In the Boy Scouts, there's a required merit badge called Environmental Science.
As part of the badge, you have to go out into nature and record what you see. The official wording is really sort of crazy - - Choose two outdoor study areas that are very different from one another (e.g., hilltop vs. bottom of a hill; field vs. forest; swamp vs. dry land). For BOTH study areas, do ONE of the following:
- Mark off a plot of 4 square yards in each study area, and count the number of species found there. Estimate how much space is occupied by each plant species and the type and number of nonplant species you find. Write a report that adequately discusses the biodiversity and population density of these study areas. Discuss your report with your counselor.
- Make at least three visits to each of the two study areas (for a total of six visits), staying for at least 20 minutes each time, to observe the living and nonliving parts of the ecosystem. Space each visit far enough apart that there are readily apparent differences in the observations. Keep a journal that includes the differences you observe. Then, write a short report that adequately addresses your observations, including how the differences of the study areas might relate to the differences noted, and discuss this with your counselor.
Then came the glorious thing called summer camps. In these camps, you work on merit badges for a week, and much like spring and summer term at college the work is streamlined and the push is to get through the program, and corners are cut. Programs that normally take weeks or even months (yes those badges do exist, and sadly they're the ones that are required) are compressed down to a single week.
While at my first summer camp I was working on this one because there was actually nature around, but there was one, tiny, itsy bitsy problem - it was a summer camp. Nothing living with half a brain was going to come within a mile of the yelling, singing, and excessive use of fire that is a summer camp. The second problem came with me just not caring. I could sit in the forest and stare at a lump of land for a long time, but it wasn't like I was going to go Hawthorne on it and see nature as a great thing and pull out great meaning from the animals (or rather the lack of them) in the area or the plant life, and I was 11 at the time, so there was even less of a chance that I was going to take a scientific approach towards any of it, and thus started one of the first times that I BS dumped with creative writing.
I don't remember much of what I wrote, but I do remember that I did not go out as many times as I should have, and I remembered that I wrote most of it all in the first day so that I didn't have to go out into the middle of a forest and sit around staring at nothing for an hour (or however long it was) for the rest of the week. I had merit badges to earn, and sitting in the forest wasn't going to help me earn them (officially it would have, but I thought that time could be better spent on other badges). The bits and pieces that I do remember about the stuff I wrote was that I anthropomorphized (<--- check out that vocabulary word! I almost spelt it right the first time too!) everything around me.
Had the counselor paid enough attention to read anything that I wrote, I'm just about 99.99% guaranteed that they would have laughed me off of the mountain because I didn't write a scientific analysis of my surroundings, I wrote what I always write, whatever my daydreams lead me to. If I remember right, I'm sure that I had a few paragraphs about the ants (that didn't even exist) and watching them crawl around. Let me make that perfectly clear, in my patch of Earth that I was supposed to be detailing for this merit badge, my 11 year old brain was able to see zero animals, and my 28 year old brain agrees with my 11 year old self in that not a single piece of sentient wildlife would be brave, or dumb, enough to live there.
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