 background about me. I'm senior at BYU, I'm graduating in April if all goes well and well I won't be walking or anything, so that's kind of a bummer. I've been working with Mormon Environmental Stewardship Alliance, otherwise known as Mesa, for the last couple of months and I've been able to work on a climate change, climate action campaign with them. So I wanted to share some of the research that I did and some of the things that I found and a lot of it's, a lot of what we did was through social media and mainly Facebook and promoting posts and trying to get more information out there. So but to start off I want to go through a couple of assumptions that I have and that I think are true since I looked them up but just to ask this question is climate change an important issue? I want to say yes and I have a couple of sources here, some of my favorite ones that I like to go to when I'm talking about climate science or climate change and I'm sure that most of you guys have seen these already or have seen better ones. I think my favorite one on here is ExxonMobil's page on energy in the environment and climate change. Just to show that this is established science and we really need to be moving forward on a lot of these issues. We know that climate change is altered and will alter our world significantly because humans have already cloud paved or burnt about three-quarters of the land's ice-free surface and we alter over 80% of the marine environment as well and our combined weight like in mass of humanity is tenfold greater than wildland and vertebrates and our livestock weigh more than twice what we do. So basically we take up 90% of the weight on Earth of all mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians on Earth. I'm pulling this a little bit from my professor Dr. Abbott's research and so he has all of the sources and I can send those out as well. I just wanted to give a little bit of background about I know that we talked earlier about how some people might not think that an SUV or their children's living SUVs are really going to make a change but we've seen that we do and that we alter the environment 10 to 100 times more than the natural processes do. So because we're about because we're able to alter the risks significantly it's definitely more than possible to push it towards a tipping point which is what we are seeing. And I wanted to add some of the LDS views on this as well. There's actually been a couple of talks and symposiums where members and general authorities of the church have talked specifically about climate change and global warming and this is one of my favorites from President Oaks. He talked in a BYU commencement speech in 2017 I believe about. He named global warming specifically. His talk was more about the moral imperative and moral how we need to fight back against the world in terms of morality but he did this quote is directly from his talk and I think that it's really relevant to those island nations and to all of us around the world. And so I hope that throughout this presentation we can see a little bit more about what general authorities and members of the church are saying about climate change. The next question is Mormon theology pro environment. I want to say yes it is. We've seen it in scriptures. If you don't know LDS and stewardship has a huge resource library of everything relating to the environment by different topics. It's really wonderful and I hope that everyone gets a chance to look at that. So there's it's been in scripture since scripture has been and just recently in 2014 it became a gospel topic in our church manual under environmental stewardship and conservation and there's also several other articles. There's the church newsroom which has a lot of great resources for it as well and then there's articles in the tribune and local news and the church news as well. So these are some of my favorite links to these environmental topics. And then top it all off President Nelson himself has said that we are beneficiaries of the divine creation and we need to be there. The vice versa for future generation. So if that's not enough I think that a lot of members need to see this and that they should recognize well I hope to see more in the future that general authorities talking about it more openly and that we can talk about it more in our individual church relationships. So lastly do Mormons identify as conservative? This one I'm sure is obvious to you all as a yes. Here's a little graph from the Pew Research Center and they you can see that Mormon here I don't know if you can see my mouse or not but you can see that Mormon is the furthest right on conservative and Republican ideologies and that also most of our yeah so you can see that 70% of Mormons lean Republican and we uphold many conservative values and I think that that shouldn't go against environmental issues. To me conservatism we talk about property rights, a focus on family and our future generations and conservative though in itself the word we have conserved and we should be conserving and protecting our resources. So here's those sources for those and so I'm wondering or I've been wondering this whole time why is there such a big disconnect and you can see from this Facebook comment that I was going to blur out the names but since it's a public page and everyone can see it anyways I decided not to take that time but we can see that LDS concerned about the environment to me that is like mixing oil and water and I didn't write this response but if you shake the oil and water you can get the two to start mixing so I'm hoping that through this campaign we're able to shake things up a little bit and yeah hopefully get moving on some of these really important issues and so I here we go sorry I'm a little bit more about why I've simmered it down to three things so first would be politics just the fact that right-leaning ideologies will tend to push back against environmental issues and environmental moving towards sustainability and next would be culture in our church I see a lot of inaction we don't talk a lot about environmental issues and how they affect others and how we can be more charitable in those ways there's not much talk in church lessons it's not in the not in come follow me yet hopefully soon it'll be included and there's just not a lot of discussion and we also have I've noticed in Utah there's a culture of driving to church even though you it's only a five minute walk and coming from Michigan that never made much sense to me because it was like a 20 to 30 minute drive but so I feel like it's a blessing to be able to just walk to church but that's my own personal opinion and then lastly of science I found that a lot of people that do respond to us on Facebook have issues with the credibility of science and overall that's been a huge issue for me as an environmental scientist is that people don't trust peer-reviewed articles they don't they're having trouble just trusting news as well and so it's really difficult to get the clear sound science and make it available to everyone right so I want to show a little bit some examples of the things I've been posting things I've been putting together um I've just been trying to mix all the issues that we're facing and some of the quotes from general authorities or members of the church things that I've pulled from Valley Asserts to Rich of Research Library and other research that I've done and so um if you guys all have time feel free to feel free to read through them on Facebook they're kind of long because um Sorin wanted a lot of more information on each post in case people were curious about the issues um but I've compiled issues relating to air pollution wildfires as you can see here in this first picture um just different quotes from church leadership Greenland ice sheets and Arctic ice melting um trying to incorporate children and a reverence for the creation of the earth and also just different quotes this one's on my favorites from Gordon B. Hinckley that says this earth is his creation and we make it ugly we um we offend him um we got a lot of good responses on that one but so there's many examples um we've been trying to cover issues such as permafrost environmental disasters influence on water supply and drought um and trying to tie it back into since most of our membership is based in Utah we want to tie that tie those issues into what they're currently facing so post-it all these things a lot of them have a lot of articles and news articles and I tried to make it as easy to read and easy to understand as possible we still run into some fun comments which I'd like to share with you guys so there's been a couple of good ones and a couple of great reactions um well I don't know if you'd call this great but it's a good one and I'm glad that we're able to represent that voice but we also have a couple of fun ones like these well I I say fun in a light way some of them might not be as fun for others but I think this one's my favorite I quoted the commencement address and then someone commented that um we are lying about what the leadership of the church is saying even though it was a direct quote and I'll show some of the responses to these that we've done that were funnier but we saw a lot of issues with climate change and the science behind it or they try and push it on to other countries such as China and Russia which I feel is just an absolvement of responsibility but then I've seen this quote a lot about um how climate change is made up catastrophe used to tax us and regulate our freedoms and then we see it um in a fancier version with a quote from doctor in a covenants as well and this was on a post that was promoted and so I think a couple thousand people saw it and so we got you can see that a lot of the people that are seeing this post agree with comments like this now let me just get some crazier ones but I won't spend much time on those or just some funny memes that people have created on both sides and so I've seen as looking through all of these comments um and kind of regulating and promoting discussion about them um you see a lot of different ideas and what people are thinking about the environmental movement and as it relates to um the LDS population so I to me I see a lot of fear in these comments and a lot of worry but and you can see that on um climate alarmism on the other side as well but you can see that there's a lot of fear and maybe a little bit of unwillingness to learn more about the subject um that some of these fears and ideas are very deeply entrenched and so for me this comment is kind of a low blow to me as an environmentalist because I don't understand how plastics draws became one of the main platforms that we have but when we're still using plastic cups and everything else plastic so I'm hoping that the environmentalist movement can also try and expand the horizon on that. So here are some of the fun responses that we've formulated um this one was funny because President Benson actually says a lot about the environment and so I think Soren wrote this one he put together a lot of quotes and all of these are links to different talks from President or President Benson and other general authorities of the church talking about environmental stewardship and this one was also interesting we've had a couple of little keyboard warriors on our side as well that talk about um so this one says climate change is not going to kill anyone ever and the World Health Organization disagrees I'm quoting but it seems like um with everything that we do post there's always a rebuttal and so um we're just hoping that some of these conversations can change a couple of minds little by little but I'm hoping that more communities communicate more clearly and people can really engage in honest and open discussions and so after seeing all those comments um I get pretty bogged down easily from them but maybe you guys are doing better but I wanted to share some of the more hopeful ones and the good things that people are commenting so this one just says thank you for showing leadership on an important issue of stewardship um I definitely agree with this one that the LDS church needs to put aside some of its other controversial beliefs and get behind these environmental issues yeah and then on a couple of them we just get a lot of amens which is comforting but also I hope that this becomes more than just something you say amen and move on from I hope that people are able to really incorporate this into their lives so I'm really grateful for other organizations that are working on this and trying to change the church culture and hopefully these actions have good repercussions and that people can keep moving forward so I want to not take too much time more but I want to ask you guys what do you think we can do better and offer some of the things that I've thought about and like we've got like two to three five minutes or so you guys can chat I know Lincoln had a question for you as well I can Lincoln's question was um what is your primary call to action and I assume Lincoln you mean the organization of Mesa oh he says sure well feel free to unmute yourself and clarify if you want to expand personally how do you what do you feel people to do um as for Mesa I'll speak to them first our call to action is to join the organization get more involved in public issues but for me personally I would say that I would agree with that and that we do need to get more involved and hear more voices and talk with each other and foster that communication um but I think that some of the biggest things that we can do are acting politically voting towards things that we believe in and that promote environmental stewardship as well as fostering that within our church communities and talking about it more in our gospel discussions and just showing a reference for the creator I think that for me personally like going on nature I learned so much more about God and that's why I chose environmental science as a major and so I hope that people can have those experiences and really recognize the importance of environmental science. Thank you. I'll just put all of these up and then if you guys think of anything else that you'd like to talk about or have questions about these are some of the things that I've thought about just connecting doctrines and teachings to policy people. These are fantastic. My friends, oh thank you, one of my friends that works in the same lab as me she's working on a letter to church leadership to the general authorities of the church to talk more about environmental stewardship and environmental issues in general conference or just eventually income follow me or some something else in the church culture that we can do. Are you able to share this presentation? I believe so. However they're sharing the the video of it I guess I'll talk with my clan and see how we can send it out. We can maybe make like a google doc file or something to have everybody drop into. Yeah that would be great. Am I on mute? No I can't. Not anymore. I don't know how that happened and I'm sorry if I had any background but I'm kind of poking my head in but I'm the director for LDSR Stewardship and I've been doing a ton of conversations with upper level members of the church and I'm guessing most people in this group probably know that Sister Eubanks spoke to our organization in the fall and so we've got some really great content there but I sat in a meeting a few weeks ago with Elder Renland and he's interested so I have a feeling that this might come out this conference. That's really been the goal all along is to get this over the pulpit and conference and I think they're on their way. The area authority in Salt Lake is really interested in trying to get solar panels on churches and we've talked about possibly cutting some sod out of the design of the church buildings. Who knows what kind of state we're in right now because there's so much upheaval but there definitely is talk going on at upper levels. They're thinking about this. They know it's important and they especially know it's important to reach out to the younger generations of the church that this will be one of the key factors for keeping people in the church. So just some of my two cents on that. Thank you. No that's great. I was actually going to ask you anyways. Okay. I'm glad you're on this. This is fantastic. I love what Mesa's doing and your studies especially. This is really great. So thank you. Thank you.