These Environmentalists Are Really Green
They’ve saved dolphins, met with the United Nations and made some of the world’s largest companies cringe. Most aren’t yet 18.
Forty of the world’s most powerful leaders of the youth environmental movement will gather in Santa Cruz for two weeks beginning today.
“This camp will be a great opportunity to meet other people like me,” said Marie Segger, 23, who founded the Canada-based West Coast Environmental Youth Alliance, which is connected with environmental youth groups in Costa Rica, Chile and Mexico. “I can’t wait to learn about their projects and connect with youth leaders around the world to work in solidarity for our future.”
The first-ever World Youth Leadership Camp, sponsored by ! (Youth for Environmental Sanity), will bring together leading environmental and social youth activists, teens and twentysomethings representing such organizations as the Ecology Club of Ghana, Jamaica Environmental Youth Network and even the U.S.-based Sierra Club in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
If you think this is just kid stuff, you’ve missed the latest wave of the environmental crusade. This year’s election of 24-year-old Adam Werbach to the presidency of the 104-year-old Sierra Club stripped decades from the environmental movement’s visage.
Werbach, who works in the club’s San Francisco headquarters, will be among those representing 23 nations gathering to learn from veteran environmentalists such as David Brower, the 84-year-old dean of the Sierra Club and its former executive director; John Robbins, the founder of EarthSave International; and John Seed, founder of the Rainforest Information Centre.
Werbach is responsible for the creation of a national student coalition of 30,000 members within the Sierra Club, which he started in high school. While attending Brown University he mobilized a telephone campaign that is credited for turning the U.S. Senate vote that won protections for California desert lands.
The message the various groups promote is not just about tree-hugging. It’s about phone campaigns. It’s about empowerment. It’s about informing them of their voting power and their buying power.
Young consumers are cited by ! as the main group to have helped force Star-Kist to stop buying tuna from fishermen who killed dolphins, stopped McDonald’s from using foam containers and stopped Burger King from importing beef from cattle raised on former tropical rain forest land.
The groups share a common fight in wanting fresh clean air and water for their grandchildren.
They say they also share the fight against increasing world population and decreasing food production. So, naturally, they promote birth control, safe sex, recycling, use of mass transit and fight against homelessness, starvation and meat-based diets.
“As you get older, you begin to realize that the environmental problems are much more complex than stopping one tree from being cut,” said Segger, who was also the national coordinator of Youth for Habitat II-Canada, which met with members of the United Nations in Istanbul, Turkey, earlier this month.
“Social issues are connected to environmental issues. It’s about transforming our society of consumerism which exploits the environment and other people. That begins with something as simple as going beyond the grocery checkout line question of ‘Paper or plastic?’ … I mean, what about canvas bags?”
The leadership camp, among other things, battles the widespread image of young people as being apathetic to the social problems that affect their lives and the world they live in.
The camp-goers say they must give their peers messages of hope, telling them they are capable of trying to clean up the world that is “messed up by grown-ups.”.
“The reason why kids feel so unmotivated is that they see all the problems in the world and they think it’s too big for them to solve by themselves,” said Melissa Poe, 16, founder of Kids For a Clean Environment. “We tell them that they gotta take that first step and then big things will happen.”