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ACE Alumna Profile: Chloe

January 26th, 2012 by

Chloe Maxmin attended Lincoln Academy in Damariscotta, Maine for high school and is currently a first-year student at Harvard University. While in high school, Chloe founded her school’s Climate Action Club (http://laclimateaction.webs.com), which saved 700,000 plastic bags from local landfills, installed solar school panels on Lincoln Academy, and more. Chloe organized an ACE assembly at her high school for all 600 students. She also founded First Here, Then Everywhere (www.firstheretheneverywhere.org). We’re excited to welcome her back as an ACE Alumna blogger! Read on to learn more about her story:

Where do you go to college now and what work are you doing around climate change?

I go to Harvard College, and I’m involved with various projects both and on and off campus to educate people about climate change and contribute to mitigation efforts. I’m involved with one group that is organizing the first Green Economy Caucus in the Massachusetts Legislature. I’m part of another organization that is planning a renewable energy demonstration on campus to educate students about renewable energy and Harvard’s commitment to solar panels, wind power, and geothermal. I also work with an exclusively first-year organization dedicated to making energy-efficiency improvements around campus.  Earlier in the year I worked on campus  to protest the Keystone XL pipeline and educate students about the proposal. I am on the Editorial Board of the Harvard Crimson, writing about environmentalism on campus and around the world. I also write for Next Gen Journal to share some of my ideas about climate change and educate a larger audience. I tweet and maintain my website–First Here, Then Everywhere–as well.

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Gaby

Gaby is a East Coast transplant and a new addition to the ACE Oakland team. She loves coming up with and sharing new, cool ideas about green technologies and trends. Follow her on Twitter at @Gabyberk!

Exclusive Interview with Kevin

January 25th, 2012 by

You may have seen this guy running around in his blue track suit, repping ACE in Biggest Loser: Energy videos. But starring in videos is just one part of Kevin Kailath’s dynamic role here at ACE as the Student Action Program Coordinator. We flagged Kev down to ask him a few questions. Check out the exclusive interview below!

How long have you been at ACE?

I’ve been working at ACE for about 5 months and loving my time here.

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Gaby

Gaby is a East Coast transplant and a new addition to the ACE Oakland team. She loves coming up with and sharing new, cool ideas about green technologies and trends. Follow her on Twitter at @Gabyberk!

2011 Climate Recap: What a Year

January 24th, 2012 by

2011 was a year of extremes. Extremes like Tim Tebow’s winning streak and Kim Kardashian’s shortest-ever marriage, but also extremes of the weather variety.

Last year, the U.S. got hit with a record-breaking total of 14 weather disasters of over a billion dollars each, from Hurricane Irene to wildfires in Texas to the series of tornado outbreaks last spring. (2008 is the #2 year with only 9 billion-dollar weather disasters.)

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Rebecca

Rebecca is an ACE Educator and the ACE Team Scientist. She's done research in the Arctic and Antarctic and loves to geek-out on all things climate science-related! Ask her a question at science@climateeducation.org.

Climate Science Education: It’s Important.

January 23rd, 2012 by

This week, an article came out in the LA Times describing climate change education as the new “evolution debate” in schools, reporting that some states are considering new policies that would require teachers to “teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position.”

ACE was founded to fill an enormous gap in our educational sciences curriculum around this very subject. Currently, there are no state or national science standards in public high schools that address teaching of the science of global warming, even though 98% of the world’s climate scientists agree that humans are causing climate change, and the consequences could be extraordinary.

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Rebecca

Rebecca is an ACE Educator and the ACE Team Scientist. She's done research in the Arctic and Antarctic and loves to geek-out on all things climate science-related! Ask her a question at science@climateeducation.org.

Climate Change Denial Hits the Classroom

January 19th, 2012 by

It’s been quite a week, between President Obama blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline, SOPA/ PIPA’s internet black out day yesterday, Apple announcing iBooksl, a textbook platform, Kodak going bankrupt…. the list goes on and on. And on.

But at the top of our list of wordly happenings is that teaching climate change in schools is now on the same level as teaching evolution in schools. What I mean is this:  there is now more and more resistance to to teaching man-made climate change in both middle and high schools despite the fact that all scientific evidence shows that yes, climate change is caused by man-made activities, such as copious amounts of fossil fuel consumption.

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Gaby

Gaby is a East Coast transplant and a new addition to the ACE Oakland team. She loves coming up with and sharing new, cool ideas about green technologies and trends. Follow her on Twitter at @Gabyberk!

Welcome to Yard Lab

January 18th, 2012 by

Howdy from the staff at Chabot Space & Science Center in the Oakland Hills! Chabot works to encourage students to actively address climate issues within the Bay Area community. We’ll be dropping by ACE occasionally to share some interesting facts, zany stories, and conversations regarding climate change and how it all relates to you!

Hi! I’m Ben Burress, the Staff Astronomer and Experience Content Developer at Chabot… yes of the Lake Merritt Burresses… That is, my dad was a Naturalist at the Lake Merritt bird refuge in Oakland for 32 years, and my mom was a biology teacher. My “natural” upbringing seems to have rubbed off, for not only do I love hiking and exploring nature, but my backyard hobby reflects my love of the great outdoors….

I call it “Yard Lab.” It’s my home laboratory—and not like the little basement chemistry lab I had when I was a kid, where I made concoctions that I gave names to like ”almost-gunpowder,” “ bubbling barf,” and “jar of stuff that just doesn’t seem to undergo any sort of chemical reaction at all.”

No, my “adult” home laboratory is my backyard, where I put a number of green practices to the test. And having lived in the same house for 12 years now, I’ve been able to watch the results of my experiments season after season.

We started with a pretty plain backyard: just a few old fruit trees. A blank slate to work with. My wife and I both love gardening, and what gardening brings to the home, and so we loved our blank slate instantly – we were able to fill the yard with our own ideas.

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Gaby

Gaby is a East Coast transplant and a new addition to the ACE Oakland team. She loves coming up with and sharing new, cool ideas about green technologies and trends. Follow her on Twitter at @Gabyberk!

Losing Big, Here at Home

January 17th, 2012 by

So at this point, you’ve probably heard about Biggest Loser: Energy!

(It’s a really big deal)

But, in case you haven’t, Biggest Loser: Energy is ACE’s national competition that challenges Action Teams to reduce their school’s energy usage: Dropping pounds of CO2 and saving money in the process.

It’s awesome! It’s so awesome that I had to do it myself.

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Gaby

Gaby is a East Coast transplant and a new addition to the ACE Oakland team. She loves coming up with and sharing new, cool ideas about green technologies and trends. Follow her on Twitter at @Gabyberk!

A Tale of Two Cities (Not by Dickens)

January 12th, 2012 by

This is a guest post by Field Correspondent Athman. 

Hi everyone! My name is Athman and I am one of the Field Correspondents for ACE. I want to share with you the story of two unique cities that I have had the privilege of working with these past few years. Fortunately, this story does have a happy ending – one that readers of this blog may find encouraging.

I have been leading Bags Gag (www.bagsgag.org) , a nationwide service project, for a few years now. The mission of Bags Gag is to raise awareness on the harmful effects of plastic bags and to promote reusable bags. Bags Gag has been involved with projects across the globe, ranging from the US to India. The headquarters of Bags Gag is San Jose, California. I also frequently visit a small town on the other side of the globe: Tiruvannamalai in South India. It is safe to say that there are a good number of environmentally conscious residents in both these places. Many organizations have worked extremely hard in both regions to make a positive difference first in their communities and then in the world. San Jose, CA, a city many of us know, is the tenth largest city in the US and the heart of Silicon Valley. Tiruvannamalai, India, a small town on the other side of the world, is home to temples, animals, and many spiritual centers. These two culturally different cities have something recent in common. Both cities have banned plastic bags.

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Gaby

Gaby is a East Coast transplant and a new addition to the ACE Oakland team. She loves coming up with and sharing new, cool ideas about green technologies and trends. Follow her on Twitter at @Gabyberk!

The Winners of the Fall 2011 Biggest Loser: Energy Competition Are…

January 11th, 2012 by

Alright, losers. That’s right, I called you LOSERS. Last semester ACE launched the Biggest Loser: Energy competition, where losing (pounds of CO2, that is) is actually winning. We had 60 Action Teams compete for the $1000 grand prize, losing a grand total of 206,932 pounds of CO2, saving their schools 153,283 kWh of energy and therefore saving their schools over $15,000 in energy costs. WOW!

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Gaby

Gaby is a East Coast transplant and a new addition to the ACE Oakland team. She loves coming up with and sharing new, cool ideas about green technologies and trends. Follow her on Twitter at @Gabyberk!

The After Christmas Tree

January 11th, 2012 by

This is a guest post by Field Correspondent Molly Cleveland.

How many of you went out to get a Christmas Tree this year? I’ll guess probably 100% of  you, but if you think about it, it’s pretty wasteful for us to cut down perfectly good trees to  put up in our houses for a month, and then throw them into our backyards when were  done with them. I read this Christmas Story when I was younger, that was called “The After Christmas Tree.”  The family in the story didn’t want to get rid of their tree after Christmas, so they “reused” it. They decorated the tree with pinecones dipped in peanut butter and then rolled in bird seed, cranberries, popcorn, and lights. After the tree was decorated they set it up outside for all of the birds, squirrels, chipmunks, etc to come and enjoy their “After Christmas Tree.” They kept it up for weeks after, until the tree finally died. If we all found creative ways to “reuse” our Christmas Trees, then maybe it wouldn’t be so wasteful to cut down a tree, just for a month.

Materials To Make “The After Christmas Tree.”
Pinecones
Bird Seed
Melted Peanut Butter
Cranberries
Popcorn
String
Newspaper, or paper bags to lay down because this project WILL get messy.

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Gaby

Gaby is a East Coast transplant and a new addition to the ACE Oakland team. She loves coming up with and sharing new, cool ideas about green technologies and trends. Follow her on Twitter at @Gabyberk!

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