Photo Essays

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Podcasts

First Place

"Forecasting the Future"
By Jolina Nguyen and Cristian Hernandez

Second Place

"Michelle's Seed Pod(cast)"
By Michelle Shim

Third Place

"Concern To Action - Climate Change"
By Iker Adrian Tamayo Salgado and Colleen Lam

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Narrative Essays

First Place

"The World Beneath Our Wings"
By Zoe Berri, Thousand Oaks

• Read Zoe's essay.

  The light had just turned red when the tsunami of orange wings arrived. One moment, we were sitting in traffic somewhere in the bustling city of Los Angeles — my mom in the front seat, my sister in the car seat beside me, and my dad in the driver's seat, impatiently hitting his finger like drumsticks on the drum of the steering wheel — and next, the sky was alive. Monarch butterflies flooded the packed intersection in waves of orange and gold specks; their wings flickering against the afternoon sunlight, like embers falling from a blazing fire. They enveloped our car so densely it felt like we were the letter Mother Nature was trying to send us.
  
  At that moment, even the city seemed to hold its breath. The city that usually rushed by in loud engines, sirens, and noise, suddenly seemed dimmed beneath thousands of delicate wings. I remember pressing my face against the cool glass of the window, afraid that even breathing too hard would disturb their pristine peace. At the time, I could not even fathom climate change or migration patterns, or how habitats could disappear into the thin air we were polluting. I was young enough to believe that all breathtaking things were permanent. I thought the butterflies would always return.
  
  Now, many years later, I think about that film reel of memory differently. When people speak about climate change, they often speak in numbers over words; temperatures rising, sea levels climbing to the height of Mount Everest, and species declining. The facts are, in turn, important, but sometimes numbers feel too cold to hold grief properly. They cannot fully encapsulate the deep ache of coming to realize that the world we inherit is not going to be the world we will pass on.
  
  For me, climate change feels like mourning something before its last breath. Monarch butterflies have become increasingly more fragile. Rising temperatures, drought, pollution, and habitat destruction threaten migrations that existed way longer before any of us did. And somehow, that hurts more than words can express. Not because butterflies are small, but because they are small enough to remind us all how delicate everything truly is.
  
  I think that is what scares me the most about climate change: not just the destruction, but the quietness of it. The way it arrives incrementally; a little less snow each winter, fewer monarchs in the sky, the tree barriers of forests thinning until one day there is nothing left. But that memory at the stoplight left me with something softer than fear.
  
  Watching the butterflies move around us, I remember thinking how they looked almost human; thousands of separate lives being carried by the same current. Monarchs spend their whole lives transforming. They begin as small beings before unfolding into creatures capable of crossing entire continents. People at their core are not so different. We are always becoming new versions of ourselves and emotionally migrating towards one another, sculpting the world around us without noticing.
  
  Climate change has made me come to terms with how connected we all are. No fire burns in isolation. No storm belongs to one coastline. The same train of wind stops at stations in different cities, forests, oceans, and people alike. We breathe the same air, inherit the same planet, and bleed the same red. We are not separate from nature, no matter how hard we pretend to be.
  
  For a long time, these feelings made me feel helpless. The problem felt too large for one person to change. But I’ve begun to believe that action can begin long before protests or challenging policy. It begins with attention; with refusing to look away and telling stories that make people pause to listen, and actually care.
  
  Because stories do something, statistics will never be able to. They remind us of what we are trying to save.

Second Place

"What the Fire Left Standing"
By Priscilla L. Ho, Altadena

• Read Priscilla's essay.

  The night we evacuated, the sky above our house in the Altadena hills was the color of a furnace. Sparks flew under our car. One thought: survive.
  
  When my family bought the house, Dad warned me that the fire danger was real, made worse by climate change. We bought the house anyway, for the beauty—the oaks and sycamores, the chaparral trails—half expecting it would burn.
  
  It didn’t. Two weeks later I returned to find our house standing beside the burned mountain. But farther down the hill, the houses were gone, burned to their foundations.
  
  The winds that night were among the most severe Santa Ana winds on record. Santa Anas are nothing new here; what was rare was their collision with bone-dry ground. After a record-hot summer and a wet season that never came, climate-driven drought had left the brush at least a quarter drier than normal. A fierce wind crossing parched ground is the “perfect storm” that incinerates neighborhoods. Embers flew from the peak to homes that never expected them. My family had gambled on the most exposed spot and was untouched; those with every reason to feel safe lost everything.
  
  That injustice is where my guilt took root, deepened by what I knew about my neighbors—many African American families whose grandparents came west in the Great Migration. Redlining had shut them out of much of Los Angeles, pushing them toward these hills, where Altadena offered something rare in the 1950s and ’60s: a place to own a home and build a community, free of the discrimination they met everywhere else. They were the real survivors.
  
  During the year we were displaced, the guilt had nowhere to go but inward. Then I watched people with power and influence call climate change a hoax and push to strip away the rules meant to slow it. I knew it wasn't a hoax. I had watched the fire race down and swallow homes that stood tall and proud for generations. The denial didn't sink me into despair; it made me indignant, and the indignation finally gave the guilt somewhere to go.
  
  The shift had begun earlier, in history class. We were studying the Declaration of Independence—“Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”—and spent almost all our time on the last two. Thomas Jefferson had named Life the first unalienable right, yet no one in class paused on it; the word seemed too broad to mean anything. But when I looked closely, I saw what it had to mean today: a life worth protecting must include freedom from the disasters we are causing ourselves. A stable climate wasn’t separate from that first right. It was that right.
  
  So I built apps. ShopGreen came from something I noticed: delivery trucks idling at our curb daily, dropping orders I could have combined. The app bundles impulse orders into one weekly delivery, trimming emissions household by household. After the fire came EatGreen, which reads a meal’s carbon footprint from a phone photo. I chose apps because they hold us accountable—turning good intentions into changed behavior, the daily choices we control. Both won Congressional App Challenge awards, but that was never the point. The point was that I had stopped waiting—for experts, for someone older—and acted.
  
  I still carry the guilt; I’m not sure it’s supposed to leave. But it isn’t only a weight anymore—it’s a galvanizing force. Being spared is not the same as being safe, and a right to life means little if we let the conditions that sustain it disappear. My generation did not start this crisis, but we can't wait for someone else to act. If the first right is life, protecting it is work we must begin ourselves—while something is still left to protect.

Third Place

"Don't Retire from this Match"
By Shia Watts, Valley Village

• Read Shia's essay.

  I grew up in Los Angeles learning about climate change the way most kids do — in science class, through class discussion, complete with photos–that felt like someone else’s future reality. I learned about the dangers of climate change, but believing something and feeling it are two different things.
  
  I felt it for the first time on a tennis court last summer in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
  
  The temperature was over 100 degrees. The asphalt radiated heat from below while the sun pressed down. I was somewhere in between, trying to play a sport I love, trying to compete, trying to breathe. I pushed through my match. But around me, were other junior players that gave everything they had but didn’t return the next day to play. Not because they gave up. Because their bodies couldn't endure the conditions that should never have existed in the first place.
  
  That day changed how I understand what climate change actually costs. It isn’t just rising sea levels and polar ice. It is the sight of junior players, mid-court during a match, unable to finish something they’ve worked so hard to achieve. A tournament that brought us all together for competitive tennis, somehow became something that kept us apart from each other.
  
  Back home in California, I know this feeling isn’t unique to Tennessee. We have all felt it. The heat waves that delay match times. The air quality alerts that keep us inside forcing matches to be canceled. The summers that stretch hotter every year, quietly shrink our time on the court. What happened last summer on the courts is happening everywhere, and is getting worse.
  
  Tennis is called a lifetime sport for a reason. You can play it at any age, and when you need a place of comfort, the tennis court is always ready to greet you. That has always meant something to me — the idea that this game could grow with me, that the court could be a place I return to across every season of life. But a lifetime sport requires a livable climate. And we are running out of time to protect both.
  
  What makes this more urgent for me is knowing who is disproportionately impacted from climate change. Currently, there is a real push to bring tennis to communities that have historically been locked out of the sport — specifically the Black communities and Latine communities, for whom resources may not be accessible. That work matters deeply to me. As someone who is part of both of these communities, I want to see the court become a place that belongs to everyone.
  
  But here is the painful reality: extreme heat doesn’t fall equally. When temperatures become dangerous, it is under-resourced communities that suffer most — less access to cooling, fewer green spaces, more exposure. Our bodies are absorbing what the heat carries: poor air quality, toxins, conditions that accumulate over time. The sport is inviting us to the court, and at the same time, the court is becoming harder to stand on. That is not equity. That is a crisis layered on top of a crisis.
  
  So what do I do with all of this? With the frustration and sadness at a problem our generation did not create but have to live inside of?
  
  I begin by using the words of tennis great, Arthur Ashe, “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” For me, this means bringing awareness to the issue, advocating for communities impacted, and overall using my voice, on and off the court to bring more inclusivity and justice. Climate change isn’t some abstract concept, and I understand both the importance and responsibility to bring more attention to climate change.
  
  Tennis taught me that you don’t retire from a match just because the conditions are hard. You adjust. You fight. You stay in it.
  
  Climate change is the match of our time. And I am not done playing.