Redesigning Our Future

We had a lot of time to work, think, and talk about the environment at Redesigning Our Future: Environmental Summit (for high school students). But . . . To make a difference, we must take what we learned home, and we must get others to join in our crusade to protect the earth for now and forever. Many of our campers made public pledges. You can too. Just add a comment, and tell us what you will do to take care of and save our planet.

Congratulations Jennah! Summit camper Jennah (front) from Chapel Hill won the Friday night Applebee's gift card, so she and a friend can have a nice meal out compliments of the Green Ink Bloggers. We would like to thank Jennah and all the students, staff, faculty, and people we don't even know who visited our blog this week. We had more than 400 page views one day, and this is a new blog. We were pretty excited to have the support and also to share the message of the summit. Working together we can Redesign our Future.

How Do You Build a Tower with Newspapers? That's a good question, and you can see how campers worked together to make towers "happen" at the Ecolympics at the Center for the Environment Summit, a program for high school students across the nation hosted in Salisbury, NC. OK. Let's Roll It Up Like This   . . . Hum. Now, How Do We Get Them Connected? Take Your Time Girls. We've Got This. Oh Yes! We Are So Rocking Our Newspaper Tower. The best part about our game is that we had old newspapers which meant no cost or trash afterwards, because the papers went right to recycling. 

Showcasing our Environmental Knowledge and Projects from the Week After a super busy week at Redesigning Our Future: Environmental Summit for High School students, groups spent Friday afternoon coming up with creative ideas to share what was learned and how we've all grown. There was a flurry across campus as we all tried to develop creative ways to capture the spirits of our various focus groups. Everyone was running here and there picking up poster boards, markers, tape, and various other odds and ends. Dr. Sue Calcagni Has a Safe Spot with a Good View in the Environmental Center   The view from above at the Center for the Environment at Catawba College was probably the safest spot with so much going on and only forty-five minutes to get things together and over to the Peeler-Crystal Lounge. You Need WHAT to Make WHAT? Every group had a different overall personality and work style. Some groups had traditional table discussions while others scattered around buil

Dr. Forrest Anderson, Assistant Professor of English, conducted a Discovery Session called "A Field Guide to the Poetics of Environmental Writing. Students put together poems with a nature theme during the session. Camper Monique wrote a poem that touched her fellow group members. Her poem was displayed on the last night of the summit, and she did a reading for the entire group. Nature Speaks for Me By Monique Useless, unworthy, and unwanted. This chant in my ear. Smack, drug away and done any kind of Way. Tall, brown, big bright green leaves. Like me, this beautiful site was cut At the waste. When I would get too lonely and shattered to stand The patter of my feet would echo in the wind. Here, no man could rip me to shreds and use me as he saw fit. What happens when water gets scarce? It dies. What happened on my last dance? I bawled up next to what I thought held some connection. I had its back it had mine. It was all in my head but that was alright. This sick

By: Keela Sweeney Today I got the oppurtunity to accompany the "Animals Near and Far" group on their turtle tracking adventure! Students suited up and climbed into kayaks with satellites in hand so they could track where in the pond the turtles were. In the beginning of the week this group worked hard to catch up to six turtles inhabiting the pond and marsh areas around the Center for the Environment Nature Preserve here at Catawba College. Two huge snappers and four midsize to baby turtles were marked on Monday with trackers so that the students could go back and track them all today. And I was lucky enough to join the fun!  Emily and Josh using the radiotelemetric rod to find their marked turtles Having a great time out on the pond                                                                                              Found the second one!! Finishing up the hunt for the day! 

Photo by: Emily Pieper Summit campers Justine, Shaina, Chas, and Emma (L-R) take a short break before working hard on their student Action Plans. Shaina (second from the left) plans on starting a United Students Against Sweatshops club at her school and eventually have them purchase spirit wear from sweat-free companies. A Quick News Note from Green Ink Blogger Emily Pieper 

                                                                                                                                                           Photo by Dr. Seth Holzman Redesigning the Future: Environmental Summit for High School Students 2012 After breakfast this morning, the last day of the summit before we head home tomorrow, Dr. Seth Holzman ("Is Nature What We Think?") took our group photo. He set up the tripod and got ready as we had scrambled eggs, grits, biscuits, gravy, and cereal (not all together). We're all wearing our Redesigning the Future t-shirts and giving our best early morning smiles before meeting our focus groups for the last time. Well, we do meet later in the day, but that is to get ready for our "What We've Learned" festival. All the groups from "Environmental Education Through Theatre" to "Sacred Spaces: Global Heritage and Conservation" have displays, hands on stations, or open mic ses

From Culture Shock to Love By Shaina Robinson As a northerner from Michigan, I began preparing myself a couple of days before coming to this  summit  in Salisbury, NC for some southern culture shock. The last time I had eaten food in the South, I hadn't had the best experience. I had gone down to breakfast hoping to get some some porridge and when I saw some on the table I was ecstatic. The food that I thought was porridge though turned out to be grits and despite how many times people told me that the two foods were different, I was sure that they would taste the same. I mean they look similar right? Well, as I would soon learn, porridge and grits are different foods and needless to say I never quite thought about grits in the same way again. But now that I'm here at Catawba  at the Environmental Summit for high school students, I've had the chance to try southern food again, and I really enjoy it! Of course there are other aspects of the south that ha

Name State  Summit Campers from Dr. Eric Hake's Focus Group              Thoughts on making a difference . . . Natasha Anbalagan NC I plan to convince my school to install low-flush toilets by creating a cost-benifit analysis that shows the net benifits of low-flush toilets. Saloni Choudhary NJ I'm going to talk to my school administrators about selling re-usable water bottles in our school store. It's such a simple way to make a difference. Emma NC I plan to establish a school garden, which through programs here we've learned is a SMART goal. Gabby NC I hope to do work with the NCSEA and spreading awareness on the topic of using green energy in NC. I hope to join them in one of their annual meetings. Chas VA I want to bring more in-depth environmental information to my school since it lacks envionrmental programs and classes. I pl

Connecting with  Nature Through Deep Thinking By Shaina Robinson  A couple of days ago, I got the chance to sneak a peek inside the room of " Is Nature What We Think It Is ?" focus group . When I entered, it was dimly lighted by a single candle with sunlight being its only other source of lighting. At the time, all of the group members were in the state of "deep thinking" and were trying to answer the discussion question that had been given to them.   I soon found out that the goal of this focus group was to determine what nature really is and how when our ideas around it change, so do our outcomes. It's hard to explain what types of discussion happened in the focus group, but modern and premodern thinking were prominent topics in many of them. The general idea and ensuing argument behind these phrases is that schools aren't teaching students to be humanistic anymore and are instead promoting materialism.   As I was taking pictures I was

Summit Camper Has a Passion for Aviation By Emma Sophia Zahra is a rising high school senior from Salisbury, North Carolina who is in the Environmental Education through Theater focus group at camp.  Previously, she has been part of her middle school's Green Team; the Green Team is a recycling program at her school that she says is not taken very seriously by teachers and students. Last fall, things for Zahra changed when she took AP Environmental Science. In the class she learned more about environmental issues and realized that there is a lot of help and change that needs to happen in the world, and she wants to be part of that change. Zahra also has a passion for aviation. Flying is something she has loved for a long time, and just this past year, she got her pilot license for her birthday. Because of her love for flying, she has long dreamed of being an aeronautical engineer. Now that she also pays more acute attention to environmental issues, she struggles with th

Green Inkers Arrive at the Summit and Get Ready to Get to Work By Cyndi Allison Wittum (focus group leader) The first night at the "Redesigning the Future: Environmental Summit for High School Students 2012" campers began arriving at Catawba College. Here are the "Green Ink: Blogging for a Better Tomorrow" group. They had opted to spend the week covering the news all across the summit. I have called my group the Green Inkers. They look a tad nervous on this first night, but it did not take them long to get in the swing on things. In fact, I am absolutely amazed at the terrific content they have produced (working together) in just a couple of days. Only one student had blogged previously. By the second full day of the summit, the Green Inkers looked like a professional news room crew. They were coming up with their own ideas, gathering information during the short breaks between sessions, and they had articles up and ready for review before the sun s

Having a Blast at the Environmental Center Summit Hosted at Catawba College It's been a busy week for sure at "Redesigning Our Future" (a camp for high school students) with an environmentalism theme. We hit breakfast at 7:30 a.m., and the lights aren't out until long after sunset. But, we've had a great time and learned a lot. Catching Our Breath for Just a Minute These young ladies take a quick break before heading off to a focus group which range from dance and blogging to economics and sacred spaces. We asked a random group of students waiting out on the brick yard what they considered one highlight to date at the summit. My Favorite Part About the Summit So Far . . . Robert (Virginia) - "Kayaking on the reserve was a lot of fun." Chas (Virginia) - "I loved dominating the Ecolympics with my team :-)" Savannah (North Carolina) - "Learned lots of awesome things and made a lot of awesome friends." Ce