Tree "teen"acity - Samantha Ibarguen, teenage environmentalist - Earthkeepers

American Forests, July-August, 1993 by Doyle S. Rice

Samantha Ibarguen's "environmental resume" includes a week of Earth Day activities for high-school students, a walk in the Everglades with a president, newspaper bylines, and a host of local and national awards. It's accompanied by glowing testimonials from community leaders and newspaper clippings about her. In short, it's a resume anyone would be proud of.

Especially if you're only 14.

Samantha, a freshman at the Ransom Everglades Upper School in Miami, is one of the Sunshine State's most active environmentalists and a tireless worker on behalf of AMERICAN FORESTS' Global ReLeaf program.

Her interest in environmental issues started at the ripe old age of 8. "I got really involved in aluminum-can recycling in elementary school. I also did a project on the greenhouse effect."

It was the potentially devastating consequences of the greenhouse effect that spurred her to action. "I know it sounds corny, but it's our generation that's going to make or break it (the environment)."

She believes education is key to this goal, and she cites among her proudest accomplishments an Earth Week event that she helped coordinate for her high school last April. "I wanted to celebrate Earth Day the entire week to make people more aware," said Samantha. "People don't know why they're doing the wrong things, and I want to help them understand."

She also prepared a 15-page guide for students interested in organizing Earth Day activities in their own schools. It was distributed to all the public schools in Dade County.

From beach cleanups to tree plantings, Samantha has pitched in on--or led--many environmental efforts in South Florida. In fact, when President George Bush came to Everglades National Park in 1990, Samantha was one of six Florida schoolchildren chosen to walk with him through the park. Equally impressed, the National Park Service asked Samantha to help narrate a 1991 video about endangered species in the Everglades.

While in grade school, Samantha wrote weekly columns dealing with environmental issues for the Islander News, the Key Biscayne community newspaper. She graduated to the prestigious Miami Herald, becoming the first teenager to receive a byline for her environmental writing, and is now a regular contributor. In a recent article, she cited the benefits of tree planting:

"No one is too young to join the quest for an environmentally perfect world," she wrote. "When I was a 10-year-old fifth grader, I raised $500 for Global ReLeaf. . . . I made copies of a Global ReLeaf pamphlet and mailed it out around Key Biscayne, where I lived at the time. It explained the importance of tree planting and asked for donations.

"Tree planting is more important than ever now because of the destruction by Hurricane Andrew," Samantha wrote. "We lost a lot of our exotic species, which threaten our native plants and trees. But we also lost a lot of natives. Now that there is more land to occupy, there is a crucial race for space between natives and exotics."

As one who saw the effects of Hurricane Andrew first-hand, she knows the importance of the rebuilding efforts there. She recently helped organize a Plant-A-Thon in Miami for Habitat for Humanity, a nationwide volunteer program that builds houses for people in need. She's also organizing fellow students to raise money for Global ReLeaf's Environmental Emergency Fund, which helps underwrite tree-planting and tree-care projects in areas devastated by natural disasters.

The Miami teen's list of awards and commendations is longer than her arm--including the 1992 outstanding national environmental student, from the St. Francis of Assisi Nature Center in San Francisco; and the Sierra Club Miami Chapter's 1992 Green Award for outstanding achievement in promoting environmental awareness. But personal recognition seems less important to Samantha than her concern for the environment.

"Remember, we are the generation that has to clean up the mess left to us by our ancestors," she writes in her Earth Week guide. ". . . with dedication and persistence working to save the Earth, it has a very good chance of surviving!"