On Feb. 25-27, Macon County Schools, Highlands Biological Station and Highlands Biological Foundation partnered to offer a free Sustainability Summit to the students of Macon County where they learned about sustainability, climate issues and research.
Highlands Biological Station’s educational specialist Paige Engelbrektsson said the summit was a chance to teach sustainability as a concept.
“The idea was to bring Macon County eighth graders through 12th graders together to help them learn about sustainability as a concept,” Engelbrektsson said. “Then they can figure out where they can take action in their personal lives, in their families and then their communities to be more sustainable.”
Between learning about the impacts of people’s decisions on the environment and what they can do to take action, Engelbrektsson said it’s a perfect nexus for HBS and HBF to come together with Macon County Schools.
“The station is all about protecting and preserving Highlands as the ‘biological crown of the Southern Appalachians,’” Engelbrektsson said. “The foundation’s mission is to help inspire people to preserve and protect this area as well. So, between the two, it was a perfect way to get Macon County Schools involved.”
The fourteen students spread out across the Highlands Biological Station, participating in different workshops hosted by different professionals in Western North Carolina such as Talkin’ Trash, We Are What We Eat!, Telling our Story Through Podcasts and Photojournalism and Carbon and Energy.
“It’s really exciting to get all of these professionals together to talk about this to the students,” Engelbrektsson said. “Jennifer Love is the Macon County School’s STEM coordinator and with her and Gloria Painter brainstorming who to ask, everytime we reached out to someone they were always really enthusiastic.”
Macon County School’s STEM coordinator Jennifer Love said the idea stemmed from Engelbrektsson mentioning the Sustainability Summits in New York and Durham.
“She came to me after we went to the Durham summit and said that it would be cool if we could do something like that here,” Love said. “Then we started meeting and as we started brainstorming and Gloria Painter, a teacher at Macon Early College said she wanted to join because she does a climate change unit with her kids. Every single person we called wanted to join in, as well. Everybody we asked have been so passionate about how can we get our youth engaged, because I feel like more people agree with climate change and what’s happening than don’t. Kids are asking questions and want to know. They hear all these things in the news and start asking how they can fix it. We just wanted to see how we can start giving them answers and giving them projects they can work on.”
With students engaging in different workshops, Love said it is wonderful to hear the feedback from the students.
“It’s exciting, but it is also frustrating,” Love said. “With our curriculum, for teachers we have to stick to the script. Climate change does come in, talking about renewable energy sources, but what’s so great about this is being able to put it in that local context. When we look outside, everything may look great, but really what is happening? Our water temperatures are increasing, we are losing our forests and we are showing this huge population growth, so it is having an impact.”
Though climate change was a topic, Love said that is not what she wanted to focus on 100 percent.
“To me, the focus was not on rehashing climate change,” Love said. “It’s a sustainability summit. So, how can we all work to make it better. Whether you believe in climate change or not, these kinds of practices are for everybody. We want to make sure the students focus on their carbon footprint and what they can actually effect change with.”
Macon Early College teacher Gloria Painter said the purpose of the summit was to make sure students knew that they can make a change.
“Hopefully in turn, that will help others make changes so that it does have a positive impact on our climate,” Painter said. “I am a recycle nerd and don’t remember a time where my family didn’t recycle. To see kids be engaged and then start talking about how they can make an impact in their own schools, because school recycling is a little more difficult, it is excited. If you can teach kids to have their own voice, then change is a little easier to make. We would love to keep this thing going. We want to make it a Western regional thing, because I think if we can continually offer this and reach more people it would be pretty cool.”
HBS associate director Jason Love said this summit was a way to educate students of Macon County about what’s happening in the world in terms of climate change, deforestation, the ecological impact humans are having and the positive impacts humans can have on the Earth.
“These young students are going to be the future stewards of the Earth,” Jason Love said. “My generation and past generations have somewhat failed in that regard. So, they need to learn these things and they are some tough truths, but there is still hope. It’s not too late to make changes, but those changes need to happen more rapidly now because we haven’t done enough to address the negative impacts. These kids are curious and asking questions, wanting to know more about the impact we are having as well as solutions. We just want to give them the tools to make positive change.”
- By Christopher Lugo