This Boise student won a national contest on climate change — for a project on grass
Quinn Carter recalled some of the first times they became aware of climate change. It started with a family Alaskan cruise and seeing a chunk of a glacier fall. And in kindergarten, a teacher asked students to close their eyes as they counted to 60 — then told them how many acres of trees were cut down during that time.
“I’ve grown up on planet Earth,” said Carter, 16. “I just love animals and plants, just organisms in general.”
Carter’s passion in addressing climate change paid off last month when they received a national award for a video they produced as part of the Climate Innovation Challenge, a contest that asked students to illustrate “a specific climate vulnerability or impact and present a creative solution,” according to a news release from Climate Advocates Voces Unidas, the nonprofit that ran the climate challenge.
Carter focused their project on grass — its harmful impact on biodiversity and ways to rethink typical grass lawns.
Climate Advocates Voces Unidas gave Carter the award for outstanding entry in high school. The hundreds of entries were judged by a group of scientists, educators and visual media professionals, according to the news release.
Carter, the only Boise student to win, said they hope to raise awareness about grass and possible alternatives.
“‘I’m hoping that people start talking about it more,” they said. “Replacing (grass) with native plants would help the local ecosystem a lot.”
‘Our Native Lawn’
Carter’s video submission, called “Our Native Lawn,” begins with showing large fields of grass, which Carter said have grown and spread in the U.S. over the course of decades, and now cover about 2% of America’s land.
“Even though these plant species are constantly surrounding us and have been for many years, they are an invasive species and in turn greatly affect our biodiversity and ecosystem,” Carter said in the video.
They create biodiversity deserts and produce more greenhouse gases than they absorb, Carter said.
In the video, Carter talks with Chy Gappmayer, a biologist. Gappmayer said grass lawns and turf need to be “pretty much abolished.”
“Why waste our resources, which are finite, like water especially, on feeding something that doesn’t give back to anything or anyone?” he said.
The type of grass popular across the U.S. isn’t native to America, Carter said. A plant like grass, which is hard to remove, will slowly cut down on the materials the natural and native plants use to survive.
When those materials are gone, the native plants start dying off. In turn, insects and animals that feed off those plants start dying off, Carter said.
“It’s just a whole chain reaction that affects the entire climate of the area when you when you implant such a strong, large colony of this everywhere,” they said.
Carter’s solution was to replace the “resource-sucking species” with something that would benefit the environment instead of hurting it.
“We can bring out native species into our home,” Carter said. “We will welcome all the insects and small species that we have driven away by destroying their homes.”
For Idaho, those species could include sagebrush or wheatgrass. People across the U.S. have also recently been planting laws made up of clover, a species that requires less water and fewer resources to grow, and don’t need to be mowed.
“There is no excuse not to bring back our native species that we once loved, and now is more important than ever,” they said. “We still have a chance if we act now.”
Students in several grades participated in challenge
This was the first year students at Sage participated in the Climate Innovation Challenge, said Eric Oliver, a teacher at Sage who taught the challenge. The challenge is in its third year. The school worked in partnership with Climate Advocates Voces Unidas, and adapted the curriculum, resources and training it received to fit the school’s classes. Students in seventh through 10th grade participated, he said.
During the unit in Oliver’s design class, students explored climate change’s impacts on communities, Oliver said. They learned how different communities, such as ski areas in Idaho, were adapting to climate change, and steps they were taking to mitigate its impacts.
“We talked a lot about the ways that communities in Idaho and around the world are already having to adapt to climate change,” Oliver said.
Students in his class did their projects on a variety of topics, ranging from the impact of climate change on the snow pack to farming and agricultural techniques. Students focused on different areas of concern, learned about the threats posed by climate change and came up with ways those communities could adapt.
Carter said they got the idea for their project about a month before they started the unit at school — but they couldn’t remember exactly how they came up with it.
When they started doing research, they found a term, “tapestry lawn,” used on social media to refer to lawns that weren’t made of grass. Having that term helped them kickstart a lot of the work on their project.
The project really drove home the idea of how much grass there is in the U.S. and how much space it takes up, Carter said.
As part of the project, they also went up to Idaho City to capture film they used for the video.
Oliver said he had given his class an extra incentive when they were submitting their entries.
“I told the students I would automatically give them the highest grade possible if they happened to win, kind of thinking that wouldn’t occur,” Oliver said. “I had to honor my promise. And I was really glad I did.”
Phil Lucero, education director at Climate Advocates Voces Unidas, said during the awards ceremony that both adaptation and mitigation strategies are important in addressing climate change, but “no single option is sufficient by itself.” He talked about the importance of looking at the issue on a local level.
“We need to think locally, addressing smaller impacts as they present themselves in our own communities,” Lucero said in the news release. “If we approach the problem this way, it becomes more manageable, and we will feel more empowered by the success of our actions.”
‘Everything is getting destroyed by us’
Carter said they want to use what they learned and replace some of the grass at the Sage school campus. They are considering proposing the idea to the school’s green club next school year.
In the future, Carter said they want to be a biologist. They are passionate about rainforest deforestation in particular, they said.
Carter said it’s upsetting to see plants and animals being ruined through human actions.
“They’re fascinating,” they said. “It’s sad that everything is getting destroyed by us.”
