UC Santa Barbara Bren School Students Mentor Teens at Climate Leadership Workshop on Channel Islands

Ocean acidification, offshore oil controversy, and invasive plant species. These are pressing climate issues, but how do you talk about them? 

To figure it out, students at UC Santa Barbara mentored 20 high school activists from across the country during a trip to Santa Cruz Island late last month. It was a workshop in climate leadership and literacy, to learn the best modes of communication for California’s — and the globe’s — most relevant climate dilemmas. 

It marked the beginning of a summer chock-full of lessons for future climate leaders.

“Climate Science Communications is really important to me, and I think it should really be an emphasis for a lot of our youth,” said Lotus Vermeer, the UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science’s assistant dean of development and partnerships. 

The trip was made possible through a partnership between the Bren School and the BlueDot Institute. Vermeer camped at the UCSB Santa Cruz Island Reserve alongside her PhD students and their teenage mentees for the four-day trip immersed in one of the Central Coast’s most unique environments. 

On top of leadership and communications training, students engaged in layered activities all around the island — exploring, learning about the island’s environmental challenges and conservation issues, and talking through the transformation of the Channel Islands over the years, such as the removal of invasive pigs and sheep. 

“The PhD students come from very different backgrounds, so they have very different perspectives and areas of research that they can share with the students,” Vermeer said.

What Vermeer is looking forward to now is an upcoming partnership with Safe Passage Youth, which takes kids from low-income families and trains them in restoration work, such as creating wildfire buffers and planting native plants and trees, and pays them for their work. The kids will be joining Vermeer’s PhD students to complete restoration work on Santa Cruz Island this summer.

The recent trip laid a foundation for more of these initiatives, Vermeer said.  

“I was with kids that had never been out to Santa Cruz Island before,” she said. “Most of them, including the kids from our own backyard, didn’t even know there was this remote island right out there, only a stone’s throw away from us here in Santa Barbara.” 

The kids got to see the real impact of habitat restoration on the island. At the end of the trip, each of the students completed a presentation on a climate issue that interests them. 

“It was very moving … just thinking, ‘Okay, this, this is starting to work,’” Vermeer continued. “This actually can maybe help make a difference. We’re starting to build our future of environmental leadership and climate activism.”