Duanne certified as Master Naturalist

 

Congratulations to Duanne for completing the rigorous training to be a Master Naturalist!   In the following description, he tells about the program which he recently participated in.  

 

He has always been a "go-to guy" for us for questions about the environment and about living green, and now he can expect that we will head his way with even more questions.

 

Thanks very much for describing this interesting program, Duanne.   Feel free to pass on to us any of the new knowledge you have gained.

 

A mile wide and an inch deep…that’s how the Mississippi River was once described. That is also an apt description for the week-long WI Master Naturalist Program that I completed in mid-May at Schmeekle Reserve on the campus of UW Stevens Point.

Twenty-four students (mostly with as much gray hair as I have) immersed themselves in attempted understanding of the natural world as we know it in Wisconsin. In a total of forty hours, nineteen women and five men, generally from the Stevens Point area but from as far away as Chicago, listened to speakers and went on daily field trips.   All hoped to upgrade their value as volunteers at some of the more than 2,000 environmental education and nature centers around the state.

Please don’t assume the first sentence is in any way a negative reflection on the fledgling program administered by Cooperative Extension Service.   Patterned after the very popular Master Gardener program, the Naturalist edition covers a staggering amount of material with each day of the five-day course covering different parts of the environment.   Included were landscape, ecology, plant life, wildlife, water, and the impact of human evolution.  

Now being presented in more than 43 states, the WI version states its objective as simply, “…certified volunteers will work in their communities in three natural resource service arenas;  stewardship, education and research.”