The Harker Environmental and Animal Rights Team (HEART) held a special assembly on Oct. 22 featuring guest speaker Ambessa Cantave, an educator representing the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE). ACE specializes in engaging high school students to become active in stopping climate change.

Cantave gave an introductory presentation on climate change with an amusing series of animated shorts that illustrated how carbon dioxide works in the earth’s environment, and how human-caused emissions of it and other greenhouse gases have contributed to the various changes in climate in the last several decades. He then demonstrated how youth can network to bring about the change needed to end the climate crisis, showing video of young climate activists marching en masse and working on projects that help make their schools and communities more environmentally conscious and less wasteful.

Slips of paper were passed out to the assembly audience, on which students wrote their names to be included in a Declaration of Independence on Fossil Fuels, which will be presented to President Barack Obama.