CA must harness creative energy of youth to beat climate change

OPINION – What can we learn from an alternative high school with 170 students that beat out academic powerhouses such as Cal Poly Pomona, UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Riverside to take first place in a competition designed to curb climate change, one of Sacramento’s top priorities?

The Orange County Sustainability Decathlon  (OCSD) is a new state-sponsored competition, courtesy State Senator Dave Min, which challenges college students to build housing units that address the climate crisis (as well as workforce development, homelessness, and affordable housing).

This year, 14 schools participated, most from California. Students built their homes on their campuses, took them apart, trucked them to the OC Fair & Event Center in Costa Mesa, where they were reassembled for public display and awards. The houses were evaluated by subject-matter experts in fields such as engineering and architecture.

Rancho Cielo Youth Campus (Salinas) is a “diversion” school that serves young people (ages 16-24), mostly Hispanic, from poor homes, many of whom got caught up in the state’s juvenile justice system. Many have underdeveloped English and math skills. Rather than being sent to prison where they’d likely learn to be professional criminals, they get hands-on vocational training, earn their high school diplomas, and often get good jobs. Rancho Cielo has a dozen or so faculty and administrators, a few buildings, and a very small endowment. We included them in our collegiate competition because their proposal was so intriguing.

Rancho Cielo and several other schools gave students credit for building the house. Students learned about the causes and effects of climate change. They also learned about ways to mitigate it through the use of construction products and practices that emphasize energy efficiency and sustainability (e.g., solar panels, greywater systems, rainwater harvesting, air-tightness, and energy recovery ventilation).  Students relish such audacious and “hands-on” projects; you can’t build a house “on-line.”

A centrally located and attractive house can also spark conversations about climate change and sustainability among those not directly involved in the project. Rancho Cielo’s house – Nexus 01 – was built in a prominent place on campus. The school held an open-house  so the community could see the students’ progress.

Rancho Cielo’s students got plenty of help from local businesses such as Realitree: Ecology and Architecture, Scudder Solar, Hayward Lumber, and the Don Chapin Company. In addition to unifying the campus behind a lofty goal, the house was a vehicle for “friend raising.” All segments of society must be involved in the effort to defeat climate change.

Rancho Cielo’s students also enjoyed the full support of the entire institution–the faculty, staff, administrators, and trustees. Other student teams did not have such full-throated support. Several teams from much larger and wealthier colleges labored under a record-breaking, brutally hot summer sun without the support or knowledge (often both) of university decision makers. This is not surprising since this was the inaugural competition, and college campuses are incredibly busy places with lots of things going on.

Persistence is in Rancho Cielo’s DNA. The school was founded in the early 2000s by John Phillips, a former Monterey County prosecutor, superior court judge  (and later county supervisor). Phillips was disheartened sending kids off to prison for decades. He raised tens of millions of dollars and turned an abandoned 100 acre lot on the outskirts of Salinas into a school which transforms would-be lifetime criminals into productive citizens.

“Will” was key to Rancho Cielo’s first-place finish.  “We’re putting something more in this than the rest aren’t,” said Don Chapin, of the Don Chapin Company “and that’s passion.”

On a much larger scale, this type of will is also key to meeting the California’s legislature’s bold and commendable goal of being 100% renewable by 2045. To do this, the state must harness the creative energy of its youth and the academic community, incentivize the private sector, and engage citizens. The stakes could not be higher.

Fred Smoller and Michael A. (Mike) Moodian teach at Chapman University and are the cofounders of the Orange County Sustainability Decathlon (OCSD). OCSD Research Assistant Khang Tran conducted research for and contributed to this op-ed.