Green Feather Award Winner: Isabelle Kellett

Nature Nexus Institute was proud to co-present the 2025 Green Feather Award, a unique component of the Omega Sci-Fi Awards – a science fiction writing contest open to high school students across Los Angeles County. This special award honors environmentally themed sci-fi stories that creatively explore solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises. We’re excited to showcase this year’s winning story on our blog!

Our 2025 Green Feather Award Winner is Isabelle Kellett, a junior at Notre Dame Academy. Izzy Kellett has been writing since she was first able to hold a pen, falling in love with storytelling as a kid through playground games and library books. She draws inspiration for her writing from the human experience, focusing on the magic that can exist in the mundane and the mundane that can be found within the magical. Kellett first visited Catalina Island on an eye-opening school trip during her eighth-grade year, where she fell in love with the island and its wildlife. "Santa Catalina" was inspired by her experience on that trip, her ever-growing concern for endangered species, and her love of the outdoors. Her family and friends are her greatest motivation and her first audience. As a junior in high school at Notre Dame Academy, she’s heavily involved in the theater program and the behind-the-scenes management of shows. When she's not writing, she loves to draw, read, and play Dungeons & Dragons with her friends. She encourages everyone reading this to take a moment to step outside, stand in the sunlight, and listen to the birdsong.

Santa Catalina

By Isabelle Kellett

In the morning, I took my regular trek up the hillside to the old mahogany tree. There was a somber sort of mood that day, as my boots knocked against the dirt and the waves crashed down below. The ocean spray fell flatter than usual, and the breeze stilled the usually chatty leaves to a low murmur in the background.

I reached the top swiftly. There were days, in my younger years, when even that short hike would leave me out of breath, my thighs burning. Now my footsteps were second nature, and it sometimes seemed like I couldn’t breathe right except for here, at the top of my small world. Across the water, the silhouette of the Port of Long Beach stood out against the morning sky. 

I took a seat, criss-crossed on the edge of the cliff before the steep drop-off. Staring down at the sea foam, I ran my hand over the underbrush I sat within. A trail of ants began to make their way over the seam of my shorts. 

Turning my head, I looked back to where I’d just been, to the small town below. It looked repulsive now, my view of small houses intermingled with the island’s flora abruptly obscured by the imposing large machines and ships. The metal felt unnatural, the reflection of the sun in the silver panels blinding in more ways than one. 

A breath. In, out. 

You have to find a way to stay sane. That was what my mother used to tell me. You can’t let it get to you, no matter what. If you’re overwhelmed, they win. 

You must keep fighting.

And so, I did. I stood up, brushed myself off, and turned back toward the path. But not before taking one last glance over the island, over the trees and the brush and the creatures moving beneath it, in the dirt and in the air. My home. Santa Catalina. And if one thing was for sure, I was not going to let it go down without a fight.

The news was promoting it as California’s greatest idea of the decade: New houses and apartment complexes, built on the undeveloped land of the islands. Headlines praised it as the “great solution” to today’s housing crisis, as proof that California is working toward more affordable fixes, using its resources, ever expanding.

Expanding. I almost wanted to laugh.

Expanding into land that does not belong to them. Into the land that was sacred; the land of the sea lion and the bat and the fox, the land that we promised to this planet, to this earth. 

I failed to see how creating more multi-million dollar, tourist attraction island homes really helped with the ‘affordable housing’ crisis they claimed so much to want to fix. No matter how good the intention, construction across the islands would only make things worse. For the animals, the plants, the ground, all of it. It might solve one issue only to replace it with so many others. 

At the end of the trail, I took the final jump down to flat land again. Heading back towards the town’s paved path, I looked towards the sea. Looking out at that blue, I pictured my first time dunking under the water, the first dive I ever took. I looked at the ships, all while the people on board looked back towards me, towards this land they had never known care for. 

Invasive species have always been an issue here. The foreign vegetation, the deer I’d grown to love, were tearing the island apart. We’d been working to fix it for so long, advocating and relocating and containing, only to ignore the biggest invasive species of them all: ourselves. Humans, who wanted to simply remove it all with no care for the impact, who preferred the flashy headlines and square footage to the undisturbed dirt.

And it wasn’t that I was against building homes – they were just going about the idea in the wrong way. How could we start fixing problems in a way that didn’t jeopardize the safety and progress of years of conservation efforts? 

I took a seat at the edge of a low stone wall, gazing out over the bay. I watched, silent and still, as they docked, as they began to unload those machines off of the ships.

They called it the Biological Chronos. The concept was simple: you take the cells of an organism, and you freeze it in time. No growing, no aging, no dying, no moving. They’d be frozen, stuck there, until the Chronos was used again to unfreeze them. You send waves through the body that slow down deterioration of cells, and slow down the creation of new ones. 

Within the next year, they planned to use it on all of Catalina’s wildlife. Freeze the bison; move them into better-contained pens. Freeze the invasive deer; get them off of the island entirely. Fix it. If the invasive species are harming the environment, why not just get them out of the way so we can ‘take advantage’ of the land? 

I couldn’t help but shudder at the idea. Who knew what sort of long term effects that kind of procedure would have on a living animal? Deer may be harmful here, but that doesn’t mean we can just do whatever it takes to get them off the island. I was all for relocating invasive species, but you wouldn’t be able to fix anything without starting from the ground. Literally. 

And then, it clicked. I sat straight up, eyes looking around as my mind raced. I pushed myself off the low stone wall, and began to pace. 

That was it. 

The Biological Chronos wasn’t wise to use on animals, but on plants? They could withstand more, and would still be able to come back strong if something happened. 

Time. This was exactly what they needed. Why hadn’t I thought of it sooner? With time, they could stop the spread of the invasive plants. They could set up monitoring systems, better control them, eventually allow the native island life to reclaim the land. 

That was, if the island wasn’t bulldozed over first.

So I set to work. I had a week: that was roughly the amount of time before all of the equipment was unloaded and systems were locked into place. I had two, max, if I was lucky, but anything more and there was no way we could find a way to change the project in time.

I spoke with people throughout the town, reiterating what we all already knew but saying it nonetheless. Making sure they, too, agreed to not back down. No one disagreed. 

I made friends with the other people, too–the Chronos ship’s crew and its scientists–even though I hadn’t started out with the intention to do so. I asked them what they planned to do on the island, and what made them come here. They said they came because of the jobs. Because it was good money even if it wasn’t always good work. I think that took me aback the most. I’d so easily vilified them in my mind, and yet here they were: real, whole people. 

One younger man, a year or two my junior if I had to guess, told me that he’d proposed to his fiance at the top of one of the hills now scheduled for development. That he’d picked the spot because there was nothing his fiance loved more than foxes, and that when she was distracted staring at one in the brush, he’d dropped to a knee. 

And then I asked him if he wanted to help. 

And again, I was surprised to hear him say yes. 

The plan developed easily from there: a compromise, where both the scientists and the town were happy. We’d use the Biological Chronos on the plants to slow the populations of invasive species, but only for that. The construction would continue confined to the outskirts of town, where some of the land was already cleared, and they wouldn’t tear away the heart of the island. With the time bought from no longer worrying about stopping invasive plants, and from not having to focus on the impacts of destructive urbanization, we could deal with the invasive wildlife the right way. Find them new homes, places where they could thrive, and get them there humanely: no strange machines or cold, industrial transport. A way for both sides to win. 

You have to find a way to stay sane.

And I would. I would keep fighting until the day I died for the safety and the peace of this island, and the people on it. I would make communities and friendships, and I would never forget that ocean spray on my face and the wind through the leaves of the plants that had carried me through for so long.