Introduction!

Hi and welcome all to the Lansing Climate Reality blog! My name is Bernadette Osborn, I am the Vice-Chair and Presentations Committee Chair of the chapter, and I am here to introduce you all to our chapter. We will be using this blog to educate others about the effects of climate change, talk about how we can help locally, locally address climate issues, climate change advances, and many more exciting topics! As a first blog post, I would like to introduce what Lansing Climate Reality is.

I created Lansing Climate Reality in early September 2020 after I attended the July 2020 Global Training. After I learned about chapters, I knew I had to join one to continue learning about climate change and my climate activism. Since there was no Climate Reality chapter near me, I decided to start my own, however, being only 16 at the time, I was underage. I decided to reach out to Climate Reality Leaders near me and discovered Carolyn Randall. Current Chair Carolyn stepped up and agreed to help, along with Aiko Major (Marketing and Communications Chair), Allison Schoen (Campaign Chair), and Anna Hicks (Membership Chair). Since Aiko, Allison, Anna, and I are all current juniors at Okemos High School, we have brought a lot of youth to the chapter. We have many concerns about climate change since what we do in the next few years will determine our futures. Although the chapter has a lot of youth, we are trying to bring in community members of all ages. Climate change affects everyone, so everyone should be fighting for it.

The chapter runs a few campaigns, including Our Climate Moment: Let’s Get to Work, Plastic Pollution Reduction, Water Pollution, and Presentation and Education Development. With Our Climate Moment, our primary goal is to encourage Congress members to take action against climate change. We are doing this by signing petitions that support our fight against climate change and calling and writing our members of Congress to encourage climate action. Our goal with Plastic Pollution Reduction is to promote our community and local businesses to reduce their plastic consumption. For this campaign, we have monthly goals of how many litter pieces to pick up each month. We encourage members to try to implement one way of reducing their plastic consumption each month, and we post on Instagram members picking up trash to encourage others to do so. For our third campaign, Water Pollution, we are trying to reduce the amount of pollution in the Red Cedar. Here we are educating people about the river’s pollution and how to prevent it, encouraging legislation to be passed that protects our waterways, learning more about what we can do to help, and volunteering to help clean the river. For our last campaign, Presentation and Education Development, our goal is to educate the community about climate change, what they can do to help, and how to find their voice. We do this by holding weekly webinars that cover many topics, teaching elementary/middle schoolers about climate change, and claiming local presentation requests.

Thank you so much for visiting our website, and I hope you learned a little about the Lansing chapter! If you would like to become a member, apply here. Remember, there is no Planet B, so let’s fight for the one we have.

Bernadette Osborn