These in-their-own-words pieces are told to Patricia Lane and co-edited with input from the interviewee for the purpose of brevity.

Dane Currie is cleaning up for good. The 12-year-old from St Catharines, Ont., and his Thursday classmates, the Green Herons, got tired of doing beach clean-ups, so they figured out how to stop pollution at the source. They are 2025 winners of the I-SEA National Youth Climate Activism Award for their Earth Day video.

Tell us about your clean-up project. 

Jordan Harbour on Lake Ontario is a dumping site for garbage by local fishermen and visitors to the beach, so for four years we tried to clean it up. After pulling out hundreds of bags of trash, we were frustrated! Could we stop it from happening in the first place?

We asked the town and the conservation authority, but since it wasn’t their land, there was little they could do. So we installed garbage bins, compostable bag dispensers, and Niagara Waste gave us a discount on a........

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