By PAUL ROWLEY

Reporter

Fourteen-year-old Orcas Islander Dylan D’Haeze has won a medley of awards for his documentary series about pollution and climate change, earned through hard work and a sense of responsibility for these critical issues that are already changing the planet future generations will inherit.

“The kids that are just growing up around my age are going to be leading the world in about 10 to 15 years, and we want them to be as informed and empowered as much as they can. They can make the world a better place then,” he said.

In this spirit, Dylan will attend the Earth Day Celebration on Saturday at Vashon High School to speak with the audience that will see his latest film, “Everything Connects,” which considers sustainability and how zero-waste living is achievable for families and communities.

Dylan believes meaningful change can happen when enough kids make it so. That idea weaves throughout his work and the online community surrounding it since he entered his first short film, “Plastic is Forever,” last year in the San Francisco International Ocean Film Festival, where he was the youngest ever recipient of a major award in any category.

“Especially for the oceans, we just need to stop pollution and plastic from getting out into the environment. Everything is a lot easier to do if we stop it at the source,” he said. “You have to start at the source, which is us.”

Dylan was encouraged to share and promote his film, which was originally begun as a school project, by a number of his interview subjects, according to his mother, Dawn D’Haeze, who produced the series in association with her husband’s media company. In between work on new projects, she has homeschooled the young filmmaker while incorporating her love of travel into their lessons.

“That makes a perfect documentarian, following one subject wherever it takes you. Actually, homeschooling is perfect for making documentaries,” she said. “This project has completely changed our lives.”

Their study of coastal erosion and the environmental impact of human activity on oceans fatefully led them to an alarming exhibit about plastic pollution at the San Diego Birch Aquarium.

“That one issue, the environmental issue, really affected him the most, so I thought, ‘OK, we found something that was really going to change him. Let’s delve into that one,’” said D’Haeze.

Dylan, then 12, was shocked by the scale of the seemingly insurmountable problem.

“When I saw the exhibits, and I saw just the amount of plastic that had already entered our ocean and environment, I was just terrified, and I didn’t even want to go into the aquariums and the exhibits,” he said. “But then my mom talked to me and told me that instead of being afraid, we should do something about it.”

The Earth Day Celebration on Vashon, held for the first time last year, kicked off with a weeklong action tour beginning last Friday. Each one was intended to be a different occasion for islanders to make an impactful difference, said Erika Carleton, development director for the Vashon Maury Island Land Trust.

“The idea this year was to give people some opportunities to get out and do some things. Earth Day should have some action items involved with it instead of just coming out to the high school,” she said. “So I guess the idea was to add action to the celebration. Last year everything happened at the high school. Now there’s kind of a learning function there as well, and a get-out-and-do-something part of it.”

Carleton said she discovered Dylan while building a program in January to screen selections from the Wild & Scenic Film Festival, the largest of its kind in the nation, at the Vashon Theatre. Dylan’s first film was an official selection of the judges, and his second film about climate change, “Tipping Point,” premiered there last year.

“They probably get tens of thousands of films that people submit, and that probably had a lot to do with getting him on the map,” said Carleton. “I just find film to be a really powerful tool.”

Dylan would agree. When not out in the field with his parents working on a new documentary, he attends classes at Orcas Christian School, recently taking part in a Zero Waste week with his classmates and teachers.

“The biggest things you can do, the three Rs, are reduce, reuse, recycle,” he said.

His school held a trash audit and tallied what was thrown away at the end of the week. Students made beeswax wrapping paper and their own deodorant, lip balm and reusable napkins. Considerable thought was given to durability and burden posed to the environment. Students also urged local businesses — on camera — to make a pledge that they would operate as close to zero waste as possible for a week, illustrating both the challenge of going green and the ecological footprint of consumption.

“If you point a camera at someone and get them to say something, then they’ll get it done, and it’s a lot more reliable than just their word,” Dylan said.

Carleton added that for Earth Day and every day after, being accountable doesn’t always have to mean being under pressure.

“To call something Earth Day and to talk about the environment, those are big ideas,” she said. “I just hope people leave having learned something they didn’t know and can do something they haven’t thought of. Or they realize they’ve already been doing things.”

She credited the way some Vashon residents live and regularly shop as benefiting the increasingly dire environmental situation faced in other parts of the country and world, like shopping at Granny’s Attic for goods that might have otherwise been tossed into a landfill.

“There are all these things that we do on Vashon that I don’t think we’re thinking of as good for the environment, that these are good things for our planet. There’s all kinds of things we can grab a hold of that can make a big difference,” she said. “We can save the planet.”

The Vashon Earth Day Celebration will join a scheduled tour of volunteer events across the island with a fair on Saturday at the high school from noon to 4 p.m. and distinguished guests including local visual artists as well as Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon. For more information, see pages 13-20 in this week’s paper.