BENZONIA, Mich. (AP) - Seamus Callaghan was only 8 when the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” helped re-energize the environmental movement. But already he had strong beliefs about environmental protection.
“There’s a lot of environmental damage and not a lot of people understand why that’s important,” said Callaghan, 17, whose parents often exposed him to nature and science. “I want to go at that at a youth level, because young people are the future and we need to educate them.”
The Benzie Central High School junior started a school environmental group called “BCIA” or “Benzie - Conserve, Inspire and Adapt.” The group meets for a half-hour on Mondays in the school cafeteria and takes field trips to places like Bay Area Disposal and the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, which propagates, archives and reforests with some of the country’s oldest and most iconic trees.
“They want to conserve resources, they want to inspire others to do the same and they want people to understand that we have to adapt because of climate change,” group adviser Aimé Merizon, outreach coordinator for the Benzie Conservation District, told the Traverse City Record-Eagle ( https://bit.ly/1IhydCW ).
The group started small - by following the footprint of a can of soda - but thinks big. Potential projects include implementing composting in the school cafeteria, establishing a year-round garden with a Monarch butterfly way station, and installing solar panels on the school roof.
“We are in the planning stages of all those things,” said Callaghan, who started the group last fall with the help of the conservation district.
The group tackles its biggest project this spring when it plants a 20-by-45-feet “youth hoop house” at Grow Benzie in Benzonia. The hoop house was erected last summer with the support of the Midland-based Allen Foundation but was never used, said Josh Stoltz, Grow Benzie executive director.
Besides standard growing techniques, BCIA wants to experiment with hydroponics, soilless growing in nutrient-rich water solutions; mycoagriculture, the use of fungi in sustainable agriculture; hugelkultur, a form of raised-bed gardening that uses hills and mounds of soil on top of decaying wood debris and compostable biomass; and landscape biomimicry, the study and application of naturally occurring processes in site design.
The group applied for a $2,500 grant to buy seed and water pumps and to make upgrades to the hoop house, such as geothermal heating and cooling and electric motors to open and close windows.
“I found a grant that I thought would work for the group and Seamus wrote it. It was stellar,” said Stoltz. “We’re still waiting to hear whether they got the grant, but even if they don’t, we’ll find a way to work with them. It’s still a youth hoop house. We want it to be youth driven.”
Group members will maintain the garden year-round, with help over the summer from volunteers from neighboring community garden plots. They’ll pick up where they left off on other projects when school starts again in the fall.
“One of the challenges in any community garden is getting it watered. Because it’s work,” said Stoltz. “To drive out here for half an hour just to water isn’t a priority for a kid or an adult.”
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Information from: Traverse City Record-Eagle, https://www.record-eagle.com
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