Ecosystem Restoration Around the World: Six Short Documentaries for World Environment Day

World Environment Day 2021 is all about ecosystem restoration, and documentaries are a great way to see the range of what that can look like! From rainforests in India to the island of Wasini, here are six powerful shorts to watch in the classroom with your students.

Washington Middle School Science Students Partner with Local Volunteers to Restore Ecosystems for the UN Decade on Restoration

Learn how the UN Decade on Restoration will begin in science classrooms across Washington state! Fifteen teachers at eight schools across the state are partnering with the Washington Native Plant Society to pilot Youth Ecology Education through Restoration (YEER), a program in which middle school students will take on the role of restoration ecologists to answer a driving question: how can we, as student restoration ecologists, restore land in our community to increase biodiversity? In an NGSS aligned unit on ecosystems, students will learn about the functioning of healthy ecosystems, understand how native plant communities form the foundation of biodiverse ecosystems, and partner with a local volunteer Washington Native Plant Society Steward and a local land manager to restore land in their communities. 

How Blue Bird Gulch Came to Be

For World Environment Day 2021, artist Donna Iona Drozda writes poetically in this personal environmental education essay of how she and her partner BD came to restore a deeply scarred 50 acres of land to form Blue Bird Gulch, a tree farm retreat.

Healing the Creek that Runs Through the Heart of Nashville

The Cumberland River basin sits within the third most biodiverse freshwater ecosystem in the world. More than three million people and thousands of species rely on its clean and abundant water. Yet across the region, habitat changes continue to threaten precious and rare aquatic ecosystems. Mill Creek is one such ecosystem, and the Cumberland River Compact has worked to reimagine and restore the Creek since 2015 through innovative, science-based restoration solutions and an empowered and educated community. 

Inspired to take action? The UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) has developed a free 20-hour certification course on climate change that enables students in middle school (grades 6-8) to acquire academic knowledge and social and emotional competencies for climate change and environmental sciences. Debunk myths and learn how you can slow down climate change!