Engaging Our Youth in Environmental Protection

For many youth, summer is a time when school is out and fun is in. Teens participating in a program at the Monterey Bay Aquarium this summer have been able to combine learning and fun. The Watsonville Area Teens Conserving Habitats (WATCH) program gives students hands-on exposure to the benefits, challenges and imperatives of environmental preservation. It also orients them in the principles of collective leadership and invites them to design strategies for preserving the delicate ecosystem of marine, avian, and land life that coexist along the stretch of California’s central coast where they live. In this episode we are joined by Rita Bell, education program manager at the aquarium, for a conversation about how she and her colleagues are weaving collective leadership into the program and the benefits they hope to accrue from that investment.