In front of an audience of about 200 local high school students on Friday, author and environmentalist Bill McKibben made a case for green energy, focusing mainly that day on solar power.
The Santa Fe Conservation Trust brought him to Santa Fe, where he also spoke at a fundraiser for the Trust on Saturday night.
Before the Santa Fe High assembly held in the cafeteria began, McKibben boiled down a core messages to one sentence.
“ Climate change at this point is just simply a race between how fast the planet's deteriorating, which is very fast, and how fast we can build out clean energy—which also at this point could be very fast,”
McKibben said.
McKibben’s Friday visits to Santa Fe and Capital high schools is part of a new effort to reach out to young people about the climate crisis.
He recently founded an organization called Third Act that aims to recruit people over 60 to help protect the planet.
At the same time, he’s trying to get across to younger folks that everyone, regardless of age, must play a role.
One of the students at Santa Fe High who is already involved is senior Alette HahnHanson, who leads the school’s Botany and Sustainibility Club.
HahnHanson, who says she’s aiming to tackle this problem as a politician someday, believes that engineering, conservation, and intersectionality are three overlapping areas critical to tackling such problems as a warming earth and diminishing supplies of water.
As president of the student club, she seeks to get her fellow students engaged with environmental issues by, first of all, getting them outside.
“We spend so much of our lives in these classrooms. We spend so much of our lives in our houses on our phones. Me too," said HahnHanson.
"Part of what I'm doing with my club is getting people outside. The other day I had a greenhouse clean out where we just had our hands in the dirt. And connecting people with the elements of the earth will help us move forward into thinking about how we can serve and protect it.“
A person at Santa Fe High serving as a mentor for Allete HahnHanson and other climate-focused students is environmental science teacher Claire Noonan.
Her classes are not about activism, but helping students understand the objective realities of the environment, based in scientific study and research.
One major project that students in Noonan’s AP environmental science class will tackle this year is suggesting how the school itself can improve its environmental impact.
“The students will conduct an audit of our campus as a whole to create a proposal for action points of specific steps that the school needs to do to be better.”
They may have their work cut out for them; Santa Fe Public Schools is already doing better than some districts, generating 25 percent of its electricity from the sun and having reduced water use by 75 percent since 2010.
McKibben is seeking creative ideas from students and others as he aims toward a day of action event next August called Sun Day.
