Up a tree and loving it

These Antelope Valley teens turned picking up trash from a chore into a scavenger hunt.

Michell Sanchez was only a teenager at the time, but she came of age as an environmentalist when TreePeople first walked onto her high school campus more than a decade ago.

Sanchez was an early—and enthusiastic—participant in Generation Earth, a hands-on environmental education program sponsored by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works and carried out by TreePeople in local middle schools and high schools since 1998. Funding for the next two years, with renewals possible for 4½ years after that, was approved this week by the Board of Supervisors. The investment—which could total $4.35 million over the life of the current contract—promises results that go well beyond the classroom.

Just ask Sanchez.

Not only did the program inspire her to help lead a team of Grant High School students to launch an on-campus recycling program—and later to create a native plants butterfly garden that still flourishes at the school—but it also influenced what she went on to study in college. (She received her degree in environmental science and policy from Cal State Long Beach.)

Now 25, Sanchez works for TreePeople as a development associate and doesn’t hesitate to sing the praises of the program that got her started.

Generation Earth, she says, left her feeling “empowered and inspired.”

“It really helped guide me to what I wanted to do,” Sanchez says.

Students strenghten a just-planted tree as part of the Generation Earth program, which has been going strong since 1998.

Sanchez is among the hundreds of thousands of high school and middle school students who have taken part in Generation Earth since the program started. In just the past seven fiscal years, 228,188 students created 2,697 projects at 244 schools.

While Sanchez worked on recycling and gardening, other student endeavors over the years have ranged from e-waste collection events to an urban runoff audit whose results were publicized via social media.

“It’s basically to inspire the students to take personal responsibility about the environment, and then transforming that into action by doing a service-learning project on campus,” says Edna Gandarilla, who manages the program for Public Works.

Some of those actions can have an enduring impact. Diamond Bar students, for example, convinced school district officials to install water-efficient sprinklers at their high school. “They noticed that when the sprinklers were on, they were watering the sidewalks and they were just wasting a lot of water,” Gandarilla says.

Candice Russell, TreePeople’s director of environmental education, says her group’s partnership with Public Works represents a “wonderful symbiosis” that is unparalleled anywhere else in the state.

“This is a very unique program,” Russell says. “It’s a beautiful marriage between TreePeople’s mission—to inspire the people of Los Angeles to take personal responsibility for the urban forest—and the county’s goal of educating the students of Los Angeles.”

It’s also a good barometer of which environmental issues seem most pressing to the younger generation.

“People are fascinated by water, especially because of the drought. It’s huge,” Russell says. “In addition to that, school greening. They want green campuses. They want healthy, viable, green campuses and they want to have a part in making it.”

Waste issues and stormwater solutions also get lots of attention, in part because of two popular contests that pit schools against each other in friendly competition each year. “Battle of the Schools” is a pounds-of-recycling-per-student smackdown, while “Streets to the Sea” showcases student media messaging campaigns about stormwater.

Students are spreading the word in a big way in Santa Monica.

Secondary school students aren’t the only ones getting some environmental consciousness-raising. A second DPW-sponsored program, called Environmental Defenders, stages elementary school assemblies starring actors who play characters extolling the virtues of the Four Rs. (Those would be Rethink, Reuse, Reduce and Recycle.)

As a practical matter, such educational efforts help the county keep up with state mandates to reduce the amount of trash going into landfills, while also spreading a multi-faceted environmental message to a large and growing audience.

Because it turns out that what happens at school doesn’t stay at school.

Students are “great influencers of their parents,” said Public Works spokesman Kerjon Lee. “We’ll have kids going home and telling their parents not to take longer than 5-minute showers. They’re great messengers for us.

“At that age, we know they’re still open to adjusting their own behaviors. And they also feel really good about having an impact. Basically, we’re training young people on how to be better citizens, not just better environmental stewards.”

Projects have included cooking up some alternative cleansers at San Fernando High School.

Posted 10/16/14