Summer and Ellie, Juniors from multi-level Troop 65659, went to Meadow Mountain Ranch to complete their outdoor Journey. They did most of their activities in the Homestead House. It was the perfect place to complete their Animal Habitats badge and then have fun with the Eco Camper badge by making a Leave No Trace presentation for family and friends, preparing trail mix, learning how to set up a campsite kitchen, pretending to be animals, and making notes in their journals on a short hike.
Summer and Ellie made a video and word search game to teach others about Leave No Trace principles for their Take Action Project. You can view the video, A Message from a Bear, on YouTube or read the transcript below.
"Welcome to my instructional video about what trash can do to the environment its animals and what we can do to help. If you look to my left here you'll see some trash. I'm also going to teach you how to properly dispose of said trash but step one make sure that you have all your trash, do not just dump it on the ground or into a water source. That would be bad for the environment. So the way you want to dispose of this if you're at a campsite there will usually be a bear box a giant metal box that keeps creatures like me from getting into it and stealing all the stuff such as food and smell-ables et cetera and next to that bear box is also usually a trash can. We can use that to dispose of this trash. For the negative effects it has on the animals and that if you do not do these steps then animals can get stuck in the trash or mistake it for food. It's not good for them. A lot of plastic accidentally goes to baby animals. When this happens what it can do to the environment is pollute the water harm the trees and nature and prevent and stop animals from finding actual food for the babies. What we can do to help with this is to make sure that you carry in all of your stuff and make sure that it's all being carried out if your campsite or camping event does not have a bear box trash can, you can just store the trash in some random reusable container. These are some of the things that you can do to help the environment and prevent things like plastic going to babies or animals trying to eat the plastic. These steps can help stop all this from happening.
This first drawing here is to treat living plants with respect and to take pictures of flowers instead of picking them. The second drawing represents that I don't take home anything I've found and this third drawing here represents leaving things as I found them."