Science fair revisited

Part of the reason I became a hippie has to do with my junior-high science fair projects. My best friend, Amy, and I did a project about desertification — the process by which deserts are formed — in seventh grade. I think my mom came up with the topic while she was watching some TV special about starving children in Africa or something. It was a pretty interesting project that lent itself well to little dioramas and elaborate posters, which was good for us, because we were way more interested in art than in science.

We won a first superior with our desert project. Of course, to our way of thinking, this meant that anything short of a first superior the next year would constitute abject failure. Amy wisely decided that since we’d demonstrated ourselves to be capable of wrapping our heads around climatology, we should stick with this proven formula for success and do a similar topic the next year.

She found a Newsweek cover story about the greenhouse effect — better known today as global warming — and suggested we focus our efforts in that direction.

We brought home another pair of superior plaques and first-place ribbons for our efforts, but more importantly, we came out of the eighth grade with a social conscience driven by our forays into environmental science. We understood how man impacted his environment, and how that environment impacted man. The lessons must have sunk in, because we’ve both been jumping on and off the veggie wagon, shopping organic, and buying each other socially conscious Christmas presents (Heifer International, anyone?) for the better end of 20 years.

I thought of our science fair days the other day when I stumbled across a link to a downloadable book called Sunshine to Dollars. I downloaded a free sample — instructions for making a solar air heater out of a sheet of black plastic and a curtain rod — and went ahead and bought the whole book this evening for $9.95.

It’s a fun read (I’m about a third of the way through) that reminds me a lot of Mother’s Book of Homemade Power, which is one of my favorite books.

I get the feeling that the author’s house is one giant science-fair project. I highly recommend it if you are interested in either science, the environment, or both.

You can buy it here.

Emily