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Princella Tobias is a founding Publisher of the Benton Spirit Community Newspaper, and an avid supporter of public science initiatives in our community. She has a deep history with 老司机传媒, and is working with our staff, students, and alumni to bring our community “Environmental Fridays.” In this article, Tobias explains what these days are, and what they represent, in her own words.

If your house is on fire in the middle of the night and you know it, do you keep it to yourself? Do you only tell the adults? Do you not tell the children? Do you not tell the black kids, or the Navajo kids, or the Caribbean kids? Do you wake them up? This is what Environmental Fridays is all about – telling the truth, as the late Jamaican singer Bob Marley sang – ‘tell the children the truth.’ Our environmental truths, our climate crisis truths, our environmental justice truths, and bringing actionable awareness.

A new school year is beginning. An historic bill and investment addressing the climate crisis and environmental justice became law in the United States in mid-August. Caribbean nations are renewing their commitment to address regional food security at the CARICOM Agribusiness forum. Russian aggression continues to do irreparable damage to the Ukrainian people and environment, threatening even the safety of nuclear plants. Europe is experiencing its hottest driest summer in over 500 years. The water supply for tens of millions of Americans and Mexicans is at stake with the dwindling amounts from the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers due, in part, to decades of drought conditions. Sharon Lavigne, a former high school teacher and a winner of the 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize, is still fighting the good fight to keep chemical companies from building new plants in her community of St. James Parish, Louisiana. This is a brief and incomplete picture of our supposedly post-COVID world as Environmental Fridays enters its third season.

Debra Shore, the Administrator for U.S. EPA Region 5 will lead off Environmental Fridays, Season III with a presentation on the climate crisis and environmental justice. Her responsibilities include overseeing environmental protection efforts in the Great Lakes states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin, as well as 35 federally recognized tribal nations. Her September 16, 2022, lecture is the first of twelve episodes with different guest speakers that meet online every Friday at 9:30 am until the final one on December 9 about the plants of Trinidad and Tobago.

Topics in Environmental Fridays, Season III range from butterfly gardens, a nature park in an oil refinery, waterborne pathogens, coastal development and conservation in Grenada, and improvement of a Benton Harbor, Michigan watershed to managing wildfires in Western United States, sustainable agri-tourism at the historic Belmont Estate Grenada, to the environmental impact of Sargassum, the environmental impact of natural disasters, and the advantages of native versus invasive plants.

Season III guest speakers come from a variety of backgrounds, expertise and experiences across the United States and Caribbean. For example, they come from Illinois, Michigan, Virginia, Delaware, Kansas, Washington, Trinidad, Grenada, Barbados, and Saint Lucia. They represent government, nongovernmental, business, and volunteer organizations, and educational institutions.

An important goal of Environmental Fridays is to engage and mentor our next generation about environmental challenges and concerns that we face around the world, from local to global. Another way of engaging students is through the Environmental Fridays Public Science Announcement Video Contest. This contest is open to all high school and college students from participating Environmental Fridays institutions. It requires that participating students create a two-minute public science announcement (PSA) video on an environmentally related topic. Entries will be judged in two categories: high school and college. The top three videos in each category will be awarded $250, $150, and $100 at the end of each Environmental Fridays season. It is co-sponsored by Building Excellence in Science and Technology (BEST Early) and Benton Spirit Community Newspaper.

Each week notifications would be sent out broadly across multiple media platforms, including in the Benton Spirit (http://bentonspiritnews.com/) to provide more specific and detailed information of the upcoming lecture, guest speaker and the Zoom link. All are welcomed to attend and participate in these Season III public science episodes either live on Zoom or via video-on-demand on YouTube. More information and details can be found at the Environmental Fridays website: Environmental Fridays ...it is personal.  Everyone is encouraged to join the Environmental Fridays Facebook group at: Environmental Fridays | Facebook.  If you want to participate in Environmental Fridays as a student, teacher, potential guest speaker, community member, co-sponsor, or have any questions, please contact Dr. Desmond Hartwell Murray, Founding Director of Environmental Fridays, Inc. at environmentalfridays@gmail.com.

Environmental Fridays Speakers (September)

9.16.2022: Debra Shore is the regional administrator for U.S. EPA Region 5. Her responsibilities include overseeing environmental protection efforts in the Great Lakes states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin, as well as 35 federally recognized tribal nations. One of her roles is manager of EPA’s Great Lakes National Program, in which she leads restoration and protection of the largest freshwater system in the world.
 
Prior to joining EPA, Shore was an elected member of the Board of Commissioners of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, a $1 billion agency responsible for wastewater treatment and stormwater management for more than five million people. She is a strong advocate for cleaning up the Chicago waterways and for resource recovery, including the reuse of treated water and the generation of renewable energy.

9.23.2022: Jaleen West is a young and aspiring environmental conservationist who works as an Education Officer at the Pointe-a-Pierre Wildfowl Trust in Trinidad. A graduate of the University of the West Indies, Jaleen holds a BSc in International Tourism Management but found her passion in Environmental Education and Public Awareness. Following in the footsteps of her mentor Ms. Molly Gaskin, president of the P-a-P Wildfowl Trust, Jaleen oversees the Trust's aviculture programmes for the research, breeding and release of locally endangered waterfowl and wetland birds as well as the Trust's Environmental education and Public Awareness programmes designed to sensitize visitors and students to the importance of wise use of our natural resources. Her aim is to instill a sense of pride in the country's young people that they may know and understand that there is only one place to call home, Earth and that they MUST protect it.

9.30.2022: Joseph Falkinham III received his A.B. (Bacteriology) and Ph.D. (Microbiology) from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Falkinham served in the US Air Force from 1969 through 1972, directing hospital clinical laboratories. Following a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Roy Curtiss at the University of Alabama Medical Center, Dr. Falkinham joined the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech in 1974.

His most recent research is focused on mycobacteria, legionella, and amoeba in household plumbing; biofilm formation by mycobacteria; isolation and identification of new anti-mycobacterial antibiotics; and mechanism of action of antibiotic dendritic amphiphiles.