PORTLAND, Ore. (KATU) — Ukiah Halloran-Steiner was 16 years old and living in McMinnville, Ore. with her parents when the 2021 heat dome hit Oregon, bringing triple-digit temperatures for multiple days in a row.
“I was in high school and I was actively involved with climate justice organizing across the state of Oregon. But more so, I was a kid who was a teenager thinking about my future, thinking about the life that I wanted to live ahead of me,” she said. “When the heat wave hit, it was really, really a scary experience to be a young person, to have the realities of climate change — this obscure label I had thought about or learned about — really impacting me in my everyday life.”
Halloran-Steiner is now in college studying politics and hopes to eventually use her degree to make an impact in the lives of people who are even more affected by climate change than she is…