Coppell High School senior Eco Club officer Mehak Arora marches down Buddy Echols Field on Friday nights in fall with her clarinet in hand. But for Arora, environmental justice and equity are music to her ears, driving her to initiate change through public speaking and research over vast environmental topics. 

What sparked your passion for environmental studies?

A couple of years ago, I was hiking in Zion National Park. Obviously, being a government-funded national park, there wasn’t as much litter as you would see in a Coppell park, like the nature park here. But what I did see is that there were many people traversing the trails and then also going beyond them in places where the borders aren’t marked. This effect of overcrowding, social deprecation of the importance of nature and ruining landscapes, angered me a little bit. People were disrespecting the places that we have set up for nature parks and I wanted to do something about it. 

What are you researching?

Right now, I’m working on an environmental psychology project with Covalence Global as their head of research. We’re doing a project to see how the fear of climate equity within climate change is impacting the adolescent aging process and psychological stress induced by the changing climate, and whether students are realizing the changes between climate change and climate equity because that’s an important distinction that many people don’t realize.

How do you apply your research to help the Coppell community?

This psychology project is taking place with students from across the U.S., mainly in San Francisco, and then also a hub in Africa because we’re working with university students at the University of Ghana. Something that we’ve done is we’ve created a hub for the project here in Coppell as well, and Eco Club will soon be participating in that psychology survey. We’ll be able to see how climate change is impacting students in Coppell.

What is one of your future goals? 

I learned at the Houston Climate Reality power training that the U.S. has a really bad policy on industry and its effect on frontline communities and underrepresented minorities living next to industry. We learned about cancer alleys in Louisiana as well as the toxic petrochemicals in Houston, and how there is a significantly increased rate of cancer development in these communities. One of my future goals is to indict policy in order to change that.

What is your favorite movie? 

My favorite movie is National Treasure, and not the sequel because I think Nicholas Cage can only steal a document once for it to actually be exciting. I like National Treasure because I like riddles, clues and mystery novels, so it is an exciting journey to watch.

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