CURE Founders Lead Assembly
Bridgette Adu-Wadier
“The water is rising,” said Kenneth Warren, co-founder of CURE, Community United for Renewable Energy, an environmental organization dedicated to promoting sustainability at T.C. “When the wind starts blowing and the water starts rising… it will not be about Snapchat, or
Instagram or your car. It will be about climate change impacting your life.”
Warren, a senior, and Riley Casagrande, a junior and co-founder, led an assembly on March 14, discussing the causes of climate change and how to fight against it. The two welcomed Claire Gould, a representative for the Climate Reality Project, an organization Al Gore created to promote education and advocacy on climate change.
The U.S. is one of the leading contributors to climate change, but takes the least actions to reduce waste, fossil fuel use, and plastic consumption. The progression of global warming has strong implications for the future of the environment, meaning more droughts, wildfires, and floods.“We are dumping millions of tons of man-made pollution and gases into the atmosphere every 24 hours,” said Gould.
Casagrande stressed voting as a necessary action towards creating policy change and voting leaders who advocate for environmental protections into office. With roughly 500 students in the auditorium during seminar, more than half of them raised their hands when asked if they would be able to vote for the 2020 election. Though President Trump did pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the U.S. cannot officially leave it until the day after the 2020 election. Therefore, T.C. students and young people across the country may still have a final voice in the process.
“This is the power of our generation. It is not just us. It is children our age all around the world that know this planet is dying. And though our parents and their parents started this problem, it is now our job to fix it. This is the power of our generation,” said Casagrande.
The overarching message of the assembly was the importance of implementing sustainability in small, but impactful ways. Reducing energy consuming by using LED lights, consuming less plastic when eating out, turning out the lights after the leaving the room are habits that, once practiced over the course of several years, yield a significant impact.
Sustainability starts with using less paper, which is a challenge in the educational environment, since paper is the lifeblood of schools.
“I know you all [teachers] love to packets to your students, we have great resources at our hands. We have access to Canvas and Google Drive,” Casagrande said.
CURE is planning for a new initiative to make recycling a reality at T.C. The team has installed posters reminding students to recycle in front of most of the recycling bins around the school. After this, they plan to introduce elementary school students to sustainability as well, along with installing four refillable water bottle stations in T.C.
The CURE founders encourage their fellow T.C. students to join the global effort to reduce the impact of climate change.
“This generation has become the greatest generation to ever walk this Earth. We will not have fought World War 2, but it will be instead the generation — our generation — that will have stopped the sea levels from rising.”
