Biocitizen Inc

With its motto of "Off the screen and into the green," Biocitizen School offers a solution to the problem of "nature deficit disorder." We cue students to the living, cyclical systems and processes of local ecologies, believing they need to know where they live—for it is not possible to know who one is, unless one knows where one is.

When a person knows where they are, they can know what to do; they can know what they are doing, why they are doing it, and what they are doing it to. The awareness that we are placed, and that the place we inhabit is crucial to who and what we are, is undertaught and even ignored our standardized indoor educational system.

The environmental philosopher Aldo Leopold wrote: "We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry." Although industrialism thrives by making us placeless (in the McDonaldsland fashion of making every place the same- and finally no- place), we are always capable of reorienting ourselves to “what supports industry”: the biophysical dynamisms of our place, the earth. At this time of climate change and mass extinctions, Biocitizen's mission is to facilitate this reorientation. 

We appreciate your support, which will help us sustain our youth environmental leadership program called the Biocitizen Corps. It will help us to enlarge our Rapid Bioassessment (RBA) program, a citizen's science initiative that monitors river health by collecting and inventorying the bugs that live in river beds. It will also allow us to meet our goal of having 10 scholarships for the Our Place Summercamp, which brings kids out into the 5 ecoregions of the Nonotuck Biome so they can learn their "Place."