PEA Embraces Climate Action Day Activities
Exonians cultivated hydroponic microgreens in Elm Street Dining Hall, headed to the Great Bay to help restore oyster populations and observed sustainable operations and maintenance at the William Boyce Thompson Field House for last Friday’s Climate Action Day.
Exeter’s fourth annual Climate Action Day (CAD) began with a school-wide keynote address in the assembly hall. After this presentation, students participated in workshops designed to educate Exonians on issues related to climate change.
The first keynote speaker, Research Professor of Climatology and Glaciology at the University of New Hampshire Cameron Wake, emphasized climate change as an innovation opportunity for the 21st century. “Here’s 12 words I want you to live by when it comes to climate change: it’s real, it’s us, scientists agree, it’s bad, we can fix it,” he said.
The second speaker was Vernice Miller-Travis, Senior Advisor for Environmental Justice and Equitable Development at Skeo Solutions. She covered the intersection of environmentalism and racial injustice, citing her published research Toxic Waste and Race in the United States, which revealed that toxic waste sites are often adjacent to the residences of colored communities. “We can change our reality, in terms of climate change and global warming, but only if we give it our all right now,” Travis said.
Biology Instructor and Divest Exeter club adviser Eben Bein invited The New York Times climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis to speak on media coverage of climate change. Bein also helped organize the Divest Exeter workshop. He hopes the lessons learned on CAD “equip students to dismantle the fossil fuel centric culture that the world is suffering from.”
Bein also hopes CAD workshops will inspire students and faculty to integrate environmental issues into Exeter’s curriculum. “I hope that these Climate Action Day workshops act as microcosms for the school to find intellectually rigorous environmental endeavours that become threads in introductory classes,” he said.
Biology Instructor Richard Aaronian hosted a hands-on workshop in which approximately 40 students planted grass on local sand dunes and studied destruction to New Hampshire’s environment caused by increasingly frequent storms. “These storms, including those we experienced in late March, severely erode sand dunes which are important habitats and protect land behind them,” Aaronian said. “Dune grass stabilizes the sand and maintains these dunes.”
Aaronian concluded that he wanted workshop participants “to understand the threat that global climate change presents and some of the steps we can take to help reverse the trend.”
Biology Instructor Elizabeth Stevens worked with the Nature Conservancy in Durham to host a tree planting workshop. “The point of the tree planting was to add native shrubs to an old farm field in order to create habitat for birds and other wildlife. We had two groups of 30 students and planted about two acres for them,” she said. “It was a very successful project, and the Nature Conservancy was very appreciative of the help.”
Biology Instructor Sydnee Goddard hosted a workshop exploring bioacoustics at a lab at the University of New Hampshire that primarily researches insect communication. The students listened to insect sounds on a nearby nature trail.“They discovered that if you record just sounds in the habitat, then you can use computers to analyze what organisms are there,” Goddard said. “It’s a way to get assessments of biodiversity in the future more easily than one can keep track of trends of biodiversity using a sound recorder and computer analysis. That’s very labor intensive.”
Students were also involved in running workshops this year. Coheads of Divest Exeter and uppers Hillary Davis and Sophie Faliero invited Tufts University student Lila Kohrman-Glaser to hold a workshop on the divestment movement.
Faliero appreciated the opportunity for students to raise awareness for climate change at CAD, but noted a lack of conversation between the administration and the students in discussing Exeter’s official sustainability policy. “We don’t talk to them much, and I feel it’s very important for us students, who are taking part in what they’re running, to have conversations with the people who are figuring out how we run the school,” Faliero said. “I think that this is something Divest Exeter is trying to do as a club, but it is also something that the school can do to be transparent to the students themselves.”
Goddard hopes that CAD helps students “become more educated about the effects of climate change but then have an ability to do something that will let them realize that there are actions that they can take that will help mitigate the problem.” Aaronian added, “This Earth does not belong only to us, and we need to care better of it than we have done so far.”