Lauren Khoyi Noyes

Science Peer Tutor, Northern Essex Community College

Today’s Date: July 19th, 2006

1. What interaction with an animal and/or nature in your life has had the biggest impact on you?

Wild Edible Plants (teaberry, asparagus, raspberries, Phragmites, dandelion greens, mints, etc.), I find moss and ferns easy to grow and tend -- very calming, the sound of rain

2. Did you have a favorite place in the great outdoors during your childhood?

childhood haunt: i built a sticks-and-leaves lean-to in my backyard as a kid and would make it the center of all my games with the neighborhood kids. it was our fort, it was a place to hide treasures (pretty feathers, fishing line, etc), and it kept us dry in rainstorms.

Now? in a canoe on a pond, in sand dunes, on the Great Marsh.

3. As a former zookeeper, I would love to know what your favorite animal is, and why?

As a kid I was always impressed that a ring-tailed lemur could so well resemble a skunk and a primate: I called them "skunky-monkeys." Little did I know, huh? Now I dig the echidna.

4. What do you think is the greatest environmental challenge facing us now, and what do you think will be the greatest challenge in the future?

Present challenge: loss of habitat/niche. Especially for amphibians, it's astounding how quickly they're being decimated. How much longer will we have amphibians before they all succomb to chitrid fungal infections? ...anyways. Too sad. It's not just about rainforest habitats, but they're surely well publicized and many more well-explored habitats certainly pale in comparison when we think of how much we'll lose.

Future challenge: preservation and the energy crises that continue and will continue to confront us. Will we preserve more lands? Will we undergo an anti-Industrial Revolution to some extent? What's coming next as humans interact with the environment? We are the problem.

5. If you could give everyone one piece of advice regarding the environment and our natural resources, what would it be?

The world is bigger than us, that is for sure, but is more fragile. We need to become both parents and children of the land we inhabit: parents in that we'll wisely look after its best interest, and children in that we won't forget where we came from.