Park’s environmental club hosted a meeting on Feb. 10 where speakers Andy Willette and Sam Carlson from the Citizens’ Climate Lobby came in to speak about what the club can do to take action as a school and individually to help the environment.
According to junior environmental club president Catherine Kotowski, it is essential to have guest speakers come in because they are very knowledgeable on environmental topics that they teach in the club. She said that it can allow the club to learn more about certain topics and steps they can take to better understand and help the environment.
“It is important to have these speakers come in and talk because they’ve been in their respective fields of environmental and climate consciousness for so long, some as much as decades of work in these particular niche fields, topics of climate advocacy,” Kotowski said. “They have done many projects and endeavors before, and they can help us move forward with our projects and give us knowledge on how we can best achieve the things we want to achieve.”
New club member, junior Eliora Estrin, said the most important thing she learned from speakers Andy Willette and Sam Carlson was how students could collaborate with the school board to improve certain environmental matters in the school. She said it was encouraging to hear, and thinks it could encourage other people at Park to want to take action.
“The speakers taught us to combat climate change in our school by talking to the school board and educating more people on climate topics,” Estrin said. “That was really inspiring to hear about, and I think they had a lot of interesting and important things to say that could help more people want to take steps to help the environment.”
According to Citizens’ Climate Lobby speaker Andy Willette, his daughter was the one who helped ignite his passion for educating others on environmental topics. He said because it is something that does not get talked about often enough, it is more important now than ever to educate people, as well as make sure that money gets propelled towards helping the right climate causes.
“It’s my daughter mostly who inspired me to work in environmental matters because she was very concerned about environmental issues and brought me along for the ride,” Willette said. “It’s not something that people talk about a lot, so you have to actively work as a volunteer to make sure the right messages are getting out there. There is a lot of money pushing against taking environmental action, so we need people on board to counter all the money that is out there that’s pushing in the opposite direction.”
Kotowski said it is crucial to have an environmentally friendly-focused club at Park because people are more likely to listen and be inspired when students talk or voice their opinions on a topic. She said it is beneficial for the current youth to speak up to help future students have a voice in important topics such as the environment.
“It is important to have an environmental club in our school because people listen more when voices are coming from the youth,” Kotowski said. “For example, we recently had a meeting where we sent letters to senators about climate-related and environmental-related legislation, and that is more impactful than if we had adults sending that. For the youth to be educated on topics like this shows that the next generations will have such a passion for the environment. For that (environmental club) to be directly in our school, it means that we can educate other young minds who want to come by our meetings and help them develop a passion for this super important work as well.”
Willette said he hopes students will remember that they can create change in the world. He said he wants them to understand that their voice does have a significant impact, more than they may know.
“I want students to know they have the power, the power is in their hands and what they do really matters and has an impact,” Willette said. “Younger people and students have a bigger voice and impact than they realize when it comes to engaging our political leaders.”
According to Estrin, she will use the knowledge from the speakers to take action in steps that can help the environment. She said she will continue to go to meetings because she finds them inspirational and wants to be able to help out the environment.
“Something I will apply in my life that I learned from the speaker today is I want to help talk to student representatives on the school board to make the school more climate-friendly. It was my first (environmental club) meeting, but I will continue to go to more future meetings because I want to learn about what I can do as an individual to help combat climate change,” Estrin said.
