More teens living green
By Vanessa Harvey

Many are now acting out to reduce their negative impact on the earth. One teen, Samantha Barghahn, a senior at San Mateo High School, is doing her share by educating others about the urgency of global warming.

In early January, former vice president Al Gore trained Barghahn to give a presentation from the movie “Inconvenient Truth.” She traveled without her parents to Nashville, Tenn. with a group of 250 people and was taught the ins and outs of a Powerpoint presentation on the effects of global warming. She was also trained in skills on how to present the power point to large groups of people. She was one out of only three high school students to attend the training, and the only high school student from California. The people at the training were mostly celebrities such as Cameron Diaz and popular environmentalists.

The training program is sponsored by the “Climate Project;” Al Gore’s project to get 1,000 people trained to give global warming presentations. The project selected Barghahn to spend more than 30 hours of intensive training with Al Gore. She was chosen following her previous environmental activism as “Dr. Green” for earthteam.net, a kind of “Dear Abby” for environmentalists. As “Dr. Green,” Barghahn answered questions about the environment while addressing concerns and issues.

After starting off with earthteam.net, Barghahn became its youth spokesperson and motivational speaker for environmental activism. She spoke to many other students about the necessity to prevent global warming. She then starting raising money for a global climate change project and received the “Youth Service America Grant.” Becoming even more environmentally active, Barghahn then became a regular guest on the “Green Screen,” an environmental local broadcast program in Richmond.

Barghahn became interested in the project after learning about the severity of global warming and the current governmental positions in her sophomore biology class. She was concerned with the fact that her classmates quickly forgot about this important topic. At the time, Barghahn had hopes of becoming an actress and was involved with many of San Mateo High School’s drama productions. However, she soon dropped all her theatrical activities to pursue her new interests in the environment. She is passionate about the subject and is hoping to make a difference in the effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Barghahn now travels around the Bay Area presenting the power point information to schools and other organizations. She gave her ninth presentation on Thursday April 26, to 1,300 people at Saratoga High School. Previous to Thursday’s presentation, she had spoken to more than 1,000 people between the ages of 8 and 80. On Thursday April 19, Barghahn assisted Sierra Club Executive Director Rafael Reyes in presenting Al Gore’s slide show at the State Building Conference Center Auditorium for earth week.

Barghahn continues to write articles for earthteam.net and to appear on the “Green Screen” television show. She will be attending New York University in the fall and plans to major in communication, an area she feels will give her additional skills to make an even greater impact in spreading environmental information. Barghahn is more interested in the communication aspects of environmental issues rather than doing scientific research. She hopes to get more people interested in the problems with the environment and explain what people can do to help. She said, “my environmental activism takes up about 20 percent of my time, every day. But I’m not your stereotypical environmentalist, and I’m not political. I just want to prevent global warming.” If you would like more information on her activities or are interested in having her present the slide show near you, e-mail her at Samantha.cozen@nyu.edu.

Vanessa Harvey is a senior at Burlingame High School. She can be reached at Vanessa@smdailyjournal.com.