My name is Dylan Beckett; I live in Portland and I am in sixth grade.

When I started school, I was hearing all these scary things on the news—things like ice caps melting, and weather changing, and animals going extinct—that made me worry about the planet. People always say, “even if you do something small, it can have a big effect,” and I felt like I wanted to do something. So in third grade, I decided to do a Climb-a-Thon for Climate Change. We raised almost $3500 for 350PDX, a non-profit that works to help stop climate change.

With everything happening in the world this year, I felt like it was time to do another event. So this year I’m organizing Laps for Life—a Swim for the Climate. Read more

Hello! My name is Emma Rosen and I am the web and tech intern at 350PDX. I grew up in Southeast Portland with two environmentalists for parents. This meant I spent a lot of time learning about the wildlife and ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest, and of course, about climate change (or as it was still known during my childhood, global warming). I still have a board game called ‘The Life Cycle of Salmon’, which taught me about the importance of strong river banks with shady trees for hatching Salmon’s eggs, and that if your dice roll landed you on a river dam square you were definitely screwed. Everything I learned enforced the idea that climate change was an issue that needed to be addressed quickly, and by as many people as possible.

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My name is Rebecca Smith. I am a junior at Sarah Lawrence College and an intern at 350PDX. I first became familiar with the climate movement when, growing up in a conservative family in the Portland area, I was taught very carefully to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. My family started this journey by carefully setting aside our soda cans in one paper bag and our cardboard in another for trips to the local recycling center. Later, other plastics and paper products would be added to these bags. Finally, the city supplied recycling cans and pick-up dates for these and other recyclables. I remember feeling quite proud of myself in these recycling endeavors. In doing so, I felt I had single-handedly saved the planet, a sentiment that was reinforced my education system’s emphasis on our individual efforts to be green. Such individualistic notions about what it meant to be sustainable suited my conservative family very well. However, when I got to Sarah Lawrence, a liberal arts college in New York, my views on both sustainability and conservatism rapidly changed.

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