Professors and students grouped Friday, April 19 to promote numerous discussions on climate awareness during the Climate Leadership Summit. From 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., attendees branched out to classrooms around Fossil Ridge High School’s East Wing, where guest speakers from colleges, Fossil, and other important community organizations taught sessions.
Many of these sessions consisted of the speakers’ research with people or animals and connections to how they and others can make a difference.
Dr. Meg Du Bray was one of these speakers and she surveyed the emotions of people and their reactions to climate change. Some of the categories included their living and working conditions and how climate change affected their situations.
Students also learned about climate change’s effects on Colorado, especially its weather, thanks to Peter Goble. He showed various graphs and charts explaining where Colorado extracts its moisture during the warming seasons such as the slow-melting mountain snowpacks.
The City of Fort Collins was also present to showcase the goals and input they gathered from people in the community. A popular goal was surrounding the hope for zero waste.
Another important session connected to the community was the explanation of K-12 budgets directed by Trudy Trimbath, the head of energy management for the Poudre School District. She gave students more understanding as to how they are created and used to advance to help in environmental sustainability plans.
Dr. Jessica Salo made a thorough presentation of her completed habitat restoration for Preble’s meadow jumping mouse. This was necessary because they are known to be endangered due to their habitat loss from issues like flooding and residential development.
Glory Lenell, one member of the F.R.E.S.H club, included her excitement before the event.
“I’m just excited to hear from the wide variety of speakers that we have. We’ve got people from CSU [and University of Colorado Boulder] with all kinds of backgrounds and all kinds of study areas of interest and it should be just really fun to see how those things come together and learn about things that I’ve never really learned before.”
“There were so many different people who I didn’t even know this was a job, or I didn’t know there were professors of research, people who [are] conservation specialists of each of these different kinds of categories,” says sophomore Reagan Jones.
Despite the fact they were not expecting a large number of people, the ones who did attend were excited to learn.
“We’re really excited to have everyone and it’s been such an honor to put on this event and get to collaborate with different community partners and professors,” Nugent says. “The program was entirely shut down this year so we’ve taken it back up to keep the event alive.”
“What makes it the Climate Leadership Summit, isn’t if there is a million people there [or] different groups that come, it’s really the knowledge that you take away from it that matters,” Jones explains.
