Courtesy of SustainUSWashington University senior Kelley Greenman, who recently won the Truman Scholarship, spoke to Student Life about her campus activism to fight global warming and why she finds meaning in it.
Student Life: What is the Truman Scholarship?
Kelley Greenman: The Truman [scholarship] is a $30,000 scholarship for grad school or jobs after graduation. My intention is to take a year to work in [Washington] D.C. at an environmental firm and then to use the Truman Scholarship to get a degree in public policy and the environment. I’m looking at places like Michigan and Oxford.
SL: How did you get involved with the fight against global warming on campus?
KG: On campus at the activities fair I heard about Verde, which is an environmental teaching program. We go into different schools in the St. Louis area to teach kids about different environmental [issues]. I ended up being the program leader the next year. I really enjoy teaching kids. That’s where I got involved.
I also worked with AJ Singletary to revive the environmental policy branch of the Roosevelt Institution [a student think tank]. We look at different environmental issues that are going on and [at] policy that’s being debated in the government.
SL: Where do you feel you’ve made the biggest impact regarding policy?
KG: Where I’ve done that the most is at an organization called SustainUS. It’s a [college-age] youth group that’s involved in environmental policy at the U.N. level. What we look most at is climate change and issues of sustainable development. They send people to U.N. meetings; I went to the U.N. meeting in Bali in December [and] I’m going to the U.N. commission on sustainable development in New York.
SL: What do you see as the significance of policy-making at the student level?
KG: There are a lot of documents and information out there. Once you get working background knowledge [of a subject] it’s pretty easy to figure out what the policy is. We don’t formulate what you should do and how to do it, but we say what we want our government to do in general. In Bali we wanted adaptation to be on the agenda at the U.N. conference. We were looking at what we want to see our government accomplish. We’re looking at what the United States needs to do. We’re looking for them to improve farmers’ lives and support fair trade and sustainable agriculture.
SL: What’s your experience like volunteering for Verde?
KG: As a program leader of Verde I work a lot with the volunteers and teach, getting Wash. U. volunteers into the classroom in St. Louis. They visit a classroom every other week and they stay with one class for the whole semester. Depending on how old the kids are, you may have a political discussion with the kids, or tell them to draw a tree. It’s about getting the college studs into the classroom where the kids may not have an environmental education taught to them specifically.
SL: Why is that kind of education important?
KG: Getting kids started early is extremely important. That’s where I found my interest in the environment. Even if they don’t end up growing up to be environmental activists, ignorance is what feeds the global warming skeptics’ movement. If you can take these kids and teach them to appreciate [the environment] and value it, you teach them potentially to take care of it and to live more sustainably when they grow up.
The teachers are really excited to have us in their classroom. I’ve never encountered a teacher that wasn’t really excited to teach these issues to their kids, because they value [students].
SL: What, in your opinion, is the effect of campus-based initiatives like these?
KG: A lot of times campus movements, like the civil rights movement-these campus initiatives do push national change. You can’t ignore [the environment] when there’s a big demographic of people doing something about it. At the U.N. level, that movement was brought up. I don’t at all think that campus initiatives are local. You work locally to impact globally.