The Sink or Swim Project

My new pen pal friend, Chelsea Mickels, is simply amazing and like so many of the young people I hear from, she is an inspiration. After you read a bit more about her and her concerns, I am pretty sure that you will surely agree with me that Chelsea and young people like her all over our planet will solve our climate crisis. She simply won’t stand for any of the delays that the adults in charge today and their antiquated policies subject her future too.

Chelsea is a sixth grader from northern California that wrote me recently about her concerns over our climate crisis, including sea level rise. She’s particularly concerned about a place I know well and visited a few years ago, Hilo Bay on the Big Island in Hawaii. Hilo Bay is near Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and is well known for its Rainbow Falls, as well as its incredible fields of lava that have cooled to form basalt. It is breathtaking.

Unfortunately, like so much of our planet and so many amazingly unique habitats, its very future is at dire risk of extinction because of sea level rise. If you don’t mind, I will let Chelsea tell you what’s happening, what the science tells us, and, of course, about her concerns. Chelsea’s letter to me is below:

And, my letter in response to Chelsea is below:

Like I said, Chelsea is amazing and I hope that her articulate, passionate comments inspire everyone who reads this post. It’s up to all of us to show her and the world’s youth that her concerns are important to each of us too. She and every generation that follows deserves nothing less than our very best effort while we are here on earth to make things better, to protect our environment, and that most certainly starts with solving our climate crisis in places like Hilo Bay and everywhere else around the world.

I do hope that you will join Chelsea and me today by demanding action and improvement in your community before it’s too late because only together can we solve our climate crisis.