Catlin serves around the world

Kate Catlin is sitting in a Nicaraguan Internet café, drinking water to fight the 100-degree heat and brushing sweat out of her eyes. Her image is grainy, distorted by the distance and a slow Internet connection. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, the 21-year-old Gonzaga junior's passion about social justice, economics and climate change is contagious.

"I live with a host family, I guess," Catlin said. "But they're kind of funny. They're a family that is very wealthy by Nicaraguan standards so they spend most of the year in the U.S. I don't know. I don't have a super close relationship with them. But I hang out all the time with their maids. They have about five maids. So we hang out a lot. We make fun of [the family]. They teach me how to make beans."

And this willingness to mix it up, to talk to the people, combined with her passion and obvious intelligence, is why Catlin is one of 13 American youth between the ages of 19 and 25 selected to attend the United Nations' Conference of the Parties 17th climate conference in December, held in South Africa.

She said her goal at the conference is to learn as much as possible while also applying pressure on representatives.

"And really, part of it is being the youth face," she said. "The human face. OK, look, you guys are old, you're going to die, I'm young. Putting that pressure on people as much as possible."

The stakes are high, she said, as the Kyoto Protocol is expiring in 2012. The goal of the conference is to renew or create a new treaty. Unfortunately, according to Catlin, the majority of First World countries seem to be unwilling to draft a new treaty until 2020.

"There are thousands of lives at stake here," she said. "And the outlook of this conference doesn't look good."

Needless to say, Catlin isn't the typical Gonzaga student. While at Redmond High School in Washington, she said she was active and passionate about climate change and ecological issues. Although she said she always knew she wanted to come to Gonzaga after high school, she decided to first do something a bit different.

"I made my mother cry and delayed college for a year to move to Washington, D.C.," Catlin said. "I interned there with Earth Day network."

While at Earth Day network, she was the national youth coordinator. She worked with students around the country, coordinating conferences and efforts to promote more environmentally conscious schools. She said she also spent a significant portion of her time lobbying various politicians.

Catlin worked there for eight months and then biked across the U.S.

"I happened to run into this guy from Seattle who said, ‘Hey I'm going to bike across the country and talk to people about climate change, want to come?'" Catlin said. "And I was like, ‘Yeah, cool, man. Sounds good.' I bought a bike two weeks later and started training."

This trip, which went from Seattle to Washington, D.C., reinforced Catlin's determination to heighten awareness about the effects and damages of climate change. She said that she met people from all over the U.S. who had been negatively affected by climate change. She liked seeing how climate change affects a wide range of people, not just Seattle yuppies, but also farmers in Montana, oil extractors in South Dakota and coal miners in Virginia, she said.

After finishing the trip, she enrolled at Gonzaga in the economics program. The transition from national bike-riding activist to enrolled freshman was difficult, she said.

"It was a little harder to connect with people at first. I think that I had a much different experience coming in. It was self-imposed because I thought of myself as I'm so different, they don't understand they're just silly high school kids," she said. "[However], people at Gonzaga are really just great human beings. They have open minds and open hearts for the most part. And I was really able to cultivate some great friendships after a couple of months there."

Currently, Catlin is in Leon, Nicaragua, working for an NGO that is promoting micro-consignment. Basically, she said, they provide goods, like solar panels and reading glasses, to local women who then go to rural areas to sell them.

"So what we do is we train local Nicaraguan women to go out to rural areas to sell these products to create this access in these really rural parts of Nicaragua," she said.

Catlin is, at any given time, working on several things: studying how to make a more safe and efficient wood burning stove, researching and developing a water bottle that sugar cane farmers can wear while working (much like a Camelback, minus the First World price and material), preparing to lobby world leaders to reform climate policy and taking 12 credits of independent study at Gonzaga.

Despite her prodigious activist record, she's humble and encourages people to do the little things, like emailing politicians, switching off the lights, supporting movements like SustainUs and applying to be a youth delegate to the next conference in New York City on Feb. 1.

"I love this job because it's very varied," Catlin said.