Beth Brown

I work part time for the Board’s' director, Anita Foland. John Klein, her predecessor, created the position in 1985. He called it the Conservation Awareness Program, and the Board has kept the position. There was no training. John just said, "Do this,'' and I did. That was how it all came about. I actually earn a little check. I office out of my home, so I provide the office, all the equipment, and my car. Every County Conservation Board is the state is mandated to provide environmental education, so that is what I do for this County's Board. My particular job is to do programs in the schools, working with the teachers on different environmental issues that they want to include in their curriculum.  Working with our teachers has been a great honor.

In a class room, for instance, a project we have been doing every year for maybe 10 years at the third grade level is a two-day project dealing with water and the use of water.  It is, hopefully, a way to help the children understand that, first of all, we have no new water. There is no such thing as new water. What we have is what was here when the planet earth was created.
It is the very same water. In this unit, the class is learning about water and water treatment plants, so what I bring to them is designed to enhance what the class is doing. Evidently it has worked for them because they ask me back for this particular project every year. In this case, I go room to room so, for instance, if there are five third grade rooms, I make my presentation in each one because they have homework to do along with learning in class.

For another subject, the fifth grade rooms combine a couple of classes, and I read them the story from a Dr. Seuss book, The Lorax. Dr. Seuss really didn't write for children. He wrote for the people who would be reading the books to children. I don't know when he wrote this book, but I am sure he had an idea that things weren't going like they should be because it tells how one person destroys his habitat, using it up to make money.

The Lorax is about a person who finds an area that has Truffula Trees. He always wanted to own property, and he is telling a child about how he came upon this piece of land and knew he wanted it. This is a bad guy named Once-ler. He came upon the Truffula Trees and thought of nothing or no one other than his wants, he builds a factory and he cuts down the Truffula Trees to make stuff from the tufts of the Truffula. The product that Once-ler made was called the Thneed, which looks like a pair of pink underwear.

But there are other creatures that live in this habitat, too. The Brown Bar-ba-loots, the Humming Fish, and the Swomee-Swans all lived there. However, in his greed, Once-ler cut down all the trees, not knowing or caring that while he was doing that, the Brown Bar-ba-loots, depended on the Truffula fruit for food, couldn't live there anymore because their food supply who was gone. They had to leave. He polluted the water that the Humming Fish lived in so they couldn't live there, and the air was so polluted that the Swomee-Swans couldn't live there anymore, either. Of course, everybody lost their jobs in the factory he'd built because there weren't any more resources to make the product.

So they were all sent away, all but this little creature called the Lorax that pops out of the stump. The Lorax is telling Once-ler about what he's done and when the last tree is cut, the Lorax disappears. The story ends with Once-ler realizing that he had used up his environment. He told the child there was one Truffula Tree left, and he must go find it and plant it and build a forest and protect it. Then all the Truffula Trees can come back. Yes, it is a sad story but it's a true story of how we're dealing with our planet.

I made big posters to go along with each of the characters. I have a big poster of Once-ler, one of each the Lorax, the Brown Bar-ba-loots, the Humming Fish, and the Swomee-Swans. I created the game, so I get to be the bad guy, Once-ler, and the teacher is the good guy, the Lorax. I break the children into groups of Brown Bar-ba-loots and Humming Fish and Swomee-Swans. Every time each one of the groups hears their name they make a distinctive sound. The Brown
Bar-ba-loots go "bu-bu-bu" with their lips. The Humming Fish go "hummmm," and the Swomee­ Swans go “Swom-m-m." When the Lorax is read, they shout, "Yay! The Lorax!" When Once­ler is read, they all go "shame! shame!" When each group hears its name, they are sent away. They put their poster down and they're gone. So by the time we are through there is nothing but silence because everything is gone. Nothing is left but the Once-ler.

Then we do problem solving. We talk about ways we can use our natural resources while protecting them for all living things. That is their kick-off for studying their biomes, which is an area where certain species live. Each class has their own biome to study, like the desert, where only certain plants, animals, and insects live. Then there is the ocean, the Arctic, the wetlands, and the prairie. If there are five classes, they each have their own biome for that particular study.

What I do is not recess, it is not entertainment, but is to be a part of their curriculum. I do an extension of whatever unit the class is studying. In fifth grade, for their Indian unit, I put on a costume in front of them, and I become an old crone, a Native American grandmother, and I tell stories. In second grade we do snakes. We bring in live snakes and we study reptiles. I also do owls for second grade. When I started with John, I was in every single elementary classroom. Changes have been mandated for our elementary school system and teachers don't have as much time as they formerly did to work in extra units. As one of my I-35 teachers said, "The no-child­left-behind, means no teacher left standing."

But I also wear another hat, one that acquainted me with Gladys Black, who was known as the Bird Lady of Iowa. A federal permit is required in order to work with birds, and I am licensed to work with injured birds - wild birds only, not pet-shop birds. I hold federal and state permits to rehabilitate birds, to hold birds for education, and to band birds.

I've been working with wounded or orphaned birds since 1983. People generally and the DNR specifically have brought them to me. Officers in the area know me and know that I am licensed, so they tell people to call me. I am not competing with veterinarians. They deal with large and small live-stock and animals, not with birds. There are other licensed rehabilitators in the state. Some work with mammals and some with wild birds. Laurie Spencer from Osceola is licensed to work with birds. Anna Harvey of Osceola is licensed to work with mammals.

Gladys Black died in 1999, but her legacy lives on. She has a refuge named for her by Red Rock and the osprey tower at Lake Red Rock was dedicated to her last year, 2006 - The Gladys Black Osprey Learning Tower. I'm participating in that project as a consultant - the Osprey Re-introduction Project. Perhaps it would be nice to mention that Gladys Black was a Public Health Nurse in Clarke County in the '30s and met her husband here. He was from Woodburn.

My area goes beyond Clarke. In my capacity as Naturalist, I work in Clarke County, but when I travel outside the county, it has to do with birds, particularly owls, and I travel all over with them. I use the birds in education because I hold live birds. In the Des Moines area, I have for, about 16 years, done the Science Center pre-school. I also go to public and private schools, as well as home schools. I am in Chariton, Lucas County, at least once or twice every year. I also go to Madison and Warren Counties. I used to travel to Council Bluffs every year for a high school class but that teacher retired. I think I'm awfully glad. I had to leave about 5:00 in the morning to do what they asked not only because of travel time but packing up the birds takes some doing.

Taking care of the birds probably comes under the heading of being masochistic, and not being motivated to save toward retirement. In Iowa, rehabilitation is up to whom ever chooses to do it. It becomes their problem. Even though all of our wild life is protected by the state, rehabilitators have to find their own funding. The state does not help with that. Jim's support and encouragement has made this all possible.

One of the reasons I went to work after Jim went on the bench was to try to help support this project since it was my idea. Jim is very good about collecting dead squirrels, which probably needs an explanation. I raised two vultures. They need "road-kill" to eat. They were wonderful little guys to raise and when they were old enough, one of them said, "Goodbye. I'm a vulture. I am going to leave and be a vulture." He soared up in the sky and was never seen again.

The other one is more people-oriented.  He flies beautifully. He likes to fly with other vultures, but then he comes down to visit people, and somehow people are a little alarmed to see this big black bird about 2 1/2 feet tall with a five foot wing span in their yard. He won't go away. He has been to the Methodist Church, sat on golf carts, and on the roof of every neighbor in our little area. He has visited East Lake Park. I'm surprised he hasn't visited the library. Maybe he has and nobody saw him. It is easy to understand that people become a little upset if they go out on their deck to do some grilling and find a vulture sitting there.

The Police have called, the Sheriff s department has called, but I don't know what to do about him. We are resigned to having a vulture, and vultures eat dead squirrels. The other day when Jim came home from having ridden his bicycle to the post office, he announced,  "There is a dead squirrel in the street, do you want it?" I said, "Yeh!" So he went back and acted like he was being a good citizen, moving that poor creature out of the way so that it wouldn't get smashed.

He stuck it in his saddle bag and came home with a dead squirrel to feed to the vulture. Just now, when I left home, the vulture was on our deck and the squirrel is still waiting for him to eat it.

FOOD

My conservation awareness leads me to notice many inequities in our society that I wish I could change - except the problems seem overwhelming. I'd been concerned for children who are in "food insecure" homes. Drake University has developed a paper (available on the web) that shows hunger to be wide-spread throughout Iowa, the "breadbasket of the world." Not only are there hungry children but hungry elderly in the state and in our county. One of the counties the researcher studied was Decatur, our next door neighbor.

I don't know how you get the attention of the community. I find it so strange, when we try to talk to people about the matter, they respond with condemnation of the parents. They note what the mothers have in their shopping carts in the check-out line. That doesn't help the child. They didn't have anything to say about where or to whom they were born. They're not capable of or legally permitted to go out and earn a living, so it is kind of that old Dickensonian idea that we ought to throw these people into debtors' prison, as though little children nine or ten ought to be out there earning their food. We should be punishing the children for the sins of their parents?  Be they Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, or none of the above, I'm interested in their buying more food, and could it be more healthful?

We seem to care a lot about the hungry all over the world except right here. There was one family in town in which the husband lost his job, and was not qualified to take another. They had no income! The wife started cleaning houses but she did not earn enough to feed the entire family so she went without. This woman was hungry! She was active in the community, was known by everybody, and was hungry! I don't know if she went for help, if she got food stamps, for instance. It was hard for me to ask, "Are you hungry? What's going on in your family?"

We've changed our food system. We can eat strawberries in January. When I was a kid we ate foods when they were in season. I was fortunate to be raised in a family in which, if there was ever a time when we were poor, I didn't know about it or see it. My mother canned and froze things and we butchered. Everyone in our family was involved in food production as a family.

We could learn so much from our Hispanic families. I see these kids coming to our elementary school. They are the ones who have had sleep, who have been fed, and whose clothes are clean. When they return home, somebody who cares will be there to look after them. Children are their most important concern. They are cared for and made to know they are important. How much some of our children need to know that! My personal experience of meeting a family was when they brought me a little bird. They were a lovely family.

Long before I knew there were hungry children - not in the big city, but here - I was involved in taking a group of kids to Springbrook in the wintertime. One of the children had come without mittens, and the leader told me that this family had been evicted and were living in their car. There are mittens for kids to use, kept in the nurses' offices at both Clarke County schools, but this little fifth grade child didn't realize hers were lost until they were on the bus. It was one of those light bulb moments.We have children sleeping in a car in Clarke County? Yes, we do, and perhaps more than we know.

The Drake Study pointed out that not only children are deprived of basic needs, but in some communities there are people, particularly the elderly, who - even if they have money - don't have transportation to get groceries. In some places all they have is a convenience store. They are correctly named - they are for convenience, but the food is expensive, not nutritious, and there is not a variety from which to choose. What is available may fill the tummy but it is not healthful. It is wrong that we have this situation in our country! One of the statistics in the report is the number of households that are food insecure. Over 400,000 individuals in the state of Iowa, not all in urban areas but rural as well. It is shocking! In a list of states regarding food secure households, we rank 41st. That is pretty far down the line in this ''breadbasket of the world."

My problem is I have no solution. I spend a lot of time calling Washington. I certainly communicate with our congressional people, but they always come back with something about the program they have going and how wonderful it is. It seems to me they don't live in the real world. They don't see or hear what you and I see and hear. Do they ever read a report like the Drake report on hunger? As we work with children, we can recognize in some that there is something wrong. The Drake study pointed out there is a relationship between hunger and behavior.  The superintendent of the Lamoni schools said one way to get children to change their lives is by feeding them. This is what he was hoping to accomplish by a summer breakfast program. People in the medical field know. The school administrators know.

And the teachers pretty much know when the child is in trouble in lots of ways, and if there  is some potential of a serious problem. In Clarke Elementary there is a B.D. (Behavior Disorder) room. I believe their maximum is 10 children in the class, and there is a waiting list. As we look at these children, it is obvious that they are deprived of what you and I would think is a stable home with food, shelter, and love.

OUR CULTURE

Another issue I would like to see changed: We seem to have forgotten that our culture is made up of all kinds of cultures. In Osceola we have the perfect set-up to start in kindergarten teaching Spanish because we have these young Latino children who could help their classmates learn to speak Spanish while they are being helped to learn English. This proposal is another difficult subject to introduce in a conversation. People get all upset, like we are trying to change our culture. We know English is our language but we do live in the world and our children are going to live even more in the world. Maybe if we learn each others' language, we will learn to understand them and their culture better than we do now.

We've never really taken a look at ourselves. We've never really said, "Our country was founded on trying to wipe out a race of people, the indigenous people." We did ethnic cleansing long before ethnic cleansing took place in Bosnia, Africa or other places, like Hitler doing it during the '40s. When we couldn't wipe out a race, in the 1930's - within my lifetime - our government took Native American children off the reservations, to enroll them in special schools where they were taught to give up their language and their religious traditions. That created a group of people who couldn't work in either their or our society.

We are a country that was built on slavery. We have never come to terms with that. I am not saying we are bad people. I just would like for people to take a step back and look at who we are, and so we are now going to build walls between Mexico and the United States? We're a country of lots of different cultures and we will only be great again when we recognize that is who we are and that's where we came from. That's where we've been, so why do we think we are so wonderful and want everybody to be like us? People from other countries tell us that we know less about what is going on in the world than any country. That is what is going wrong right now.

At least in WWII everybody was involved. We had ration stamps, children bought bonds, there was rationing, and people grew victory gardens and worked in defense plants. But now we've been told to go shop and not pay any attention because this is just collateral damage, these people who are dying every day. "It doesn't have anything to do with us. Go shop. We'll get them to be like us and then we'll all come home and life will go right on." I don't get it. We don't understand a lot of cultures, maybe because our country is still so relatively new that we haven't learned how to be grown up, how to accept other people for what they are? Is that possible? We know nothing about this culture we are trying to make like us. Nor do we seem to want to learn.

Then there is the matter of "keeping up with the Joneses." I see parents who charge things so their children can have whatever some other family has. There was a time when one of our daughters tried to run away because we only had three pair of blue jeans and a friend of hers had a whole lot more. We allowed her to pack her suitcase and I think she carried it up to the square and decided she didn't have any place to go so she thought she would go back home. I blame a lot on television and the marketing.

But there seems to be no shame in having a big credit card debt. Almost everybody can get a credit card except probably the people we are talking about here.

Jim is now a Senior Judge for the Court of Appeals and has been that since his retirement from the District Court bench. He is still writing decisions on cases for the Court of Appeals, and is on the bench only when they ask him to take the place of someone who is on vacation or ill or there is a vacancy and there is a case that has to be heard. He loves it a lot. Unfortunately he has only one year left. There is forced retirement from the District Court bench at age 72 and from the Senior Judgeship at 78. They are wasting a wonderful resource by that ruling. They are losing out on the wisdom and experience of many in this age group. We, in fact, may be the largest population of all.

Our oldest daughter, Julie, decided to make a career change, and entered the University of Central Arkansas. Last fall, she graduated summa cum laude and now she is in graduate school getting her master's degree in nutrition. She is also involved in exercise science. She has become a runner and is a certified aerobics teacher. She hopes to get her degree by the end of next summer (2008). She has turned into this incredible student and changed her life completely. When you get a degree in nutrition, you also learn how to feed the hungry. One of Julie's big interests, as mine is also, is organic foods. A problem is they are so terribly expensive. This is an issue the Drake study points out - healthy food isn't always available for the poor. Most of our Farmers' Markets now take food stamps. With their use, people can get homegrown food. Julie has two children, Jason and Jennifer, and three granddaughters.

Our daughters Mary and Susan are twins. Mary works in Des Moines at Sam and Gabe's Restaurant, and for a caterer. Her favorite job, however, is as a tax preparer. She has now started running, joining Julie and Jeff in this activity. Mary and I enjoy spending time together.

Susan is an absolutely lovely girl who sees everything as sunshine. She doesn't like negative thoughts or talk. She and her husband, Ed Pritchard, have a 20 year old daughter, Amy. Susan is a senior account manager for a financial service. Ed is a vice president of fleet management and purchasing for Silver Eagle Distributors, Inc.

Then there's Jeff. He is another ball of wax. His story is in the 8th volume of Recipes for Living. The education they are getting is incredible. Jeff’s assignment has evolved over time, but since 2003 he and the family have lived in Central Asia, and he presently works for a non-governmental organization out of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. To prepare for this kind of life they studied Spanish for a year in Costa Rica, so it is Alyssa's first language. She learned to read Spanish in Costa Rica and Venezuela before she learned to read in English. They both speak some French and they both are in Arabic studies. Jeff has learned to pick up languages very quickly. He is fluent in Spanish, can speak Erdu, Hindi, and was used as a translator during the earthquake in Pakistan.

Last year when Jeff was in the states, he, Daniel, and Jim rode in RAGBRAI (Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa): I pulled the camper so Mary and I were there, too, as the support group. One night we pulled into the overnight town. In RAGBRAI, people set up all kinds of food booths, and when we went to get something to eat, we came to a booth that appeared to be from India. Jeff stopped and chose something from the menu. The woman in her Indian dress was cooking and Jeff started talking to her in Hindi. She started to answer him and then looked up and said, "How do you know that?" She was absolutely floored. I said to him, "That blows me away. I have a hard enough time with English. I don't know how you learn these other languages." He said for him it is really easy. He has that basic Spanish and now has the tools to learn other languages.

I have been very privileged. I came from a large extended family that cared for and nurtured me. I was lucky enough to marry the most wonderful, funny, smart man in the world and to be a parent of four wonderful children, and to have the opportunity to work with birds, children and teachers in the schools.

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Last Revised October 24, 2013