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Aug 22, 2007 8:46 am US/Central
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U Of M Biology Camp Teaches About Nature And Life
by Don Shelby
(WCCO)
"Water indeed reflects heaven," wrote naturalist Henry David Thoreau more than 150 years ago.
Thoreau had a mystical fascination with water and it was a pond that made him famous.
At the headwaters of the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota, you can feel the essence of his words strongest: "You could anywhere run across the stream on the rocks and in its constant murmurings would quiet the passions of mankind forever."
In order to study those "constant murmurings" better, a camp has been set up at Itasca for some of the smartest people in the world. They are incoming freshmen to the University of Minnesota's College of Biological Science. The camp is called Nature of Life.
Instructor David Biesboer has as much passion for learning and water as Thoreau. He takes his students to a soggy wetland, known as a bog, for a bug-swatting, hands-on biology lesson in the nature of life.
"I can pull up a soil sample that based on our measurements is about 800 years old," he said.
The camp can be thought of as a boot camp for students who have never failed or never tasted dirt.
"Many of these students of course are urban," Biesboer said. "Their lives to this point in time have been aimed at living in urban or suburban life."
Many of the students who want to become doctors or teachers have done most of their studying in a classroom. Biesboer wants to get them away from the microscope and outside for a real close-up view of biology.
"Biology is life," Biesboer said. "Biology is your life, biology is my life, biology is the life of all the people that we have in our society."
"I think people learn more when they're not so stressed out," student Christine Yi said. "I think that people learn to enjoy what they're learning more because they don't feel so pressured to learn something."
Biesboer hopes the students will learn the important connections between human life, water and plants.
"They breathe for us," Biesboer said. "All of these plants are producing oxygen and consuming carbon dioxide. You think ahead on the problems of global warming. It's important places like this, like wetlands, especially very large ones that breathe and consume carbon dioxide and take that out of the atmosphere. They're very important."
The students said after this experience, they will be looking at the world in a whole new way.
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