WPI Journal - The Magazine for WPI Alumni

WINTER 2015

The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)

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Winter 2015 15 W π AS WORCESTER CELEBRATED the plant- ing of 30,000 trees to replace those cut down in response to infestation by the Asian Longhorned Beetle (ALB), author Loree Griffn Burns '91 celebrated the publication of her ffth book, Beetle Busters: A Rogue Insect and the People Who Track It. Her pre- vious topics include butterfies, honeybees, and ocean-borne clusters of trash. Beetle Busters informs young readers that "suc- cessful ALB eradication will depend heavily on people like you. (Yes, you!)" Between her book-launch travels, Burns took time to share with WPI Journal readers her belief that we can all play a part in conserving the natural world. Your mind must be buzzing with ideas for book topics. How do you choose? The most important thing for me is passion. If I don't have it, I won't write a believable book. I am drawn to things I don't know a whole lot about. This makes dedicating a year or two of my life to learning about it super interesting, and it makes my experience with the topic very similar to that of most of my readers. A friend started me on The Hive Detectives journey by sending me a newspaper clipping about colony collapse disorder and a note that said, "You should write about honey bees." Turns out I am passionate about honey bees. I just didn't realize it until she gave me a nudge! You call on young people to become "citizen scientists" in their own back yards. What do you hope your books and school presentations can do? Taking kids seriously is one of my missions. I want readers and the students I work with to see themselves exactly this way: as thoughtful citizens with the ability to do powerful and meaningful things in this world. Not later, when they are grown up, but now. Today. And the very frst step, to me, is simple: pay attention to the world around you. As for Beetle Busters, my best hope is that it encourages people on both sides of the ALB issue—those who support the eradication effort and those who despise it—to see the opposite point of view more clearly. There are no good guys and no bad guys; there are just a whole lot of people who love trees—really love them and want to protect them—who have different opinions on how to accomplish that. I hope readers will see those different opinions more objectively, and decide to become part of the conversation. What, from your WPI education, do you bring into this unique career? If you had told me when I graduated from WPI in 1991 that I'd end up writing science books for young readers, I'd have been shocked. But even now, when I look back, there were signs. My Suffciency, for example, was called "Realism in Contemporary Children's Literature." Even when I was studying to be a biologist, I recognized that books that took children seriously were something to think about and pay attention to. I would say the greatest gift of my WPI education was a true passion for hands-on experience. Book learning is one thing; plunging your hands into the dirt is quite another. I write books that I hope will in- spire kids to get their hands dirty, to go out and fnd more information, to pick up frogs, to observe trees, to record what they learn, and to share what they discover. I think that's a lesson ingrained in me, at least in part, through the project work I did as an undergraduate at WPI. Learn more at loreeburns.com q&a; Busting the (Asian) Beetles WPI alumna takes on controversial questions about an epidemic that led to the loss of 34,297 trees in the Worcester area

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