Patricia Billette

I’m Patricia Billette, the Arctic Ambassador from the Oregon Zoo this year. I am 16 years old, and this year I’m a junior at Southridge High School, in Beaverton Oregon. I play recreational soccer and varsity racquetball, and I’ve volunteered at the Oregon Zoo as a ZooTeen for three years now. I’m very happy to have this opportunity because I think polar bears are incredible, beautiful animals. It would be a tragedy if climate change or human activities were to lead to their extinction, and I’m excited to learn more about helping the bears and their habitat. Conservation is important to me because I think there is a lot in this world that we should protect, and I think that we need to work to fix the issues that we can affect. I hope to have a positive impact on the way people around me behave at home and how they interact with the environment. Using the information and skills I bring back from Churchill, I want to change the way people in my community view their actions and teach them how those actions affect the earth and climate. I know that changes do not have to be huge to have a noticeable impact and I’d like to demonstrate some of those changes for my community. I’m also pretty excited, because this will be unlike anything I have ever done, and I think it will be an awesome, new experience overall.