Madeline Conway is a member of the EmmaGreen Team at the Emma Willard School in Troy, NY.  She attended the Adirondack Youth Climate Summit at the Wild Center in November 2012.

As the great American writer, Arthur Miller once wrote in his play Death of a Salesman, “When I walked into the jungle, I was seventeen.  When I walked out… I was rich.”  This was my story after attending the Adirondack Youth Climate Summit this fall at the Wild Center in Tupper Lake, New York.  I didn’t leave with newly acquired money, but I had acquired wealth: a wealth of new knowledge, of ideas, and of inspiration.

The two day conference for high school students, college students, and teachers brought together a strong group of driven young adults who knew climate change was scary, but realized they were ready to make a change.  I was honored to attend and empowered to do more when I left.

Speakers from organizations, the government, farms, colleges and companies shared personal experiences, projects they were working on, and called our group to action. Even though I feel pretty knowledgable about this field, I was still alarmed at many of the statistics and information.  It showed me why it is so easy to simply shy away from the things you do not want to hear.

However, the speakers told us they didn’t share the details with us to simply throw the horror story in our faces and into our hands, but they wanted to empower us to make a change so that the horror story doesn’t actually come true.  We can’t just jump into life boats and row off to another planet to escape the impending doom.  We have to act and we have to act now because, as one group’s t-shirt stated, “There is no planet B.”

As the experts handed down their wealth of knowledge to the group, ideas for what I could do and accomplish began to flourish in my mind and in the minds of my group members.  Every speaker or activity inspired me and gave me the desire to spread the knowledge to everyone.  In one workshop activity, we took one recipe for simple chocolate chip cookies, and one group found the carbon footprint of baking the cookies using all name-brand ingredients.  The other group did the same thing; however, they used as many local ingredients as they could find.

The results were mind blowing!  The drastic difference in carbon footprints for such a small recipe showed us that if we tried to buy local goods and produce for everything, we could substantially cut down on carbon emissions.

Mark and Kristin Kimball from Essex Farm also came and talked to us about the importance and benefits of local production for local consumption.  They run a farm on which all the labor is done with draft horses and their market is the local community.  Their farm is an organic community and cooperative farm that people can buy into every year and can come pickup produce and meat on a weekly basis.  The work isn’t easy, but it’s rewarding and they find it is very important to them.  Now when I go to the grocery store, I look for local first.  It may seem like a small change, but every little thing makes a big difference.

After all of the fantastic sessions on day one, we were sent back into our school specific groups and told to make an action plan: what could we reasonably accomplish in our schools and communities within the near future.  My EmmaGreen team brainstormed countless ideas, created a goal board and presented our ideas to the entire summit.

I am happy to say we are on our way to some of our goals and also made and achieved new ones as well.  One student created an interactive map online showing dots for where all the students within driving range from our boarding school live.  This was sent out to the whole school and to parents to improve carpooling.  In addition, we are reopening our thrift shop in the coming weeks where students can come and bring their clothes to sell and to find new prized possessions.

Overall the Adirondack Youth Climate Summit was overwhelmingly beneficial, imbued the entire group with new ideas, and supplied me with the hope that there are more young people out there who know that it is our duty to make change.