Air Date: Week of November 28, 1997

Steve talks with the winner of the recent Living On Earth website contest polling listeners' environmental IQ. And the winner is... Ms. Goldie Freeman, a teacher in Dorchester, Massachusetts.

Transcript

CURWOOD: Recently we aired an interview with the president of the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation. The Foundation had just released the results of its nationwide quiz on the Environment. The surprising news was that two thirds of the people who took the quiz flunked, and less than 1 in 10 got a perfect score. So, we challenged you Living on Earth listeners to take our version of this quiz. It was harder: open-ended questions instead of multiple choice, and we required a perfect score. Well, the results are in, and almost a quarter of you got all 9 questions right. And for those who didn't, a high percentage missed just 1 or 2. And out of all these hundreds of entries, we have a winner Her name is Goldie Freeman of Dorchester, Massachusetts, and her entry was the first one we received with all the correct answers to 9 questions. Ms. Freeman, welcome to the program and congratulations on a perfect score.

FREEMAN: Thank you very much.

CURWOOD: What do you do?

FREEMAN: I'm a teacher in a Montessori school in Duxbury, Massachusetts.

CURWOOD: You can tell us. How come you know so much about the environment?

FREEMAN: Well, when I lived in Canada, I was an aquatic biologist, and then I did a stint as a national parks interpreter and then I went into education. So I sort of felt like I had to know something.

CURWOOD: Now, you heard the statistics. What question did you find the hardest?

FREEMAN: Well, it was the salt marsh one, the wetland areas. Because the wetlands are so important and they're, they do a number of really important things. I decided, I differ from my husband who chose one thing, and I went with filtering.

CURWOOD: And that was the toughest question, by far.

FREEMAN: Yeah, it really was.

CURWOOD: If people missed one question, that was usually the one that they missed. Well, we'll be sending you a copy of Henry David Thoreau's Faith in a Sea, published by Island Press, and the correct answers to our environmental quiz are posted on our web site at www.loe.org. That's www.loe.org. And thanks for playing.

FREEMAN: Thank you.