."

The day's workers, fourth- and fifth-graders from Lagunitas and Wade Thomas Schools, arrive. I had envisioned big yellow school buses, but a line of sedans, station wagons, and SUVs, driven by parents, pulls in. About forty kids pile out and head for the hay bales. "Off, right now," yells Laurette. "We've been doing these projects for nine years without any injuries, and we're not going to have the first one today." Later she confides, "When I'm in the classroom, I'm very mellow. Out here, I get intense." Her carefulness is one reason Paul Martin trusts STRAW on his property.

Laurette directs the students' eyes to the lush growth in the original planting. "See those trees? The sprigs you're planting today will be that tall by the time you're in high school." The students pull calf-high rubber boots over their shoes, and line up for work gloves. They're divided into groups of four, each accompanied by a teacher or parent. Each team is issued a heavy digging bar, about six feet long and an inch in diameter, with one pointed end. After a final reminder, "Last chance to use the portable toilet," students, parents, and teachers trek across a muddy field to the creek. They're led by Boone Vale, a staffer from Prunuske Chatham, Inc., a design and construction firm specializing in restoration that is overseeing today's restoration. Prunuske Chatham and STRAW staff have already been out to the work site, to lay temporary board bridges across the creek and double-check that Paul Martin's electric fences are turned off. On the other side of a barbed wire fence, a herd of Holsteins turns its full attention to the noisy newcomers.

The creek is three or four feet wide, a few inches deep, down two-foot embankments. The Prunuske Chatham staff have placed flags at the places they chose for planting the willows. Boone shows the students how to use the digging bars, three or four people at time, pounding them into the ground, wiggling them around, pounding again, until they've dug a narrow hole a couple of feet deep. He hands out three-foot-long willow sprigs, a half-inch in diameter, cut from trees on the property. He shows the students how to tell which end is "up," how to plant them and tramp down the earth. Recent rains have left the ground soft, making digging and planting easier. The children invent songs and chants to accompany themselves as they take turns with the digging bars. They work for about ninety minutes, break for lunch, then get back to work. By the time they leave, they've planted more than 300 sprigs.

How It Started

STRAW's origins lie in 1992 at Brookside School in suburban San Anselmo (about five miles from Whole Earth's offices), where Laurette Rogers taught fourth grade.

She had showed her class a National Geographic film on rainforest destruction. "It was filled with haunting music and pictures of chain saws," recalls Aaron Mihaly, a member of that class and now a high school senior headed for Harvard. A depressing discussion about endangered species followed, until one student raised his hand. "But what can we do?" "I looked into his eyes," says Laurette, "and somehow I just couldn't give him a pat answer about letter writing and making donations."

She turned to Meryl Sundove, a trainer for a now-defunct California State Adopt-A-Species Program. Laurette gave Meryl a couple of criteria: the species needed to be local, and she wanted it to be obscure, to counter the bias toward beautiful and charismatic species being most worth saving. Meryl suggested a trout, a salmon, and the California freshwater shrimp, Syncaris pacifica (about the size of a child's little finger), now found only in fifteen creeks in Marin, Sonoma, and Napa counties. The students voted for shrimp, but they weren't that enthusiastic. "We didn't expect to like it," Laurette says.