Q & A with sophomore Avery Appleby

Q: Why did you want to start environmental club?

A: I have always cared about the environment a lot. We are all dependent on it. Obviously, there are a lot of problems facing our generation that we are going to have to solve, so it is important to bring awareness to the school.

Q: Is there anything that inspired you to care more about the environment?

A: A lot of things. There is this one lady I saw on a TED talk and she found a way to live with one mason jar of trash for three whole years. Stuff like that. Obviously, we can’t be like that, but we can try and be better.

Q: What does the club do?

A: We do recycling either every Wednesday or every other Wednesday. We made boxes for plastic recyclables and we do watering for some plants in the Spanish hallway. We are going to start a study about tardigrades.

Q: What is a tardigrade?

A: A tardigrade is a microscopic organism which is also called a water bear. It can survive in -300 °C and 200 °C which is really, really hot and really, really cold. They can also survive vacuums, UV radiation, and X-ray exposure. They can go like a year without oxygen and like ten years without food and water. They’re really cool.

Q: What should people know about the club?

A: They should know anyone can join, you don’t have to be all knowledgeable about the environment, you just have to care. We have one mission: that is to bring awareness and help the earth.

Q: Why is it important to be environmentally-friendly?

A: We only have one earth and one planet that we know of – so far – that sustains life and it is pretty important to keep it healthy otherwise we wouldn’t have an earth. There are lots of issues like climate change, like continents of trash floating in the ocean, which need to be taken care of. We need to stop putting it aside.

Q: What do you want to do in the future?

A: I don’t know yet. A tardigrade-oligist would be pretty cool, but also anything in environmental science, really.