Remember age is no obstacle.

This March, Ranger Rick magazine featured 8-year-old Cole Rasenberger from Charlotte, North Carolina in a full page article in for his efforts to get fast food companies to use recycled paper and help protect our forests. Ranger Rick is National Wildlife Federation’s popular kids’ magazine with a circulation of over 500,000. So, hundreds of thousands of kids are now reading about how fast food packaging is destroying forests along the Mid-Atlantic Coast and what they can do about it.

Cole first contacted Dogwood Alliance last year to get some information for a school project he was doing.The next thing we knew, he had hand drawn beautiful postcards representing four different forest habitats with a message on the back to the CEOs of McDonald’s and Bojangles’ to switch to recycled paper and help protect North Carolina’s Coastal Forests.He then organized 25 of his classmates at Mountain Island Elementary School and together they collected 2,225 signed post cards and sent them to the companies.

But Cole’s class didn’t stop there.Last month I was fortunate enough to attend a play that Cole and his classmates wrote and will be performing at this year’s Odyssey of the Mind Competition about how fast food packaging is destroying North Carolina’s coastal forests.Odyssey of the Minds is an international educational program where kids compete in creative problem solving. The kids made all the props for their play, out of recycled materials, of course, and in just under eight minutes the kids delivered a powerful message: our forests are too important to be wasted for fast food packaging.

Cole and his classmates are ready to help out again this year as we gear up to increase the pressure on the fast food industry. Our work with kids will expand dramatically this year through the fast food campaign. As a mother of a seven-year old, I am all too familiar with the way fast food companies constantly target kids as consumers. It’s time to equip our kids with the knowledge and skills they need to push back. Though kids can’t vote, as a major target audience of fast food companies, they can influence corporate decision-makers.

Many thanks to Cole and his classmates for reminding us all that we adults need to stop and listen to our kids.Their future depends on it.