ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, July 17, 1996 TAG: 9607170060
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SANTA CRUZ, CALIF.
SOURCE: THERESA C. VILORIA SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
YOUTHFUL LEADERS are meeting to share their strengths and teach students how to act for the environment and social justice.
They've saved the dolphins, met with the United Nations and had some of the world's largest companies cringing. Most aren't yet 18.
Forty of the world's most powerful leaders of the youth environmental movement are in Santa Cruz for two weeks for the first-ever World Youth Leadership Camp, sponsored by YES!, Youth for Environmental Sanity.
``This camp will be a great opportunity to meet other people like me,'' said Marie Segger, 23, who founded the Canada-based West Coast Environmental Youth Alliance, which is connected with environmental youth groups in Costa Rica, Chile and Mexico. ``I can't wait to learn about their projects and connect with youth leaders around the world to work in solidarity for our future.''
The camp is bringing together leading environmental and social youth activists, teens and twentysomethings representing such organizations as the Ecology Club of Ghana, Jamaica Environmental Youth Network and even the U.S.-based Sierra Club in the Santa Cruz mountains.
If you think this is just kid stuff, you've missed the latest wave of the environmental crusade. This year's election of 24-year-old Adam Werbach to the presidency of the 104-year-old Sierra Club stripped decades from the environmental movement's visage.
Werbach, who works in the club's San Francisco headquarters, is among those representing 23 nations gathering to learn from veteran environmentalists such as David Brower, the 84-year-old dean of the Sierra Club and its former executive director; John Robbins, the founder of EarthSave International; and John Seed, founder of the Rainforest Information Centre.
Werbach is responsible for the creation of a national student coalition of 30,000 members within the Sierra Club, which he started in high school. While attending Brown University he mobilized a telephone campaign that is credited for turning the U.S. Senate vote, winning crucial protections for California desert lands.
The message the various groups promote is not just about tree-hugging. It's about phone campaigns. It's about empowerment. It's about informing them of their voting power and their buying power.
Young consumers are cited by YES! as the main group to have helped force Star-Kist to stop buying tuna from fishermen who killed dolphins, stopped McDonald's from using foam containers and stopped Burger King from importing beef from cattle raised on former tropical rainforest land.
The groups share a common fight in wanting fresh, clean air and water for their grandchildren. They say they also share the fight against increasing world population and decreasing food production. So, naturally, they promote birth control, safe sex, recycling and use of mass transit and they fight against homelessness, starvation and meat-based diets.
``As you get older, you begin to realize that the environmental problems are much more complex than stopping one tree from being cut,'' said Segger, who was also the national coordinator of Youth for Habitat II-Canada, which met with members of the United Nations in Istanbul, Turkey, this month.
``Social issues are connected to environmental issues. It's about transforming our society of consumerism which exploits the environment and other people. That begins with something as simple as going beyond the grocery check-out line question of `paper or plastic?' ... I mean, what about canvas bags?''
The leadership camp, among other things, battles the widespread image of young people being apathetic on the social problems that affect their lives and the world they live in.
The camp-goers say they must give their peers messages of hope, telling them they are capable of trying to clean up the world that is ``messed up by grownups.''
``The reason why kids feel so unmotivated is that they see all the problems in the world and they think it's too big for them to solve by themselves,'' said Melissa Poe, 16, founder of Kids for a Clean Environment. ``We tell them that they gotta take that first step and then big things will happen.''
After all, that's how Melissa got started and now she runs her worldwide environmental club, which is 300,000 students strong.
It started with a letter to former President George Bush when she was 9. He answered with a form letter.
``That got me mad,'' she said. So, she started a billboard campaign, getting more than 250 billboards donated to her so she could print the letter in every state, including putting one up near the White House. It read:
Dear Mr. President,
Please will you do something about pollution. I want to live till I am 100 years old. Mr. President, if you ignore this letter we will all die of pollution and the ozone layer.
Please help.
Melissa Poe, Age 9
``After the billboards and waiting for the president to answer, I realized that I was already making a difference, by doing little things,'' she said. ``Like planting trees and starting recycling at school.''
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Already, she has rubbed elbows with President Clinton, knows Vice President Al Gore and has had the ear of her governor in Tennessee and many members of Congress.
``I found that some of the politicians really care about what the club is trying to do,'' Poe said. ``Others just want to meet me because they want camera time. Whatever. They're just like us, except they have more power to, like, pass laws.''
Yes! began as a troupe of ecological crusaders, a handful of young people spreading environmental awareness through a hip mix of slide shows, songs and skits. In the last five years they have toured 1,380 high schools, reaching 150,000 students annually.
Now it sponsors 24 environmental summer camps throughout the country, Canada, Singapore, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand and Costa Rica. The group is run entirely by young people, ages 15 to 26, with the purpose of educating high school students to act for the environment and social justice.
For more information about YES! or other affiliated youth environmental organizations, call 408-459-9344.
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