On Friday, Jan. 10, junior Marcus Sandy led Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School’s (SPFHS) new environmental club in its first meeting.
The club will meet every other Friday in room 130. Sandy plans for meetings to feature lectures and discussions of environmental issues. The club will afford students the opportunity to participate in on-campus, and potentially off-campus, cleanups. He hopes that the Environmental Club can change the culture of the school to be more environmentally friendly. 
“My goals are probably to get more people to understand more about the environment in general and how it works,” Sandy said. “[I want to emphasize] how people affect things on such huge levels, especially with consumption of things like clothes, food, even how your house technically could be eating up heat energy. I want people to walk away [with an understanding] of what [humans] are doing and how to stop it both as a person and as this big scale, or institutions in our government.” 
Advisor Zachary Rittner, who founded SPFHS’ AP Environmental Science program in 2016, hopes that the new club will help bring more awareness to the myriad of climate issues facing society in this day-in-age. 
“I think any sort of environmental science is really important, especially in these days, we have so much on the table in terms of climate change and just adjustments in how the government is overseeing environmental issues, including, but not limited to, the Endangered Species Act and how that is implemented to protect important species,” Rittner said. “I think that it is really important that people be literate in that sort of a subject. I recognize that not everyone can take AP Environmental Science, so an Environmental Club really helps to cultivate a culture in a school to focus on Environmental Science issues and allows us to explore that with a different lense of perspective than perhaps an AP Science course.”