4th Annual Youth Climate Summit of the Lehigh Valley

Saturday April 29th, 2023 

9 am – 3:30 pm (in-person)

 

Morning at the Nurture Nature Center (518 Northampton Street, Easton, PA)

Afternoon at the Karl Stirner Arts Trail/Easton Cemetery *meet at the Blue Bridge

Agenda

9:00 am – Our Changing Climate – Science on a Sphere Program

9:30 am – Student showcase 

-Short presentations about local student action

-Interactive activities – participate in a Community Poem, explore the Climate Resiliency Activity Book, create reusable bags out of old t-shirts

10 am – Highlighted talk (open to the public) 

They found plastic where?…Understanding the global plastic problem, its local impact, and how to change it

Megan J. Wolff, Ph.D., MPH, Beyond Plastics

Plastic pollution is all over the place these days, which requires some explanation. Since the 1950s, the world population has only tripled, but the production of plastics has grown over 70-fold. Eighty percent of litter is plastic. By 2025 scientists predict that for every 3 lbs of fish in the ocean there will be 1lb of plastic. Learn why this is happening, what it is impacting, and what you can do to stop it.

11 am – Guided tour of the art exhibit Risky Beauty: Aesthetics and Climate Change curated by Dr. Cynthia Veloric and featuring artists: Diane Burko, Maureen Drdak, Amie Potsic, Deirdre Murphy, Chantal Westby, Hiro Sakaguchi, and Stacy Levy

12:00 pm – Lunch with Buy Fresh Buy Local of the Greater Lehigh Valley

1:30 pm – Tree planting with the City of Easton Conservation Manager, Rob Christopher

-Guided tour of the Karl Stirner Arts Trail with Rob Christopher 

-Water quality monitoring with John Cosgrove (Bushkill Stream Conservancy)

-Trash clean-up and audit with Megan Wolff – What can we learn from our trash?

Anticipated end time 3:30 pm

Free to attend. Please register here: https://tinyurl.com/4thYCSLV 

ABOUT our speaker

Megan J. Wolff, Ph.D., MPH, (meganwolff2@bennington.edu)  is the Policy Director at Beyond Plastics. She is a medical historian by training, and prior to joining Beyond Plastics she worked as a policy researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Megan has been involved in public policy issues for most of her life, and enjoys digging at the historical roots that help explain how problems developed and what might be done to solve them. Her decision to focus on environmental policy came from a growing sense that the most pressing public health threat we now face is climate change, a feeling increasingly shared by other health practitioners. She believes that plastics are critical because they serve as a “wedge” issue, drawing together the many of the problems of extraction, emissions, and chemical toxins.

Megan holds a B.A. in English from Wesleyan University and an MPH and Ph.D. in Public Health History and Policy from Columbia University. In addition to lectures and classroom teaching, she worked for many years as a walking tour guide in New York City. In her spare time, she enjoys gardening, hiking, travel, cross country skiing, and coffee. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

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The Youth Climate Summit is part of CREATE Resilience, a project of the Nurture Nature Center, under award NA22SEC4690012​ from the Environmental Literacy Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of NOAA or the U.S. Department of Commerce.