‘Girls for Planet Earth’ Is Queen

It could have been called the Mother Earth Award. This fall, at the 81st annual conference of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) picked up the top Education Award for its Girls for Planet Earth program. Created by the Bronx Zoo’s Education Department, the program nurtured a new generation of conservation-minded young women. More importantly, WCS can reflect proudly on the accomplishments of the Girls for Planet Earth, who carried out their goals with the Zoo as their lab, the Society’s experts as their mentors, the camaraderie of one another as their inspiration . . . and not a blackboard in sight.

The Bronx Zoo Education Department launched Girls for Planet Earth to increase the participation of adolescent girls in conservation science. The program drew on the enthusiasm young people have for animals and nature as a way to motivate them to pursue a study of the environmental sciences. Participants ranged in age from 14 to 17, represented diverse backgrounds, and were drawn from high schools across the country. Five national partner organizations helped with recruitment, and the National Science Foundation’s Gender Equity Program awarded a three-year grant. The Gender Equity Program was launched a little over ten years ago in response to the loss of self-esteem young women often experience at adolescence, which can be detrimental to their pursuit of a wide range of academic discourses, particularly math and science.

The young women who became the backbone of Girls for Planet Earth participated in a year of scientific investigation and community conservation activities, crowned by an annual Earth Summit held at the Bronx Zoo. There, they explored the zoo’s resources, studied the Society’s on-the-ground approach to conservation, and met female role models among the WCS staff of leading science professionals. They also learned strategies and practices for launching environmental service projects in their hometowns. During the year following the summit, in small regional teams, the girls dedicated themselves to ambitious goals that ranged from habitat restoration to educating fellow students on native species. A Girls for Planet Earth website (girlsforplanetearth) that includes a “Virtual Clubhouse” allowed the teams to communicate with each other and WCS staff about their projects, and to help other young people undertake similar community outreach and research projects. The result was a vast network of youth activists who empowered a new generation with the capacity to make a difference in the future of our planet.

The Bronx Zoo Education Department seeks to build on the success of Girls for Planet Earth by making the program available to all teens. The website teens4planetearth.com offers tips on how to choose a conservation project and build an action plan, as well as profiles of the work of former Girls for Planet Earth teams and other useful resources.

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