Last month, a group of excited young minds set out to embark on Global Explorers’ pilot Climate Change Academy traveling to Alaska.  The program was piloted with huge help from our awesome partner, National Park Service.  We were lucky enough to sit down with Angie, who is part of the Climate Change Response Program at the National Park Service, to hear her thoughts behind why Climate Change is an important topic for our youth...

3. Why were you interested in creating a Climate Change Academy for youth? What was the motivation?

Partly, to give them a different perspective on climate change than what they might hear in the popular media. In news or in television it is portrayed as a black and white issue – you either believe it or you don’t. It’s focused on whether climate change is real or not and they don’t really move beyond that to start to thinking about, “Ok, this is happening. If this is happening, what do we do about it?” So, I think that just having that other perspective – that it is impacting our National Parks and there are a lot of things that we can do about it – is really important.

The second thing is that I don’t think that people make up their mind about something by having someone try to convince them that it’s happening, it’s real, or that there are impacts in National Parks. I think that people have to get out and actually experience it, gather citizen science data, and start to actually analyze that data for themselves so that they know – they don’t have to trust the scientists, they don’t have to trust the park rangers, they can trust themselves and see the results for themselves.

4. What gives you the most hope for the future of national parks in the face of climate change?

I think that the human spirit is capable of real greatness when we’re motivated and we want to be great. I think that we’re getting close to a tipping point with climate change that there will be enough devastation that are impacting people’s lives personally, that people will universally see the importance of addressing this topic.  Having National Parks creates a place for people to really care about the places and they are a really good common ground for people to learn about things outside of the classroom . Inherently these are places of hope. Places where people can learn about climate change and hopefully come together in respectful discourse about the topic to move it forward in a positive and proactive way.  Getting kids involved with parks and park rangers and having larger communities coming into parks gives me a lot of hope. I think that we do have a lot of power to make a difference every day. Every day that a ranger interacts with a visitor, regardless of their age or their background, they have a chance to make a difference for one person who might make big differences. That gives me a lot of hope.