Student Poster Contest Communicates Climate Catastrophe

All winning posters lined up on the stage of Lyric Hall. Contributed photo.

A broken stopwatch bears its exposed gears and unraveling chain links. Pieces of litter float in the ocean amongst marine life. Construction takes place in front of a smog-filled sky. Wildfires burn on while firefighters spray water into a forest. Penguins and polar bears look on in dismay from the loss of sea ice.

Those are all images evoked by Alainette Lebron, one of three winners of environmental organization Reimagining New Haven’s Climate Crisis Poster Contest. A junior from High School in the Community, Lebron decided to submit to the contest as an opportunity to express herself through art given her passion for climate change. 

Her piece is centered around the urgency to act, and she pushes back on the belief that climate change is a problem for future generations. 

“No matter what you care about, climate change is already affecting our world today,” she said in an interview before the awards event. “I feel that it is in our hands to do something about it and try to change, while we still have time, because climate change will not only affect forests, coral reefs ... but it will affect all of us, like [through] extreme weather, and it's time to use our voices to take action."

Lebron said she hopes that her work will make local residents more aware and interested in how climate change affects us and “maybe contribute to the cause” once displayed.

Left: Winning poster by Southern Connecticut State University student Nailah Huq. Contributed photo. Right: Winning poster by Wilbur Cross High School student Rosie Hampson. Contributed photo.

The contest, which ran from November 2022 through January 2023, invited local high school and college students to submit original poster designs that raise awareness of the impacts of climate change on our community. Ten of each winning poster will be installed in streetside glass display cases across New Haven neighborhoods, said contest organizer Steve Hamm. The posters will be printed on a durable, translucent plastic called PET film, which will allow them to light up at night in the display cases.

Winners and honorable mentions of the contest were honored at the Lyric Hall theater last Saturday. Each student received a quarter-size replica of their poster mounted on a foam-core board and their award checks. 

The event also featured a series of brief remarks from community leaders. Highlights included Steve Winter, executive director of climate and sustainability for New Haven, speaking about his initiatives since he began his role last December.

In particular, he spoke about his focus on more solar and sustainable energy, including on city buildings and the old New Haven landfill. He said the department has also been active in applying for "an avalanche of federal grant money right now," including a grant to increase citywide recycling education and a municipal composting program.

He looked to West Haven, where a new co-collection program for garbage and compost has brought down trash tonnage by over 10 percent. He also urged attendees to get involved at the state level, with multiple bills that are still active in the state legislature. Bills he suggested following include S.B. 979, S.B. 1147 and Bill 1145. He also pointed to new federal tax credit programs that can help New Haveners move from gas (fossil fuels) to electric.  

"It's awesome and also a little scary to see the posters," he said. "You know, I think it definitely speaks to the level of anxiety that the future holds and underscores the urgency for us when we try to think about our role in solutions for the climate crisis."

Doreen Abubakar, executive director of the Community Placemaking Engagement Network, spoke about a program she is developing to bring climate education and citizen science to New Haven's neighborhoods. John Cavaliere, owner of Lyric Hall, spoke about the street and basement flooding in his neighborhood, which has become a crisis for both home and small business owners. 

Another winning poster depicted the challenges that climate change poses on agriculture and food availability and pricing. Created by Nailah Huq, a junior at Southern Connecticut State University, the left side of the poster shows a dejected farmer harvesting carrots from dry, cracked soil due to drought conditions, while the right side shows a customer shocked to see the high prices of carrots at the grocery store.

In the interest of full disclosure, Huq is this reporter’s sister; neither this reporter nor Nailah knew she would win when this article began. 

To create her piece, Huq “researched the impacts of the climate crisis, especially focusing on the local information shared by speakers at the New Haven Climathon. I then illustrated how some of these impacts—droughts and food scarcity—affect farmers and consumers.” 

“I hope my streetside poster display will raise awareness of these issues among New Haven residents and highlight the connections between access to food and the climate crisis,” Nailah Huq said.

Final winner Rosie Hampson’s poster depicts two South Asian girls holding hands against a backdrop of the flooding of their community, wildfires, and air pollution from factories. An organizer, Youth Climate Action Team (YCAT) intern with the New Haven Climate Movement and a junior at Wilbur Cross High School, she decided to submit art to this contest given her interest in climate change.

She said that she believes “art is a great way to raise awareness of the devastating impacts this crisis is having on people across the world and make sure people’s stories are heard.” 

In creating her work, Hampson knew she wanted to show the human rights implications of the climate crisis. “I started by looking for portraits of people that had an impact on me and found a couple images of women with very powerful expressions that I thought would have the greatest impact,” she said.

Then, she painted her two main subjects in front of a background of environmental disaster to underscore the harms of the climate crisis on marginalized people.

“I think that often, people aren’t aware that climate change has so many human rights implications and I want my art to show that this is not true, and that there are so many people suffering because of climate change," she said. "I also want the expressions on the two faces to convey the extent of the pain this crisis is causing to people just like us, in order to motivate people to take action."

Honorable mention artists Ranya Tarabar and Zoe Arboleda, both sophomores at Wilbur Cross, heard about the contest through the Cross Environmental Club. “We tried to focus on relevant themes and landed on global warming and how it's affecting wildlife and animals,” said Tarabar on the process of working together on their poster. 

The two hoped to appeal to viewers’ emotions by tapping into the theme of losing family. 

“Usually when you think of global warming, you think of polar bears on melting ice caps and that's exactly what we drew; except we wanted to leave an impact on people and that's why we decided to add the parents in the background floating away from their child which can help people imagine what that would be like if it happened to them,” Tanabar said.

The other group of honorable mention artists consisted of a joint submission by Lila Kleppner, Sneha Maskey, and Lena Zenisek, all seniors at Wilbur Cross High School, who also heard about the contest from the Cross Environmental Club. Their poster tells the story of Penny, a penguin threatened by the loss of sea ice, while also touching on other environmental issues.

“Oftentimes there have been two different conversations based on socioeconomic status when talking about environmental issues. One focuses on destroying rainforests and dying polar bears, while the other focuses on the increase in pollution and natural disasters. We decided to show the similarity between the two conversations and how both are right,” said Kleppner, who is also an organizer with New Haven Climate Movement and a YCAT intern.

Kleppner hopes the poster will inspire people to take a moment to “rethink their environmental actions and how they think of the environmental crisis.” She also hopes that their poster and the others by Wilbur Cross students can later be displayed around the school and potentially be used to raise money for their student-led effort to get their school to begin composting their food scraps.

Learn more about Reimagining New Haven by visiting their website.