Exploring the Watershed Landscape: How do we clean this up?

What is a watershed? What is pollution and where does it come from? 

Kids at the Brooks Memorial library in Brattleboro explored these questions using the EnviroScape watershed model this past Tuesday. A watershed is an area of land that drains into a common body of water. We identified where this was on the watershed model landscape and described other things they saw going on. With excitement and wide eyes they moved some things around and explored what was going on. “This must be the farm, and all the cows can go here, and the tractor should be here too!” One child exclaimed. They moved the cars around, put the beaver in the river, and discovered where the factory was. 

Water pollution can come from a wide variety of sources. We explored this by sprinkling some pollutants onto the landscape. We talked about what they were and why humans usually use them. We used brown sprinkles as our fertilizers and compost. The kids all identified where that would probably go – maybe the farm or the house’s backyards. We used blue sprinkles to represent salt on our roads. “I saw salt on the path coming in here!” one child explained. We all talked about why we use salt. We used yellow sprinkles for the pesticides. And talked about where that would go and so on. After applying all our pollutants we made it rain! 

The kids all took turns making it rain, and watched as the colors of the pollutants ran and smeared across the landscape and the murky water drained down to the lowest point in our watershed. 

I asked the kids, ”How does the environment look and who might be impacted by this pollution?” The kids could see the answers clearly painted on the watershed: this pollution affects everyone – the plants, animals, fish, salamanders, and people that used this water. 

Next question, “How do we fix this?” Hmm. That’s a harder question. After some silence we discussed planting trees and where they should go along rivers, rain gardens, fencing in cows from accessing the river, and erosion.

We talked about how if we don’t change anything the pollution going into our river in the model wouldn’t stop. It would keep getting worse if we didn’t address it and come up with solutions. And how it would take many solutions as the pollution was coming from a variety of places. One girl exclaimed, “We need to clean up after ourselves!”