A Look Inside: Athens-Clarke Conducts Poll Accuracy Testing Before 2024 Election
Climate Anxiety – How an Education Coordinator Handles Younger Generations Environmental Worries
It’s 10:40 a.m., and another school field trip comes to a close at The State Botanical Gardens of Georgia. The sun is shining on the plants and trees that surround the facility, and children are laughing and playing as they finally funnel into their school bus to head back to the classroom.
Audrey Mitchell, who helped orchestrate the field trip, is seen chatting with the children’s parents, smiling and laughing like they’re family. Her shoes are worn and dirty from the numerous tours conducted throughout the gardens.
Mitchell, who graduated from the University of Georgia in 2015, helps coordinate and run field trips and educational seminars for grades K-12 at the gardens.
As a staff mentor for the Environmental Educational Team at Learning by Leading, she is tasked with teaching university students how to lead these educational programs. Learning by Leading, a service-learning program at UGA, was started by the University of California. It provides students with leadership skills and real-world experience to address important environmental issues.
One environmental issue that seems to be negatively affecting younger generations is climate change. According to a study in 2021, which evaluated 10,000 people between 16-25 years old, more than half of the sample said that they were extremely worried about climate change.
Mitchell helps run a yearly summer camp that goes in-depth on various environmental concepts. One concept, called environmental archaeology, is being severely harmed due to coastal line changes and environmental degradation Mitchell said. She brought in a guest speaker from New South Associates, a cultural resource management service, to discuss the subject.
Mitchell said that she tries to teach students to be a positive force in the environment.
“But in my mind, and when I try to teach students and kind of pass on is that you know, even if it is too late, do you really want to add to the badness,” she said.
One of her team leaders, MaKenzie Leatherwood, was introduced to the program after working as a summer camp counselor at the gardens. When it comes to teaching children about climate change, she said that offering them small solutions will ease their anxiety.
“So like when we’re out, like say during summer camp, we have snack, and the kids want to just throw their trash on the ground, like if it’s a paper box or something and I have to remind them like, ‘Oh no, like we’re still gonna recycle that’ because there’s a proper way to do it and teaching them about how, you know, why it’s important that we look for critters so we can tell like how the environment is changing,” Leatherwood said.
Mitchell said one of the lessons she teaches kids is how the overcollection of medicinal plants is harmful to the ecosystem at the gardens. She hopes that through the field trips she organizes, she can further educate students about how just one individual can have a dramatic effect on the ecosystem.
“So like, if you come on a field trip,” Mitchell said, “and you learn like, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize that I can’t just go pick things from the botanical garden,’ and then maybe that will carry on to deepen their knowledge as they go along.”
Mitchell said a possible reason climate anxiety is occurring in younger generations is due to easily accessible online information. She said when someone hears about corporations getting around laws to save money, they can affect the environment in negative ways.
Mitchell said that climate anxiety is a fear that can be used to be a driving force for change.
“If we didn’t know, we had these issues, and we weren’t worried about them, then what would be our motivation to do anything about it,” Mitchell said.
Author Jack Davis discusses the bald eagle’s history from a near-extinct to now thriving species
Jaxon Meeks
In promoting his new book, “The Bald Eagle: The History of a Symbol and Species,” Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Davis spoke about the Bald Eagles’ journey from almost extinct to a thriving species.
Davis spoke at the University of Georgia’s Jackson Street Building on Thursday as a part of UGA’s first Humanities Festival. Davis, who spent four years writing his book, said that his environmental book focuses on a conservation success story.
“… environmental writers tend to focus on the doom and the gloom, and I wanted to write a book that would be an alternative to that and actually offer readers something positive and uplifting,” Davis said.
Nicholas Allen, director of the Wilson Center, said that Davis wrote a book of general interest that people in Athens would love to learn about.
“So I suppose a lot of these books, and it’s a great thing about them, and like a broad stroke, and a word or a passage and it catches your imagination and different people will be getting interested in differently and that’s the kind of the gift of writing like that,” Allen said.
Davis said one reason the Bald Eagle population was nearly driven to extinction was due to misconceptions. One misconception was that Bald Eagles would steal babies. This myth, Davis said, was developed sometime in the 19th century and continued well into the 20th century. Another myth was about how a Bald Eagle carried a sheep for five miles. These stories gave Bald Eagles a negative light, and people sought to kill them.
“They killed hundreds and thousands of them in the 19th century. There was no law against it,” Davis said.
In 1963, the Bald eagle population totaled fewer than 500. However, Davis said that conservation efforts in the 20th century brought the population up to well over 300,000. He said efforts such as the Bald Eagle Conservation Act, multiple raptor conservation centers and banning the pesticide DDT all factored into restoring the population.
Davis said that the Bald Eagle population today is estimated at 500,000, which is around the same number as when Europeans first arrived in North America. He said that this was a huge success story.
Davis’ lecture was part of UGAs’ first Humanities Festival which was organized by the UGA Humanities Council. According to the website, the festival hosts a series of public events that showcase a diversity of research and practice in the humanities.
Why I Wrote the Story:
During this event coverage, I learned how to produce B-roll footage and develop a topic to write about the event on the spot. Furthermore, I also learned how to develop questions and ask sources for further information on the spot.
Mayor Kelly Girtz says he is ‘positive’ Georgia Square Mall redevelopment will move forward
Jaxon Meeks
A multimillion-dollar plan to redevelop the Georgia Square Mall may be in jeopardy.
Athens-Clarke County Mayor Kelly Girtz discussed the conflicts that surround the project in a press conference on Friday at the South Instructional Plaza.
The project plan’s initial decision was planned for Feb. 7. However, the decision was tabled until a special session on Feb. 21 where it was tabled again. The next agenda meeting will take place on March 7 when commissioners will vote on the plan.
Key issues include the number of proposed housing units that will be affordable to low-income households. According to the developer’s Tax Allocation District (TAD) application, only 118 out of the 1,188 units will be at 80% AMI, which is around $34,000.
According to the ACC website, TAD uses property taxes that go over an established baseline and puts it into a fund. However, the developers need to send an application explaining why they want to use that pool of money to finance their development.
One of the requirements on the TAD application is to have residential development provide 20% of the proposed units at 80% Average Median Income (AMI). But the developers explained in their application that they could only do 10% affordable housing due to other project amenities like a multi-modal transit station, walking trails, green spaces, dog parks and playground areas.
“So while our baseline sort of goal is exactly as you described, 20% of the units at 80% AMI. If we want to get there, either we have to draw more TAD revenue or we’ve got to cheapen the value of the project,” Girtz said.
During the Feb. 21, 2023 special called session, Commissioner Mike Hamby was critical of the negotiations between the developers and the Mall Area Redevelopment Committee (MARC). He said that the developers were refusing the MARC’s request of 60% AMI for 20% of the housing units proposed for the project.
Last year, Athenians protested about tenants facing housing insecurity. A Florida-based investment company purchased numerous affordable housing units throughout Athens and residents saw their rents spike.
Girtz, however, remains positive that an agreement will be reached.
“And so right now I’m focused on March 7,” Girtz said, “If, by some twist of fate, March 7 doesn’t happen, I’ll look to get back to the table and say, ‘Well how do we take a different shot at this?’”
1 Math was done by taking the average median income ($42,415 as of 2021) and dividing it by 80% (.80)
Why I Wrote the Story:
This news conference was the first conference I attended and it put my skills as a note-taker, photographer and social media writer to the test all at once. The topic was chosen because it connected to my beat and gave the audience details about how affordable housing will be discussed throughout the Mall Redevelopment project.