Profile: Meghan Huntley

Growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I have naturally felt the need to support the environment. With the Industrial Revolution leaving the steel city in clouds of smoke, in addition to today’s carbon emissions, air pollution has drastically affected my community. Even though the city has been trying to solve the air pollution crisis, Pittsburghers continue to ignore not only an issue greatly disrupting their local community but also an issue impacting the world: climate change.

Adamant about this global problem, I joined Girl Scouts as a youngster in kindergarten—and plan to continue through my senior year. Throughout the years, I have become more aware of other causes regarding climate change. With my troop, I educated younger girls on topics of food waste, pollution, deforestation, etc. In high school, I joined my school’s environmental club and took an environmental sustainability course. In the club, I created a program to make the school’s recycling program more efficient and less wasteful. In the sustainability course, we measured our individual and collective impact through home labs to examine our energy and resource use in our own lives. Of course, there is always more to learn and more to do; hence, the reason I joined FXB.

Currently, I am a high school senior who lives the Gen Z life as I constantly remind the rest of my family to use reusable utensils, reduce plastic, and minimalize waste. Unfortunately, not everyone has someone incessantly prodding them to care about the earth. However, right now is the time to bring awareness to a real problem the world seems to forget about. I want to be part of the action. I want to be a voice. I want to be the solution. Our generation is the solution because we are the action.