The 2021 Envirothon
The 2021 Envirothon season recently came to an end with the awards ceremony on May 21st. Our team competed with schools in towns all around Massachusetts including Acton, Brockton, Lexington, Millbury, Newton, Barre, and Dudley, and will be representing Massachusetts at the NCF National Competition in late July. Our team was lucky enough to compete in the Natural Resource Challenge and the Current Issue this year.
Natural Resource Challenge
Usually, the competition has us take a written test that assesses our general environmental knowledge with theory-based questions, but this year, the competition turned out differently. Teams are presented with a site map of a hypothetical school and have to address its potential environmental impacts on the surrounding water, forest, soil, and wildlife. The competition assesses our knowledge with questions that require both comprehension and understanding of how to apply information like planning the school’s irrigation system, analyzing the effects of removing trees, discussing soil alteration, and estimating habitat damage. Teams submit a 30 minute video answering these questions and are judged on how descriptive and accurate their responses are.
Our strategy was “divide and conquer” to the fullest extent. Our team of 10 students split into groups of 2-3 members each (water, forest, soil, and wildlife), with every group making an approximately 7.5 minute video to answer their questions. Then, within each group, we split the questions between members, and in my group, it meant each member only had to respond to 1-2 questions. To make sure we didn’t have any drastic errors, everyone peer-reviewed both their own group’s answers and other responses in the team. With this strategy, everyone had an assigned goal to work towards while also having room for collaboration and peer-review.
To make sure everyone had time to go through all of these steps, we made a schedule of the goals for every week including research periods, drafting time, space for revisions, and a recording week. Also, to ensure that the timetable doesn’t get pushed forward because of other commitments, we instituted catch-up times for people to finish up any pending work.
This system definitely succeeded, and its resulting increases in efficiency and accuracy were a key factor in our team’s advancing past the state competition. In addition to all team members participating in this Natural Resource Challenge, five of us volunteered to work on the Current Issue.
Current Issue
The 2021 Current Issue was “Water Resources and Climate Change”, so teams had to identify water’s connection with climate change, forests, wildlife, and soil along with identifying an important issue in our local community and proposing a solution.
Our video started off with the Nashua River, discussing how it changed from a bright red sewage disposal area in the 1960s to a clear river now through the effects of local, state, and federal laws. We then discussed how water is distributed in Groton, describing the Groton Water District and detailing the functions and processes of the Pepperell Wastewater Treatment plant. Transitioning into stormwater using clips from our interviews with Michelle Colette of the Groton Conductorlab Oversight Committee and Eileen Mchugh of the Groton Earth Removal Stormwater Advisory Committee, we explained Groton’s stormwater management system and emphasized its main principle to keep stormwater on site as much as possible using both green and grey infrastructure. Finally, we connected climate change to Groton’s water resources using information from the 2016-2017 Groton Water Drought and arguing that since the drought was largely caused by a lack of precipitation, these events will only worsen with the climate crisis.
An important piece of our Natural Resource Challenge and Current Issue presentations was the graphics, where we used highlighted screenshots of Groton laws and acts along with ArcGIS maps to help support our points. Although this will be less feasible when we return to in-person presentations and testing, it was definitely an important skill to learn and it enhanced our presentation.
After we submitted our two presentations, our Current Issue team had a 20 minute virtual with the judges where they asked us questions about specific points in our videos and climate change topics. Since we didn’t have a script here, we split the video’s content into different sections and had each person completely learn all of the material to be ready for questions about that piece. The strategy worked out because everything was accounted for and we had a system to decide who responded to each interview question, making us more organized.
Overall, I’m grateful to have participated in both the Natural Resource Challenge and the Current Issue because it helped me build skills in researching, writing, presenting, and answering questions on the fly. Although I’ll miss this presentation-based format, I’m excited to return to the original in-person competition next year. If you’d like to look into participating in the Envirothon, I’ve attached some links below.