Climate Change and Food System: Youth Leading the Way

Instructors

Sunny Watts

For over twenty years, Sunny has been an educator with a passion for creating dynamic learning environments for individuals from diverse international backgrounds. When developing curriculum, she focuses on incorporating arts infused disciplines, so as to facilitate active learning where individuals fully participate in their growth and development. She works with GLA participants with a level of devotion, playfulness and flexibility in order to best light up their learning experience. |  Full bio>

J.B. Hoover

JB’s first work in the environment and education began when he was supervising a team of teachers in the Philippines preparing high school age Vietnam War refugees for US secondary school.  The school campus was flat, hot, and dry with very little vegetation. JB obtained 50 Philippine Mahogany seedlings and two thousand Ipil Ipil seeds. With the help of a forester, who also taught at the school, they developed a program for the students to plant and care for the trees. Watching the hundreds of surviving seedlings grow to provide shade and greatly improve the environment excited the students and even more so, JB.  Inspired by this success, JB developed a project in the northern mountains of the Philippines which was highly deforested.  Three partners, two in the Philippines and one in Japan, agreed on a rural development project that included large-scale reforestation. Over the next 25 years of the project, local people managed nurseries and planted thousands of trees on school campuses, community land, private land and on church properties.

This led JB back to graduate school where he obtained advanced degrees in community development and international agricultural development.  Working as a staff member for 12 years at ARI  (Asian Rural Institute) in Japan provided JB with the opportunity to teach.  For over 10 years, both as a staff member and as a volunteer, he taught Climate Change classes. In his role as Executive Director for the American Friends of ARI he obtained a major gift that put a large solar power system on ARI rooftops which provides much of ARI’s electricity needs.

The majority of JB’s climate change work has been as a volunteer. After attending a training by the city of Seattle to be a “Carbon Coach”, JB spearheaded efforts at his church to install a solar power electric production system. Working with other volunteers he constructed an organic vegetable garden that provided produce for the parish’s food ministry. He established systems for composting yard and food waste. His church received a national award as the “Most Sustainable Church” in 2017.

On the Diocesan level JB worked with the Bishop’s Committee for the Environment of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Washington to establish a carbon offset partnership with a diocese in the Philippines. Over the next 8 years, Filipino church members, most of them farmers, planted tens of thousands of trees to reforest vast areas of the southern Philippines sequestering many thousands of tons of carbon. In the process those farmers have been transforming their agricultural practices from one based on annual cash crops needing chemical fertilizer, to perennial agroforestry requiring no chemical inputs. During the Covid crisis, JB worked with an iLEAP staff member to develop an online (ZOOM) Climate Crisis Leadership course that is scheduled to be taught in 2022 to interested folks from all over the world.