Transcriber: Lynn Chao Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Good evening. I'm a math teacher.
I moved to Aruba more than six years ago to teach math,
but I chose Aruba because I wanted to be able to scuba dive
more than just once a year during spring break.
But after my first year, I realized that I worked too much,
and I didn’t have enough time to scuba dive as much as I wanted to.
So in the second year, I convinced eight kids to convince their parents
that they should be allowed to scuba dive as part of a non-academic course
that I had to teach and they had to take.
And for that first semester, I was the smartest woman alive.
I found a way to get paid to leave work early on a Friday
to go scuba diving with my students -
talk about being the coolest math teacher ever.
But then they started asking me questions about the reefs,
like why the reefs around Aruba don’t all look the same.
It’s a small island, shouldn’t they all be the same?
Or why does this reef look different in February than it did in October?
Even harder, what’s happening to the reefs?
Is this reef dying? Is it dead? What’s going on?
But I’m a math teacher. I don’t have answers to those questions.
But like any good teacher would,
I suggested that we do some learning together.
So we figured out a lot about corals and about reefs:
Why they’re important.
What was threatening them.
What people around the world were actually doing to try and save them,
and not just around the world, but also in the Caribbean.
So ...
We were learning a lot. We were investigating.
We watched the Netflix documentary “Chasing Coral,”
and if you’ve seen that,
you can relate to the fact that you probably cry afterwards,
so I’m in a room with teenagers crying.
And once we stopped, they said, “OK, we want to do something. Let’s do something.”
And we did. We did some awareness campaigns around campus.
The older kids went into the classrooms with the younger kids, did activities,
we did a bake sale and raised a bunch of money for some local NGOs.
And that was fun, but it didn't feel like enough for them.
My students wanted to actually do something,
they wanted to make a change,
be a change.
And so we looked for a project that we could volunteer for,
an activity we could do.
We did actually go to “Plastic Beach Party”
and recycled some plastics we’d collected,
and we decided that work was way too hard,
so hats off.
And so we wanted to do something, and we couldn’t find anything.
There wasn’t a restoration project that we could join;
there wasn’t a survey team that we could join, especially because we’re teenagers,
myself included.
I’m not sure why everyone laughed.
But the kids were ready to give up because we’ve all been there -
you want to do something,
you want to be a part of something, but nobody else is doing it.
And if the people who have the money, the power, the expertise aren’t doing it,
how can the average math teacher do it?
How can the average teenagers do it?
But I wouldn’t let them give up,
and I said, “If it’s not here, we’ll make it.”
And so we did.
We went from being just the scuba club to a registered NGO
with the mission of getting more local youth active in ocean conservation.
Active youth.
These kids, they were the best to start this with,
and we did everything.
We researched together and planned a trip to Bonaire,
so that we could learn all about coral restoration.
When we came back, and that was during spring break,
which is a bit ironic,
they determined the supplies they needed to build their coral nursery,
and they built it.
They did that there.
In order to do this work, we actually had to apply for permission
to touch the corals, so the kids not only helped with the application,
but they presented to government officials about what they wanted to do,
why they wanted to do it.
They did that.
And now we have two coral nurseries where we grow up to enough fragments
to outplant a thousand fragments per year on our reefs.
Kids did that.
That's pretty cool. Those are some amazing bubbles.
We also do monthly beach cleanups
where we clean up beaches all around Aruba,
organized by the kids every month.
We also do reef surveys where teenagers teach other teenagers
how to conduct reef surveys
under the supervision of a dive master or an instructor.
And it’s a lot of fun, and it feels good to do stuff,
but I have to be honest:
Outplanting corals - it feels good.
It looks pretty for a while, but if nothing changes,
they’re going to die.
We’re really just putting a Band-Aid on a big wound.
Picking up plastic at the beach -
it feels really good when you collect all that trash and you leave a beach clean,
but it’s heartbreaking if you go back next week
and you see that there’s more trash.
So unless the world can do something about our dependency on plastic,
we can keep cleaning, but we’re not making a big impact.
But where we do have a big impact
is that we’re creating a generation of activists, conservationists,
and knowledgeable individuals who care about their future,
who care about the choices that they make.
As you can see, we still do awareness campaigns.
We go into camps and schools,
and the teenagers do presentations for the others.
And I love it.
And that's really the message and idea that I'm here to share with you.
If you want to make change on climate change,
forget about the politicians and the policymakers,
although I appreciate you guys, and instead focus on the youth.
Their actions, their decisions, impact their future.
Let's give them ownership of their future.
Let’s give them the skills and the tools
that they need to tell fact from fiction,
to tell theory from conspiracy,
and to tell knowledge from opinion.
Because that’s the only way we’re going to have hope for changing climate change.
Thank you.