Hawaii Preparatory Academy Hosts First Annual Student Congress on Sustainability

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Big Island Students and Teachers to Meet June 8-11, 2008

WAIMEA, Island of Hawaii—High school students and teachers from around the Big Island will gather at Hawaii Preparatory Academy June 8-11, 2008 for the first annual Student Congress on Sustainability. This event launches a global network being created to provide an opportunity for high school student environmental leaders from Hawaii to collaborate on student-driven environmental initiatives. Twenty-five public, charter, parochial, and independent high schools on the Island of Hawaii were invited and about 80 students and teachers are expected to participate in the free, three-day event sponsored by HPA.

The mission of the Student Congress on Sustainability is to celebrate, inform, and cultivate student-driven environmental initiatives addressing local, national, and global issues. By marshalling the enthusiasm, talent, and resourcefulness of young men and women, the Congress will be one means of facilitating widespread education and collaboration among high school students, serving to cultivate and shape habits of mind that will translate sustainable ideology into practice.

“It’s important to get different people with different perspectives on sustainability,” explained Dr. Bill Wiecking, HPA Upper School science teacher and assistant chairman of the event. “My main concern is energy use, but yours might be recycling, or local agriculture. All of these aspects tie in to what we are trying to accomplish.”

The Congress will feature workshops highlighting a wide range of sustainable and environmental issues, including global warming, energy conservation, wind and solar renewable energy sources, converting diesel cars to run on cooking oil, sustainable lifestyle options, recycling, and composting and organic farming.

“We wanted the workshops to be hands-on,” stated Karen Yamasato, assistant chair of the HPA Go Green Committee and one of the original organizers of the Congress. “We will have some lecture-based workshops, but most of them will get the students involved and taking part in the subject of the workshop.”

In addition to the workshops, the Congress will feature several guest speakers. Dr. Ku Kahakalu, director of Kanu o ka ‘Āina New Century Public Charter School, is scheduled to speak on the connection native Hawaiians had with sustainability. Other speakers include KTA Executive Vice-President of Perishable Operations, Derek Kurisu, and trained climate-change speaker Alan Nakagawa, who was certified by The Climate Project to present a talk based on Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

The Congress will include conversations with Dr. Mathis Wackernagel, executive director of the Global Footprint Network and co-creator of the Ecological Footprint, and teleconferences with student groups in Anchorage, Alaska, and Hamburg, Germany, to help establish international connections to similar groups who are working to increase awareness of climate change and its implications.

Additionally, students will take an excursion to the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii, exploring their renewable energy projects, and looking at how companies such as Kona Blue, Cyanotech, Koyo Water, and Big Island Abalone incorporate ecologically sound business practices into their everyday operations.

There also will be many opportunities for the representatives to interact with students from other schools, tackling issues of sustainability and ecological protection.

“Our main objective is to facilitate student networking and sustainability awareness,” said Yamasato. “So much of what we do with other schools is competitive, such as sports or academic competitions. The Congress is not about competition; it’s about student networking and working together to solve a common problem.

“It’s about building good relationships. We want this to kick off a yearlong effort towards sustainability, and it’s easier to enact change when you have a network of support.”

The original idea for the Congress was developed during a spring 2007 charrette conducted by a Seattle-based sustainability consulting group with HPA faculty, students, and parents. Out of these meetings arose HPA’s Five-Year Sustainability Action Plan. The plan calls for the development of greater community interconnectivity to conquer the challenges of developing sustainability—one aspect of which was the Student Congress.

“Being on an island gives us a unique opportunity to demonstrate sustainability, because we can’t have anything going on behind the scenes,” said Wiecking. “If the barge were to stop coming, we would have a month of oil and after that we would be back to hunting and gathering. That’s not sustainable.

“This island should be a model for sustainable energy use. We have wind, solar, geothermal. Sustainability can be done here.”

The Student Congress on Sustainability is envisioned to be a proactive step toward celebrating and spreading environmental consciousness, and enabling youth-driven conservation and sustainability initiatives to spread through a global network of student-to-student collaboration.

“We want to create a global example for sustainability,” Wiecking added. “We want to show that sustainability can be done. We have a unique location and our own set of challenges, issues, and advantages, but we want to show that yes, this is possible, so people can use our ideas and adapt it to the challenges that they have in their own settings.”

For more information, contact Yamasato at 881-4013, or by e-mail at kyamasato@hpa.edu.