by Eric Chen, 17, Priya Mirmira, 13, and Shanze Tahir, 13
Y-Press Inc.

Pflugerville, Tx—Matthew Evans never considered himself a big environmentalist. However, he cared about the environment and wanted to make a difference, so in October 2008, he founded Discover Green in Pflugerville, Texas. He was 15 years old.

“I had watched ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and had made lots of changes in my own home about energy conservation and water conservation, and I was awfully tired of talking about it and I wanted to go and do something,” he said.

The whole idea started when Matthew wanted his birthday party to be different from a conventional party, with presents and cake. He decided to throw a “party with a purpose” with his cousin, who also was celebrating a birthday, where kids could do volunteer work that would be beneficial to the community and still fun.
           
That first year, he and his “guests” planted trees around a lake in Pflugerville. Response was so positive that he has continued to host events regularly, usually involving planting trees, picking up trash, or cleaning creeks in Pflugerville and around nearby Austin.

To date, Discover Green has rallied about 1,400 volunteers, most of them youth and families. It also has planted more than 4,000 trees and seedlings, collected 40,000 pounds of trash, removed 1.5 acres of invasive species, and planted 200 native plants in community demonstration gardens for wildlife habitats.

Invasive plants

Discover Green mostly focuses on invasive plants removal and tree plantings. Many of the events have consisted of not only removing and replacing invasive species, but also recycling and collecting garbage.

“In Texas, we have a high level of invasive plants that have gone out beyond people’s yards into the local creek areas. It’s diminished the biodiversity of Texas along the creeks, so we remove the invasive species and then we plant trees in place of the trees that we have removed,” Matt explained.

Discover Green was one of the many organizations that partnered with Disney in its Give a Day/Get a Day program. Because of this, the number of volunteers skyrocketed because each person received a free day at Disney, Mathew noted.

Another goal of Discover Green is to educate people about the environment and how they can impact it.

“When we’re doing things like invasive species removal or creek clean-ups, volunteers get almost a radical experience of picking up part of a car or part of a couch out of a creek, or pulling out a large invasive tree and planting a beautiful native tree in its place. So those impacts we’ve been able to take home, so they’re a little more aware of what’s happening,” he said. “At most of my events, we do explain about how trash gets in there or how the invasives get in there, and the benefits of planting native ones.”

Environmental ignorance

Ignorance is the biggest enemy of environmentalism, Matt said. “I think the most common way for people to hurt the environment is kind of not thinking, not knowing.” In addition to its environmental accomplishments, Discover Green has made many volunteers passionate about the environment and excited to make a change.

“I think it educated me a lot. I mean, I always knew that things like recycling were important, that trees were very important to our ecosystem and that there were certain things we could do to help, but I never quite understood the magnitude of all that. There are so many things we can do. And it really helped, it educated me a lot,” said Grayce Angle, 12, a youth environmental director at Discover Green.

In that role, Grayce leads other volunteers in doing service projects that help and support the environment. Recently, she led a group of youth volunteers in planting more than 30 trees along a highway.

Apart from outdoor work, Grayce has worked a booth representing Discover Green at a local fair to teach people about the importance of our Earth and why we need to take care of it.

“There are a lot of things that we take for granted. And one of the things we take for granted is the Earth, and you really can’t do that ’cause there’s only one. There will only ever be one, and we have to do things to take care of it. We have to be responsible about the things that we do,” she said.