CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — A Texas A&M-Corpus Christi undergraduate student said he's making it his mission to educate and teach others about the Natural Resources Defense Council's 30X30 effort.
That initiative is a global effort to protect 30 percent of the world's oceans by 2030.
Armon Alex is an undergraduate at TAMU-CC, and the vice-president of Corpus Christi Mayor Paulette Guajardo’s environmental task force.
The 21-year-old student said he was introduced to environmental education when he applied for EarthEcho's water challenge ambassadors program when he was in high school.
“Basically, they would send young people water-quality testing kits to go out into their local communities and test their bays, the oceans, the rivers the lakes, or whatever body of water they have nearby them, and you can go test them," Alex said. "That's how I got started."
Alex said being part of EarthEcho's youth leadership council showed him how to make sure younger people have resources and power to change the planet.
“It’s simple things that young people can do, and in that water-quality testing kit we’ve got things to test dissolved oxygen kits, Ph, turbidity — all of these things that you can also learn within the instructions," he said.
Alex is making sure students such as Incarnate Word Academy freshman Valentina Nisimblat are educated as to how they can protect the waters in Corpus Christi.
“This world — it’s not just you that is affected," he said.
"It's going to affect your kids and your kids' kids, so you just need to be informed about it and do everything that you can to maintain that," Nisimblat said.
Suraida Nanez-James is a biology teacher at Incarnate Word Academy and Alex’s mentor. She said having Alex talk with students is amazing because it shows them someone in their generation is taking action in making a change in the community.
“But it also brings, kind of, reality to our students here when we are studying concepts in class, and now they can actually connect them to real-life issues that we are having," James said.
“We are lucky enough as a coastal community and go down to our beach, go down to our bay, go downtown and visit and see the gulf, that we sometime take for granted and we don’t realize that we sometimes have to protect it," Alex said.
If you would like to become a water-challenge ambassador visit the website here.
