Kelin (Caitlynn) Du is a 17-year-old student and environmental advocate from Beijing, China, passionate about environmental humanities, youth governance, and Indigenous rights.
Caitlynn’s commitment to environmental humanities began as president of her high school’s geography club. While tutoring peers in Earth science, she realized that although scientific models explain how Earth systems function, the shift in human culture toward colonialism, consumerism, and capitalism has driven significant environmental issues in the Anthropocene. She explored human-nature relationships through Yale’s Religious Ecology course on Coursera and Anthropology and Environmental Justice: Law, Policy and Activism by the Royal Anthropological Institute, where she was the only high school student. These experiences broadened her understanding of climate change’s effects on local communities and inspired her later environmental work.
Starting from her school community, Caitlynn transformed her club from traditional Earth science tutoring into environmental justice workshops, using case studies to explore the interdisciplinary nature of environmental problems. She also launched various campus sustainability projects, which earned her multiple school scholarships for its impact.
Living in Beijing, Caitlynn noticed how the city’s fast pace can distance people from nature. Inspired by David Attenborough’s idea that people protect what they care about, she combined her interests in anthropology and art history to create an environmental education account on RedNote, exploring how different cultures understand nature. It has gained 230+ subscriptions and ~5,000 likes. She also records pollinators in Beijing’s parks for the city’s monthly pollination reports.
Caitlynn believes that Indigenous knowledge is crucial not only for comprehensive decision-making and research, but also for preserving cultural identity. During her summer internship at Brown University, she researched how alkenone concentrations and Arctic seal ritual records provide different perspectives on changes in sea-ice concentration. In her final project of AFS Stem Accelerators, she built an ArcGIS Storymap for documenting the Indigenous knowledge of 12 Indonesian tribes.
Spending her childhood on the Chesapeake Bay, Caitlynn is drawn to marine conservation. At 16, she noticed the lack of protection for seagrass and began building an Integrative Seagrass Map with ArcGIS to promote citizen science. The project was later endorsed by the UN Ocean Decade and featured by the GenOcean Campaign, showing her the potential of youth with the right resources to address environmental challenges.
After the project brought her to the 2025 Blue Wave Conference, Caitlynn was struck by being the only high school student at a “youth” conference, reflecting the limited recognition of youth as ocean stakeholders. As a member of Heirs to Our Ocean’s International Youth Leadership Council, she worked with fellow youth advocates to strengthen the Youth Inclusion Strategic Action Plan, a roadmap for expanding youth participation and diversity in global ocean and climate governance.
At heart, Caitlynn hopes to rebuild humanity’s relationship with nature and reshape environmental governance into a more inclusive and equitable space, where everyone has a voice in shaping our shared future.