Environmental Education in 2021 
 
So what is this “environmental education” all about? Most people think of Enviroschools and waste minimization plus vegetable gardening at school. Quite a number of schools have compost bins, worm farms and chickens running around. For more than a dozen years, Project Crimson and Mazda Foundation have planted outdoor classrooms in school grounds – forest type vegetation. 

Hawkes Bay's Cape to City linked all this to a large landscape project around Cape Kidnappers and 20,000 hectares of surrounding land. It encourages school kids and teachers to do the learning outside, using the environment as a context for education. 

Putting it into practice 
 
I got a request from a Christchurch teacher to help the school create a butterfly garden. Of course they had monarchs in mind. But I had other ideas! There’s this gorgeous deep purple Lycaenid butterfly which is native to Canterbury. 

We’ve just discovered (via Hamish and Brian Patrick) that it is different from all the other “boulder copper” butterflies and therefore it has no published scientific name, nor has it an appropriate common or Maori name. The species lives on very poor terrain: the gravel and stony outwash of the large braided rives. It has been ousted from Christchurch city simply through the expansion of this man-made habitat, called suburbia. 

Could we bring the boulder copper butterfly back into the city? 
 
The kids and teachers of Burnside Primary had to do a heck of a lot of research. Food plants, sources of nectar, longevity, what do males and females look like... 

It covered all parts of the curriculum.
PE: They decided to plant a garden full of host plants and nectar support
Maori studies: They contacted local iwi for their view on translocating this taonga back into the city and what would be an appropriate Maori name. 
Literacy: They sourced all the plants and wrote the script for the invites to local media. 
Maths: They worked out the number of males versus females. 
Arts: The butterflies are beautiful – both males and females 
 
Last Thursday we did the first translocation from McLeans Island to Burnside Primary School. The kids caught the butterflies by hand and by net, and carefully transported them in flax-woven baskets, line with soft fabric, so that the butterflies could hang on during the bus ride to the new location. 
 
We had a Mihi Whakatau in the school hall; a blessing for the taonga in their new place. The butterfly will officially be described by a small group of secondary school students from Burnside High School, together with two entomological taxonomists. That’s a cool job, with genetics, morphology and ecological Science. They’ll publish the new description and name in an international peer-reviewed journal. 
 
If we are serious about our Planet and humanity’s future, we need NATURE-LITERATE Kids. We are re-writing the execution of the curriculum.

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