For the Tillamook School District, located about 70 miles west of Portland, Oregon, Envirothon is almost a rite of passage when it comes to learning about forestry.

“We’re a forestry community,” Tillamook High School Natural Resources Career Technical Education and Science Teacher Lori Loeffler said. “We have two mills in town, so these kids have grown up with the forest. It drives what we do.”

“(But) kids come in here with a lot of misconceptions. They might understand the how, but they don’t know the why,” she said.

For example, which trees are the best to harvest?; why is a logging road built one way in one area and a different way in another?; why are some trees are not planted in this section of the state but grow in another?

“Giving them the why makes the light go on,” she said. “That gets them to really care about why things are done a certain way – to take care of the forest and make sure it’s sustainable for future generations.”

For Loeffler’s students, preparing for Envirothon begins nearly at the start of the school year. Teams of five, and sometimes several alternates, are chosen just a few weeks after school starts in September. From there, the team selects which members will be the “mini-specialists” for each of the Envirothon test areas: forestry, wildlife, aquatic ecology and soils and land use. The fifth topic is a question related to current events (this year it focuses on waste) and at nationals, a sixth element, a 20-minute presentation followed by a 10-minute Q&A segment, is added.

Loeffler does as much teaching as possible outdoors, embedding Envirothon concepts into the natural resources curriculum, which includes having her students teach forestry-related classroom and field activities to students as young as kindergarten-age.

Envirothon teams across the country follow similar paths on the road to the national competition. Each state has a 20-question multiple choice and hands-on activities test. A variety of conservation and environmental agencies partner together – local, regional, statewide and federal – to determine the important topics and in some cases create the exam.

In Oregon – which will celebrate its 25th Envirothon anniversary in May 2022 – the Tillamook County Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD) helps Loeffler’s team prepare for the competition; the Marion County SWCD, with help from the City of Salem, prepares the aquatic ecology questions for the state competition. Other conservation districts participate in different ways.

“In Oregon, we rely heavily on experts, such as conservation districts, in each field to help write tests and administer those during the competition,” said Rikki Heath, environmental educator for the Oregon Forest Resources Institute, which runs the competition in the state.

“For forestry, we really want them to know tree and shrub identification, physiology (how a tree functions), forests as an ecosystem and about sustainable forest management and how trees are an important renewable resource,” Heath said.

The contests provide a connection to forestry with everyday life that many take for granted, such as turning on tap water to drink, wildlife watching, healthy soils that are used to grow crops, or a particular tree and its function on a city block.

In the process, Envirothon affords students the exposure and experience to enjoy natural resources, and in some cases (including several of Loeffler’s former students), make their way into the professional world of natural resources careers. They may become a forester that one day will head back to classroom to provide support and expertise for the school’s Envirothon team.

Tags: Forestry