5th-Graders Sound Like Seasoned Campaigners for Ecology : The two 10-year-old girls placed second in a Los Angeles contest with their flow-chart for an ‘environmental council.’

“I’ve always been an environmentalist interested in protecting wild animals and endangered species,” says Justine Chiou, who is only 10.

Justine and Laura Bishel, also 10, won second place in the recent Young Eco Inventors contest at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Their entry was an organizational flow chart for a “World Environmental Council” to raise eco awareness. Although they didn’t win money (first prize was $1,000), the girls will have their project published in the June 21 issue of PopSci, a new kids’ magazine launched recently by Popular Science.

Neither girl would brook any suggestion that she was anything but a seasoned campaigner in the fight to save the planet.

“There’s a lot of pollution in California,” Laura said gravely.

Justine and Laura have already received training in the arcane sciences of market research and consumer polling as part of their normal math lessons at Weathersfield Elementary School in Thousand Oaks.

According to school Principal Deanna Roth, a child reaching the fifth grade there has already been taught how to take a poll and calculate the results. That helps to explain why every student in Laura and Justine’s fifth-grade class was able to meet the requirement of participating in some kind of competitive science and inventing contest.

“The teachers really put a lot of environmentalism into the math and reading,” says Laura’s mother, Sharon Bishel, a county employee.

The kids seem to buy into the deal, too. Especially Justine. According to her father, Arthur Chiou, a physicist at Rockwell, “This contest was one of the rare cases when I didn’t help her at all with an assignment.”

The genesis of the project was a visit Justine made to relatives in Taiwan where, she recalls, “the air pollution was so bad that I got an eye infection.”

Back home, when it came time to come up with an idea for her project, she and Laura decided to survey fellow students and even some of their parents about environmental attitudes.

The girls said they were surprised at the range of results: “People are not so eager to save trees,” Justine says.

“They don’t like to recycle (because) it’s boring,” Laura says. “Some like to recycle (because) it’s fun.”

The girls drew up an organizational flow-chart for an “environmental council” to promote wider interest in the recycle-reduce-reuse ethic and in the long-term goal of worldwide environmental consciousness.

Their fifth-grade teacher, Deanne Hackman, was not surprised at the girls’ ardor for the environment. Women, she’s observed, “make the effort to recycle. We grab the can out of the garbage . . . I can’t get my husband to recycle even though he’s a scientist.”