The Environmental Club meets in room 402 every Tuesday afternoon. Sitting on orange swivel chairs, they discuss upcoming events and brainstorm ways to engage the student body. Emma Venarde, Spencer Lott and Hank Marriott (IV) lead the meetings; they have been involved since ninth grade, and they usually split the club into two or three groups to tackle multiple initiatives.
While COVID-19 has forced them into their homes, the club is showing as much — and even more — commitment to environmentalism as they had shown in room 402. On May 16th, the club will be hosting the first Bronx Youth Climate Summit. It will be held virtually on Google Meets.
The summit is inspired by the WILD Center; the organization’s Youth Climate Program seeks to empower young people around the world and equip them with a simple toolkit to take action within their community.
Last year, the club started planning the event with the intent of hosting it in April on Fieldston’s campus. After the coronavirus left New York City residents quarantined, however, the possibility of the event seemed more unlikely with each passing day.
Emma Venarde (VI), who proposed the idea, was not willing to put the club’s hard work to waste. “I definitely wanted to have an event no matter what the form was, so there was a transformation to postpone,” Venarde says. “We also switched it to a virtual format because even at that time, we could tell that school was not going to be back in session anytime soon.”
Specific to the Bronx, the summit will explore the ways in which environmentalism has affected the borough. However, participation is not limited to only Bronx residents. Educators and students from all across the country have signed up for the event.
“There are a lot of environmental issues that are specific to the Bronx, and there is also a strong history of activism. We felt like we wanted to build a greater understanding of this,” Venarde says. “There has never been a youth climate summit in the Bronx before, so it was definitely exciting to be the first.”
The summit will be held from 11:30 am to 3:45 pm this Saturday. It will begin with opening remarks and be followed by two 45 minute workshops where youth activists, scientists and conservationists will give insights into their practices. Participants may learn how to integrate their hobbies into environmental projects in The Art of Passion Projects or learn about the importance of oysters to New York City’s ecosystem in Restoration & Education: Oysters in the Bronx. Many organizations will be represented in the workshops including NY Sunworks, the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance and Zero Hour.
“It has been fun to be copied on all of Emma and Spencer’s emails to the organizations,” Hank Marriot (VI) says. “They are so enthusiastic about the idea of a Bronx specific summit. Everyone was so passionate about running a workshop, and even after all of our followup emails, they never got tired of us.”
The summit will end with closing remarks and a climate action planning session so that participants can brainstorm ways to implement environmental programs in their schools and communities.
“[The seniors] have shown an enormous amount of leadership in working on this summit, but it’s really just the natural outcome of all the amazing work that they have done over the last four years,” Green Dean and Science Teacher Howard Waldman says. “From the very beginning, they were all so committed and active, and we’ve done so many things. We’ve been on marches, organized huge cookouts on the quad, supported so many environmental initiatives and had so many good speakers come. This is just the final piece of the puzzle.”
The admission deadline is this Wednesday, May 13. To register, visit https://www.bronxyouthclimatesummit.com/.
