Barney has never actually taken a botany class, never actually walked through the school-owned piece of desert. But he loves the desert, he says. He's been wandering around in the canyons and on the mesas since he was a little boy.

It was a bunch of desert-loving kids like Barney who built this particular schoolyard habitat 10 years ago. They noticed a pile of old tires and wood and came to their biology teacher, Steven Cox, asking to be allowed to restore the land.

Cox helped them get a $500 grant through the state's Division of Wildlife Resources. He helped them research and plan a four-desert landscape. (Cox says the Great Basin portion of the desert never did do too well; St. George is just too hot. And even the Sonoran portion is suffering in the current drought.)

Cox wonders how many of his current students have forgotten they even live in a desert. It used to be that his students could collect insects or seeds by just walking outside the schoolyard. But in the past few years the desert around Pine View has given way to asphalt and stores and manufacturing companies.

Fortunately, they have the habitat. Every year Cox and the other science teachers take their classes on mini-field trips to their own private preserve. The fence keeps the place from getting trampled — while still allowing in birds and snakes and rabbits and lizards.

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Of course schoolyard habitats are not really meant to preserve the species.

"They are laudable," says Eric Rickart, who is a biologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History. But they aren't big enough for most species.

"They have an educational function," says Rickart. "They try to get people connected to what habitat means."

However, he notes, if we wanted to do more than educate, we would create large networks of land. We would acknowledge that we built a city in the middle of the winter feeding ground that belongs to the deer and the elk, and we would return to nature a wide field running from Liberty Park to Mount Olympus.

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Now it's June and Central High is listed on the National Wildlife Federation's Web site as an official habitat. There are thousands of school habitats in the United States. Central High's is one of only seven in Utah.

For Whitney Ellis, 18, the most important thing about the Central project was that it worked. "Usually," she said, "if you plan things, they don't work out." This message may have been reinforced at other times in her school career. But nature, and Miller and the environmental project, gave her hope.