‘They’re the future’: Valley students promote conservation at Earth Day event
Water conservation in Southern Nevada was the hot topic Saturday during the Earth Day festival at the Springs Preserve, which drew a crowd of more than 3,000 people.
The event was the culmination of work by the Youth Conservation Council, made up of local high school students who learn about water protection issues under the auspices of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, preserve spokeswoman Abigail Phillips said.
“Their target audience is the people who come here for the Earth Day event at Springs Preserve — families, younger kids — who might not want to hear an adult talk about conservation but might be interested in a cool teenager talking about it,” Phillips said.
By the end of the afternoon, the Earth Day celebration attracted 3,081 people, according to Jena Antonchuk, a contractor for the preserve.
The festival wasn’t only about the importance of preserving water. Other booths raised awareness about issues like recycling food waste and composting to cut back on garbage sent to landfills.
Sarah Stallard, 32, farm manager of Las Vegas Livestock, an animal farm at Apex north of Las Vegas, said her business gathers up to 30 tons a day of vegetable and meat scraps from casinos and other businesses, which then goes on to serve as feed for about 5,000 pigs, 400 chickens and 50 goats.
It keeps the waste from going into landfills, rotting there and spreading atmosphere-threatening methane gas emissions.
A booth run by the Nevada Department of Environmental Protection displayed a home “indoor composter,” sold for about $60, that reduces landfills by turning kitchen waste, such as potato peels, into a fertilizing liquid full of nutrients for watering house plants, according to NDEP spokeswoman Kayla Alm.
‘The next generation of decision makers’
Many of the students on Saturday managed kid-oriented activities, such as making stick puppets out of pictures of tortoises, bighorn sheep and other animals to learn how they survive in the parched Las Vegas Valley desert.
“We want to educate people about where the water is coming from, how much they should use, wasting water, especially,” said Emily Arellano, 14, a student at Ed. W. Clark High School, beneath a pop-up canopy that offered shade from the imposing midday sunshine.
Her booth, at the preserve’s amphitheater, displayed a stack of five-gallon plastic jugs next to a patch of denim, to illustrate the amount of water required to grow cotton needed to make that small amount of fabric.
“Everyone who attends today gets an earful about water conservation in a way that the kids themselves created,” Phillips said. “And at the end, not only do we have a great event, but now we have students who are about to become adults. They’re the next generation of decision makers.”
Next to Arellano was fellow Ed W. Clark student Ashritha Kalakuntla, 16, and behind them, 17-year-old Silverado High pupil Skylar Babcock, who was printing Earth Day logos onto cloth “sustainability bags” for kids to decorate and use in place of plastic bags when they go shopping.
One of the children, using felt-tipped pens to color a bag, was Javier Montgomery, a precocious 6-year-old who knew what to say about going easy on water.
“By taking quick showers and turn it off when I brush my teeth,” he said. “Because Lake Mead has a little bit of water and we’re losing water. And we’re in a drought and we want to use less water.”
Megan Punzi, 37, watched her daughters Mackenzie, 5, and Madison, 3, play with stick puppets inside one of the preserve’s classrooms.
“It seems important to teach them about sustainability, and taking care of our Earth,” Punzi said. “It’s Earth Day, right? Celebrating Earth Day and teaching them all about it. They’re the future after all, right?”
Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0382. Follow @JeffBurbank2 on Twitter.
