Through her sustainability course, Sage Lenier's goal is to inspire young people and equip them with the tools to take action.
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00:00 (soft music)
00:02 The way that the ecological crisis is usually talked about,
00:08 it sounds as though it's too late,
00:10 there's nothing we can do,
00:12 and humanity is completely doomed.
00:14 As a young person, that was obviously very jarring for me,
00:18 that there was no point in planning for a future
00:20 because we wouldn't have one.
00:23 I started looking for solutions.
00:26 We're not waiting around for the system
00:28 to give us the tools we need.
00:30 We are ready to take that for ourselves.
00:32 (soft music)
00:34 (indistinct)
00:38 I came to environmentalism
00:51 from a social justice background.
00:53 I was a really passionate teenager,
00:55 and I realized that this is really the one movement
00:58 that can encapsulate them all.
00:59 You know, there's no human rights on a dead planet.
01:01 I started teaching, I started writing these curriculums
01:04 because I was trying to invent the education
01:08 that I wasn't getting.
01:09 I feel like I built a community of students around me
01:14 where all of us were pushing away from the doomsday,
01:18 understanding how bad the problem is narrative
01:20 that our professors were pushing
01:21 and moving towards what are these actionable solutions.
01:25 We're looking at a population of 10 billion by 2050.
01:28 Where are we gonna put those people?
01:30 How do we feed them?
01:31 How do we organize these systems?
01:32 So collectively, we're all working towards the mindset
01:37 of being organized, being flexible, being resilient.
01:40 The reason this course is so popular
01:42 is because it's a solutions oriented,
01:45 action focused environmental justice curriculum.
01:47 It's a vision for what a better world could look like.
01:49 It's hopeful, and we are constantly connecting students
01:51 with fights and initiatives in our community
01:53 so that they can get involved.
01:54 I think me and a lot of the people around me
01:57 really felt like we had a responsibility to do it all.
02:02 You see a lot of burnout in youth climate activism.
02:06 It's definitely not sustainable,
02:07 and there needs to be more support from older generations.
02:10 It needs to be intergenerational collaboration.
02:13 If the kids have all this energy
02:16 and they're building all this stuff,
02:18 well, you guys have the money and the exposure
02:21 and the media control.
02:23 There needs to be more collaboration.
02:25 Even if it were possible to flip a switch tomorrow
02:29 and the whole world is run by renewable energy,
02:32 we would still be in an ecological crisis
02:34 because we're facing a crisis of pollution,
02:36 of deforestation, of over extraction,
02:40 and we need a radically different system.
02:43 The answer to the ecological crisis needs to be regional,
02:46 it needs to be local, and it needs to be tailored
02:49 to individuals, communities' needs.
02:53 If you create change in your community and I work on mine,
02:56 we can patchwork together this system-level change
03:00 through creating change in school districts,
03:02 cities, counties, states.
03:05 You don't have to go and lobby Congress
03:07 in order to be an effective climate activist.
03:09 When people tell me the impact that my work has had on them,
03:20 sometimes I cry, it definitely helps me
03:23 sleep better at night.
03:24 Knowing that I've put something in motion
03:26 that can't be stopped, that all of these people
03:28 have this framework now for what a better world
03:31 could look like, and they've all decided
03:33 to take it upon themselves to actively enact that,
03:37 and that there's nothing I could do
03:39 to stop them at this point.
03:40 I believe that there is a way to ensure
03:45 that the next generation is equipped to survive
03:48 and adapt in a climate-changed world,
03:50 and that's what we're building here.
03:52 (upbeat music)
03:55 (upbeat music)
03:57 [BLANK_AUDIO]