In East Boston, close to the Maverick T station on Broder Street, there used to be an abandoned steel factory. Now, the site is a newly built, beautiful two-tower midrise with a restaurant on the ground floor and affordable income apartments above. 

While the modern spin on a brick exterior is attractive, the comprehensive green building, energy conservation, and renewable energy planning is the real star. Due to its location on the Boston Harbor, the building was designed with a focus on climate resilience. The floor elevations are above Boston’s current Flood Elevation levels and flood relief vents. 

Behind this project is Kimberley Vemeer, founder and CEO of Urban Habitat Initiatives, a sustainability consulting firm that is working to make green building and climate resilience a reality.

When Kimberley Vermeer was in her twenties, she left her job to travel for a year. Vermeer’s time in the South Pacific islands was especially consequential, “What really struck me there was how these tiny islands were trying to live like Americans and Australians and New Zealanders.” She recalled that in emulating the Western lifestyle, there was a surge in used car imports leading to infrastructure problems like air pollution and traffic jams in on small islands like Fiji and Tahiti. 

When Vermeer came back to the United States in the 1990s, informed by her experiences while traveling, she knew that she wanted to do work with an environmental focus. “At that time, there were no Environmental Studies majors. There were no programs, there weren’t really even job descriptions. And so to do what I wanted to do, I said, ‘Okay, well, I’m just going to try to do it on my own.’” Vermeer decided to work independently and founded Urban Habitat Initiatives in 1997 to ensure that green building, health, and sustainability are integral to the planning and realization of development projects and communities. Nowadays, her company is one of the preeminent sustainability consulting firms in New England. That  climate-ready building on Border Street is just one of their many projects. 

Vermeer’s experience and education prepared her well to launch her business. She graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s in Arts and Design, she served in the Peace Corps as an architect in the Kingdom of Tonga, and she has a Master’s degree in policy and planning from the Harvard Kennedy School. Before founding Urban Habitat Initiatives, Vermeer worked in affordable housing finance, first at the Rhode Island Housing and Mortgage Finance Corporation and later at a small consulting firm. 

One of the current trends in green housing, Vermeer explains, is that US policymakers have gone from just pushing for energy efficiency to focusing on electrifying buildings. On one level this makes sense.  An building that depends only on electricity, not fossil fuels, can be fully powered with renewable energy systems. The burning of fossil fuels for electricity and heating is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Electrifying buildings can help shift to cleaner energy sources, such as renewables (solar, wind, hydro), which produce electricity with lower or zero emissions.

In Boston, there’s a strong commitment to net zero carbon by 2050. So to receive funding to build any type of affordable housing in the city, that building is required to be ready to be at net zero carbon emissions. While this move can help the environment, Vermeer points out some aspects to consider, “The concern that I have is that it’s pushing the mandate to the individual buildings and the individual developers and it’s pushing everyone to the only solution they can afford, which is to do an air source heat pumps.” 

Air source heat pumps offer energy-efficient heating and cooling by extracting warmth from the ambient air. They are suitable for various climates, lower utility bills, and enhance energy sustainability. Although they are a good solution, Vermeer knows of better one: a geothermal district heating system. 

A geothermal district heating system is considered one of the best renewable energy options because it provides reliable energy by harnessing the Earth’s natural heat. However, Vermeer emphasizes that a shared geothermal network offers efficiency through centralized generation, reducing energy waste and optimizing resource utilization. “We’re not building or even really thinking about building out any sort of shared solution.” It offers a model for community-level sustainability, which is something the U.S. needs.

The shift towards all-electric buildings is leading to new learning experiences for affordable housing designers, installers, and maintenance teams. Electrification involves the adoption of air-source heat pumps for heating and cooling, heat-pump water heaters for hot water generation, electric cooking, and the inclusion of electric vehicle charging stations in new construction. While positive, these changes will result in greater electrical demands. That requires larger electrical  panels and, in some cases, larger transformers.

In an article Vermeer recently wrote for Shelterforce, she emphasizes that the financial implications of electrification raise important equity concerns. Clean-energy conversions can reduce carbon emissions, but may increase energy costs, as electricity is more expensive than natural gas in many markets. In the article, Andre Jones, Nuestra Comunidad’s senior real estate project manager, says that “In Boston, electricity costs are higher than natural gas prices.” In response, affordable housing providers are reevaluating how utility costs are allocated and structured.

Kimberley Vermeer’s journey work reminds us that sustainability is a process that requires adaptability, innovation, and a commitment to creating greener and more equitable communities for all. As the affordable housing sector navigates this transition, it becomes clear that a balance must be struck between environmental responsibility and financial sustainability. Despite these challenges, Vermeer emphasizes that greening affordable housing is a necessity, “If we are trying to be more equitable in the world of sustainability…then making sure that affordable housing is built to green standards is an important way to be delivering on equity goals.”

“Math is a necessary evil,” explains Alexis Helgeson. Considering a recent national survey revealed the largest score declines in math in elementary schools since 1990, it is evident that math may not be America’s strong suit. Nor favorite. 

No one knows this better than Helgeson. Her very career as an environmental mathematician places her squarely in front of math aversionists. “People don’t like thinking about [math],” Helgeson admits, adding how most people find her career path confusing. “The attitude I get from a lot of people is that ‘environmental mathematician’ is not even a job title.” Yet Helgeson can not help but try to prove them wrong– “math is a universal language,” relevant to everything people care about, Helgeson explains in earnest.

And like math itself, it seems that Helgeson’s life has always consisted of a litany of proofs to be made.

Helgeson with a turtle. Source: Alexis Helgeson

Growing up, Helgeson dreamed of leaving Earth behind as an astronaut. First as a master’s student at Boston University’s Earth and Environment Department and now, as a research assistant in Yale’s School of the Environment, Helgeson has instead taken to proving that despite the changing scope of Earth’s systems, the key to more accurate global climate predictions is within reach.

How does she bear this burden of proof? It wasn’t always an easy equation for Helgeson to solve. “There’s an assumption that because I’m now involved in academia, I’ve done really well in school, but it’s not always been the case,” Helgeson chuckles, smiling warmly. Nasty teachers, unwelcoming peers, prejudiced spaces. Helgeson has dealt with the worst of academic life, yet she still quips without a hint of sadness “…[academia] is changing a lot right now…I have a lot of hope.”

No one could have handled it as well as Alexis Helgeson. After all, Helgeson told it straight: “I am the smartest person that I know.”

For her, everything came together during her sophomore year at Mount Holyoke. “I was taking discrete mathematics and an intro to ecology class at the same time.” In math, Helgeson had just started learning about group theory, a form of abstract algebra that studies groups. At their simplest, groups consist of sets of numbers with different relationships to one another. A parent set has characteristics that all the subsequent sets will share. 

This theory inspired Helgeson. “All of the different climate measurements are just the subset of a parent set. If we can bring all the pieces of information together, we can identify the shared characters, and begin to get an idea of a true value.” 

Helgeson does not intend on finding one ‘true value’ to fix the anthropogenic climate change ravaging communities across the world. More accurately, Helgeson’s current work focuses on combining data from land and atmospheric CH4 gas measurements to gain a better understanding of just how global methane cycling works. Not so much a true value, but rather, a more accurate numerical representation of environmental patterns of methane.

Considering methane’s importance to climate change as a fierce energy absorber (and therefore atmosphere-heater), such information will fundamentally bolster ecological knowledge. Despite being the second most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, methane is chronically underrepresented in the scientific literature. Methane is also one of the few greenhouse gasses with a short lifetime in the atmosphere, meaning that methane reductions today could reduce global temperatures within the next decade. All of this puts Helgeson’s work at the heart of current climate change mitigation strategies.

Helgeson knows that this hunt for her ‘true value,’ or stronger understanding of methane, is a powerful move. The data “…would help to inform…a believable baseline for [methane] emissions of natural systems” that could help with the issuing of methane-credits. Methane-credits are just a spin on carbon-credits: permits to emit greenhouse gasses, which are intended to incentivize economic exchange of CO2, with the ultimate goal of reducing overall emissions efficiently. Building up context-based models of methane is exactly what is needed to make methane-credits the next big economic mitigation tool.

This potential for more accurate and ecologically informed credit-systems proves promising, especially considering Helgeson’s assertion that it is not far off. “The tools are there, and they have been there, but we just need to learn how to use them.” 

And Helgeson is a fast learner. It was actually learning about meteorological forecasting that inspired her prior research at Boston University. Meteorologists’ tried-and-true method of self-informing weather models formed the basis for Helgeson’s unique models, which used data on ecosystem CO2 and H2O gas. 

Essentially, Helgeson was able to take pre-existing data, feed it into her models to create predictions, and then correct those predictions using the next days’ data. Much like how if the weather is predicted to be rain and then it is sunny, this information provides feedback to improve future predictions. Ultimately, Helgeson’s model revealed properties of global carbon and water cycles, and provided a new foundation for future climate models. “This is where…math…is filling in–the gaps.”

So Helgeson’s predictions for the future? “Everything is changing all at once. There’s a lot of cool things happening, and we are realizing that the resources and time spent researching in wealthy countries is not really where we need it.” Helgeson hopes for a future where her research happens not just in America’s northeast, but around the world. As things currently stand, a disproportionate amount of ecological research happens in places like North America and Europe, as opposed to countries at the forefront of climate change such as central Africa and Chad. 

“I have a lot of optimism of what the measurement and data potential is, and the questions we’re going to be able to answer. We need to come together as a [global] community and agree to equitably distribute [research].” Helgeson knows just the way towards global cooperation.

And it all comes back to math. “Math is the most powerful language–it exists outside of everything: ethnicity, race, religion, etc.” Helgeson views math as a powerful tool for the future of not just the climate, but all problems plaguing modern society. “There [can be] infinite ways to solve a problem in math!” she exclaims, before emphatically adding. “It is so beautiful–it could unite us.”

She pauses, momentarily humbled by the power of mathematics. Despite her own awe-inspiring efforts towards climate change mitigation, Helgeson knows that math is not always so well-handled. 

“So many people have stories of people being discouraged from math,” she sighs. Yet it is Helgeson’s firm belief that math–”or statistics, or applied physics, or machine learning, or whatever you want to call it”– is the key to a “shared truth.” 

But Alexis Helgeson remains sympathetic if math still is not quite for you. “I know that when I’m around, people think ‘Oh thank god there’s someone who does like math.’”

Suzanne Stathatos

Suzanne Stathatos didn’t take her first computer science class until junior year of undergrad. Although she received her Bachelor’s in history, Stathatos couldn’t help but explore computer science more after the first class piqued her interest. Stathatos jumped into her Master’s program in Computer Science at Stanford before starting her industry career as software engineer. 

Yet something was still missing. “I’ve always been the kind of person that wants to work towards– like it sounds super cheeseball– but towards making the world a better place,” Stathatos explained. This is what led Stathatos to get involved in the intersection of computer science and the environment. Now a PhD student in Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech, Stathatos focuses both on studying computer vision’s application to environmental monitoring and making computer vision more widely accessible to environmentalists who don’t have a computing background.

Stathatos’s current research focuses on developing artificial intelligence to monitor fish populations using videos from sonar cameras underwater. Stathatos uses computer vision– a field of artificial intelligence that works with data such as photos and videos– to detect which objects are fish. 

Stathatos’ research finds that using computer vision is the most accurate and efficient way to monitor fish populations. Being able to accurately monitor fish populations is key to verifying both population stability in environmental conditions that aren’t changing and understanding if climate change and climate actions are having an impact. Currently, departments like the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife manually watch “hours and hours” of footage, counting the fish– this is time consuming and costly, and most government agencies are already underfunded. Fish monitoring sometimes gets pushed aside completely. Monitoring via computer vision resolves these problems. 

A sonar image from Stathatos’ research with two fish indicated by green boxes.

However, creating a computer vision model to monitor fish isn’t an easy task. Stathatos and the team she’s part of quickly learned that their computer vision system needed extensive training to be able to detect fish from sonar. Why? Well, Stathatos explained that sonar imagery looks similar to an ultrasound video. Even though an ultrasound tech is usually confident in what they’re seeing, whenever Stathatos has seen an ultrasound image or video she’s thinking “What? How do you see any of that?” Laughing, Stathatos remarked that if you ask any average person where the fish are in a sonar image, they’d have real difficulty finding it. Computers have this problem too. Thankfully, computer vision systems get better with practice.

Ultimately, Stathatos wants her research to be of value to others. She explained that “it would be really cool to see how my research can be used by resource managers to decide how to best allocate their resources.” Stathatos also sees value in making her research project more widely applicable, so she is working to adapt the computer vision model to work for different rivers that are in new locations with fish of different sizes, swim patterns, and population densities. 

Stathatos wants to do more than build her own computer vision models. She wants to help other people build and use them too. To do this, she is working to ensure that computer vision tools are accessible for other environmental researchers and workers. After all, Stathatos emphasized, “your research is really only as good as the person who can take it and use it.” For this reason, she has taught the Computer Vision Methods for Ecology (CV4Ecology) workshop for two years.

2022 and 2023 CV4Ecology workshop group photos.

The CV4Ecology summer workshop teaches post-doc level ecologists, PhD students, and other environmental researchers the basics of computer vision in just three weeks. Participants come in with their own predefined projects, ranging from detecting whale species with audio data to examining insect behavior with stationary cameras. By the end of the workshop, individuals have a start on coding their project and know how to find and use relevant computer vision resources. They also become part of a community of peers that they can rely on. It’s especially exciting for Stathatos to know that many CV4Ecology participants go back to their own universities and research laboratories and teach what they’ve learned to others.

Stathatos’ summer 2023 CV4Ecology cohort: the ‘Pixellads’.

After talking to Stathatos, it’s easy to see why CV4Ecology is a success. Stathatos’ entire face lit up when asked about the course. “I’ll start this off by saying I have one picture on my desk…It’s me and all my cohort people,” Stathatos stated proudly while holding up a framed photo of her summer 2023 CV4Ecology cohort.

It is clear that Stathatos has many strengths that lead her to be a phenomenal mentor to others, humility being one of them. In fact, when asked to share some of her strengths Stathatos first asked if she could speak to the strengths of the other researchers she works with on the fish monitoring project. Even if she wouldn’t say it all explicitly, she has a strong combination of passion, technical skills, and communication abilities (which she’d like to attribute to her history degree) that contribute to her successes.

Stathatos looks forward to seeing all the new ways computer vision can be applied to the environment. Though she’s currently looking at fish, she noted that anything from beavers to bears could be counted in the river– and beyond. The list goes on and on with countless other opportunities of environmental monitoring. Stathatos herself isn’t even quite sure what she’ll do next. Luckily, that’s never stopped her before.

Stathatos with her advisor, Pietro Perona, using the inaturalist app- which uses some of Perona’s computer vision work- to ID turtle species at CalTech.

Image credits: Suzanne Stathatos

Sonia Hupalo is currently an ESG and sustainability consultant at Deloitte under the audit & assurance team. She advises clients on how to disclose their sustainability efforts in financial reports. 

Sonia didn’t start her career focused on ESG. As a Wellesley alum, Sonia majored in Environmental Studies and Economics. She was interested in renewables throughout college. When she graduated, she landed a role at National grid, focusing on the intersection of real estate and sustainability. She seized every opportunity she could to do sustainability-related work during her day-to-day life. “But I didn’t enjoy the environment. I was at a low-point in life,” she remembered. Almost two years in, Sonia decided to leave, and was certain she wanted to continue her sustainability journey. 

“I came across a Wellesley alum through one of our school’s newsletters, and I reached out to her because I thought she was a badass,” Sonia chuckles. Turns out that alum is a partner at Deloitte Digital. The alum told Sonia that Deloitte is building up their sustainability team, so Sonia’s background seemed like a great fit. With the alum’s introduction, the audit & assurance sustainability team recruited her. Sonia joined this new team when it was 33 people big. Now the team is over 150+. 

The focus of this team is to examine a company’s documents to assess whether its statement reflects a true and fair view of the organization. It is this kind of work that ensures the integrity of ESG reporting.  

I interviewed Sonia concerned that ESG is really just a form of greenwashing. Greenwashing refers to companies that claim to be more environmentally friendly than they actually are. 

“Well, it depends on what you mean by ESG. The name itself doesn’t say anything about what people are doing.” 

This is Sonia Hupalo’s response when I asked her what she thinks of the criticisms ESG faces. “I have rarely run into clients that are deliberately misleading on a whole,” Sonia responds. “People still intend to do the right things.” 

Sonia is confident about the work she does, mainly ESG reporting. ESG reports disclose information covering an organization’s operations and risks in environmental stewardship, social responsibility, and corporate governance. Consumers look to ESG reports to figure out if their dollars are supporting a company whose values they align with. Investors look for qualitative and quantitative information to make investment decisions. 

She argues companies might appear to be engaged in greenwashing because there is a lack of standardization across ESG reporting. Unlike the EU, ESG reporting is not regulated in the US. Thus, different frameworks for ESG reporting have emerged over the past few decades. Companies pick and choose the framework that makes sense for them. Every company is at a different ESG stage, the discrepancy makes it hard to compare and assess the progress companies are making as a whole.

Yet, a lack of standardization does not mean the current ESG reporting framework is not trustworthy. Each ESG reporting standard has its own set of requirements and emphasis. “[W]e have to follow them when it comes to auditing,”Sonia explains. In fact, one of the services Deloitte offers is to align the ESG reports to the standard frameworks to make sure they meet the requirements. 

There are many ways to go about ESG reporting. Take greenhouse gas emissions as an example. Some companies choose to report emission intensity whereas others would report total emissions. I asked Sonia why that was the case.  

“It has to do with materiality. Mission intensity is a valid way to report emissions, it is just not the only way,” Sonia explains. “I wouldn’t say that any one of them is misleading, it is just very hard to look across companies. It is starting to improve, but it is gonna take some time.” 

Materiality is an accounting concept that defines why and how certain issues are important for a company. The Securities and Exchange Commission defines it as “a matter is ‘material’ if there is a substantial likelihood that a reasonable person would consider it important.” Companies do their own material assessment because the SEC does not want to continuously add or update the underlying disclosure rules as new issues arise. This provides flexibility for the companies but the downside is a lack of standardization across companies and sectors. 

Since material assessment is company specific, it is also one of the services Deloitte offers to its clients. Through interviewing stakeholders, workers, and other company employees, Deloitte determines what issues and metrics are important to display for the company. 

Sonia remains hopeful of ESG. She sees the lack of standardization across ESG reporting, but she also sees the changes that are happening. She explained to me that there has been growing motivation for ESG reporting due to a few factors. 

First, companies are facing more regulations. The SEC is working on consolidating and standardizing ESG reporting. On March 21, 2022, the SEC issued a proposed rule that would require organizations to provide certain climate disclosures in its annual reports. This proposal marks a turning point in the US. If it is finalized, climate reporting would move from being voluntary to being required for public companies. Additionally, climate information will be disclosed in a consistent format and integrated into SEC filings. This will help reduce greenwashing and misleading reporting. 

Another factor is the investing world is pushing for more and better reporting since they want to invest in accordance with sustainability principles. Consumers are also demanding more transparency. All of these factors function as motivation to push more work around ESG reporting. 

“I personally don’t care what their motivation is as long as they do it,” Sonia chuckles. If ESG can help companies improve their sustainability, no matter their motivations, it will be an important victory. 

Erin Gray’s interest in environmental activism started with fracking. Today, she works for Green Century Funds, a mutual fund specializing in green investing and shareholder advocacy. At Green Century, impact investing is about “trying to get companies to improve their environmental performance” explains Erin.

Green Century Funds was one of the first groups looking exclusively at green investing. Green Century has now been in the business for 30 years, and Erin has been with them for 20 of those years. This is not Erin’s first interview on green investing, and she has been an advocate for both the shareholders, and the efficacy of impact investing.

“Growing up, [the environment] was never the top priority for me or my family,” remembers Erin. She majored in Economics at Smith College before transitioning to an intensive accounting program after graduation. During a vacation in Southeast Asia, Erin witnessed the impacts of air and water pollution. The experience drove Erin to switch from accounting to green investing.

Erin believes that impact investing is effective, but the impacts can be varied. When I spoke with her, she pointed to two high profile issues that illustrate the challenges and possibilities of impact investing: fracking and McDonalds

Erin remembered 15 years ago a financial advisor asked, “What are you guys doing about fracking?” At the time, Green Century didn’t even know what fracking was. The fund didn’t invest in gas or coal, but they did have investments in natural gas. Natural gas burns cleaner than oil and coal. For that reason, it was seen as part of the solution for climate change because gas is lower in emissions than coal or oil. “For maybe 3 or 4 years we tried to work with” natural gas companies to improve their environmental performance. They focused on  environmentally friendly procedures like green capping wells and pre-drilling water testing.

Green Century doesn’t invest in natural gas anymore because, at the end of the day, natural gas companies still are major emitters. Fracking is also incredibly harmful to the environment, and natural gas, while cleaner than oil, still contributes to climate change. Green Century divested and moved to industries capable of adapting.

For Erin, this example illustrates the role of impact investing in advancing environmental goals by tracking “time-bound, concrete, measurable change”. When natural gas companies weren’t able to meet Green Century’s standards for engagement, Green Century took their investments elsewhere.

Credit to Green Century Funds

The first step to achieving improved environmental performance is reaching out to companies. “There are a variety of different responses we get when we go out to companies,” says Erin. Some welcome support and guidance. Other companies are not interested.

In those cases, the next step is often filing a shareholder resolution. This strategy signals to a company that their shareholders are interested in changing the management or policy of the company. Laughing, Erin shares that sometimes companies, after receiving the shareholder resolution, will say “oh so you were serious about that?”

Shareholder advocacy can yield unexpected results. Shareholder resolutions aren’t binding: a company has no obligation to comply with the wishes of the shareholders. But to engage with companies one must own shares in the company. Erin tilts her head and concedes that “you can sometimes make strange bedfellows” through this strategy. It might be surprising that Green Century Funds invests in McDonalds. The reason they do is to engage with McDonalds as a shareholder.

This started, Erin explains, when one of Green Century’s clients raised concerns about how McDonald’s sourced pork. McDonald’s pigs were kept in restricted gestation crates, which the  investor considered inhumane. McDonald’s agreed to change their policy for pig welfare and factory farming, but when the fund checked in on progress with McDonald’s a few years later, there was no change. So, the investor went public, shaming McDonalds for its failure to follow through on its commitment. The investor hoped that by swaying public opinion they could draw support for the cause.

This example illustrates how public shaming can be an effective tool for pushing companies to change their behavior and agree to the demands of investors. After the public pressure on McDonald’s, other companies changed their policies around cage free eggs and pork gestation crates. Companies like CVS and Walgreens reached out to nonprofit groups and the Humane Society asking “What are the policies we should be implementing?”

“There’s a lot of different strategies and techniques and partners,” Erin explains. She’s serious when expressing that “the goal was not to cause the… stock [price] to drop. It was to create political space so that laws, regulations, and policies can be put into place and implemented to be sure we address the biggest environmental concern”.

Green Century still includes McDonald’s in its stock portfolio. “No one in their right mind would say ‘Hey look at that great ESG company’… but we’re going to work with these companies and try to make them better”. The concession can be hard to swallow. “Some advisors have clients who can’t handle looking at their portfolios”, because McDonald’s is a major emitter of GHGs. Other clients are more amenable to the inclusion, holding the belief that the fund is a lot greener than most alternatives.

Green Century continues to focus on environmental issues, shifting to plastic pollution and deforestation in Southeast Asia and South America more recently. When asked if she’d ever leave she laughs and recalls that she’s the last of her graduate school friends still in the first job they got out of graduation. “[The work] is just continuing to evolve” she says. It “keeps me engaged with environmental issues that I might not otherwise have a way to work on”.

The image depicts a Wisconsin dairy farm in the winter, where outdoor work is still required amidst snow, ice, and other cold conditions. Image by Corey Coyle.

“I came to the story of the dairy industry because it’s pretty much in your face here in Wisconsin,” UW-Madison PhD candidate, Dustin Cohan, told me over a Zoom call. 

Dustin Cohan is a fifth-year history PhD candidate at UW-Madison. He completed a master’s project on Chicanx advocacy and fights for liberation in Wisconsin during the 1970s. He is trained in immigration and labor history, an interdisciplinary field of history that studies work and workers as a means of better understanding the past. Immigration and labor history are deeply intertwined because immigrants have and continue to fill many of the most important, unprotected, and underappreciated jobs. Dustin’s work in these fields led him to his current project, studying the interactions between primarily Chicanx workers and, what he describes as, “a strangely complicated industry” — the Wisconsin dairy industry.

Now in his fifth year, Dustin is writing a dissertation centered around oral histories. He conducted interviews with Mexican dairy workers currently working in Wisconsin. Although there has been a sharp uptick in the number of  immigrant workers in Wisconsin, there are few studies of their experiences, from the government or academia. I was able to talk to Dustin about his research uncovering the experiences of undocumented immigrant workers and connecting the rise of immigrant labor to a consolidation of agricultural power in Wisconsin dairy.

Since the mid 1990’s, agricultural power in Wisconsin’s dairy industry has shifted from lots of small farms to fewer and larger industrial farms.With this consolidation, and with it the desire to produce the most for the cheapest, dairy farmers turned to immigrant workers, particularly undocumented workers, in the late 20th century. From the mid 1990’s through the early 2000’s, Dustin estimates that about 95% of immigrant workers in Wisconsin were Mexican. More recently workers have come from central America and northern South America, too. 

Dustin explains that this shift in the labor force happened in many other industries before Wisconsin dairy. “It’s just like any other story of Mexican immigrant workers coming to an industry that needs them, and they will be used as long as they’re needed.” Wisconsin farmers knew that their counterparts in California, as well as paper, factory, and furniture industries in Wisconsin, hired Mexican-American workers. When fewer Wisconsinites were willing to do the jobs dairy farmers offered, those farmers followed the lead of other industries. 

But unlike these other industries, the shift in hiring practices in Wisconsin dairy farming coincided with a change in federal immigration law. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act aimed to reserve jobs for citizens or immigrants with legal work visas. It imposed a strict process for immigrants to receive legal permanent status and imposed more regulations on employers to confirm that their workers were legally permitted to be in the country.

Dustin explained that because there were more hoops to jump through to gain legal status, the effect of the law was that more and more people coming to the country were classified as undocumented. This shift in the classifications of immigrants coincided with the rise of industrial agriculture in Wisconsin dairy. As Wisconsin dairy farms grew and industrialized, farmers needed more workers willing to work for less. Therefore, farmers became more likely to hire workers with the fewest legal protections: undocumented workers. 

The Day to Day of an Undocumented Dairy Worker

Workers do all the labor necessary to keep the farm running. Most live and work on or very near the farm. They often work long hours milking and cleaning the cows, maintaining the barns, and preparing and cleaning farm equipment. The work is fast paced, and workers feel pressure to work every day, even though the work is exhausting and dangerous. Dustin notes the irony, “there’s not a lot of documentation (no pun intended) for this thing, and there’s not a government oversight to check into these things.”

Being undocumented means workers have access to fewer legal protections and resources. Farm work is fast paced, so it is easy to get hurt. Wisconsin is a difficult place to work a job that requires year-round outdoor labor. In the freezing winter, workers are prone to air-borne illnesses, and in the humid summer, workers are at risk of heat exhaustion. Even if a farm offers a health plan–which many do not–undocumented workers often fear visiting a doctor, or going out elsewhere in public. 

The life of an undocumented workers is centered around dairy farms. Dustin explains that workers wake up and work for ten to twelve hours on the farm. Then they have to clean themselves and get some rest to wake up and do the same thing the next day. Dustin tells me that a lot of workers save up to buy a car in their first few months of working to be more mobile in such a rural environment, but the nature and timing of their work makes it hard to take advantage of that mobility. 

A Gap in Research

Information on immigrant labor on Wisconsin dairy farms is sparse. Research conducted by sociologists from UW-Madison is the best information for anyone studying immigrant labor in Wisconsin dairy. But, Dustin explains, their interviews included only a few hundred workers of the 25,000 or more migrant workers working in dairy in the state. Dustin knows how hard it is to conduct such interviews. People don’t always want to talk to him, ignoring requests for interviews. When he does visit farms, he sometimes finds people are often not happy to share their stories. This lack of information and research, however, makes his research all the more important. 

Dustin’s work stitches together the history of immigration law, shifts in labor, and economic consolidation in America’s dairyland. “Like a lot of other food industries in this country, it’s all about how cheap the product can be, and how cheap you can get food to American consumers.” His experience as a labor historian enables him to recognize Wisconsin dairy as just one industry in a much broader agricultural and economic system that is exploiting immigrant workers. He says that the desire to do things as cheap as possible “will continue to be the largest force affecting dairy farmers, and the people who take on the brunt of that economic decline are always gonna be the workers.”

Entrance to Shahpur Jat, one of Delhi’s many urban villages

The phrase “urban village” sounds like a juxtaposition. But in India’s capital Delhi, they’re an increasingly discussed part of the megacity’s urban landscape. In Delhi, the government purchased the agricultural land surrounding these villages for urban development, but left the residential areas untouched to preserve their cultures. That means as the city expands, it often engulfs formally rural villages. The result is an urban village — a structural reminder of the city’s rural past. 

The government of Delhi imposed completely different by-laws regarding land use and infrastructure in these urban villages for cultural preservation. They are largely unregulated and exempt from the urban planning and infrastructural requirements expected of other areas in Delhi. These residential areas are now called lal dora (red thread) lands in Delhi due to their legal and cultural separation from the rest of the megacity’s landscape. 

Ujan Ghosh has a clear perspective on the future of urban villages. “When planning city expansions or new cities, urban villages should be accounted for. They’re doing a great job for the service industry,” he explains. In his view, protecting urban villages means ensuring that they remain affordable to lower-income residents, many of whom work in Delhi’s service sector. In order to do this, these areas cannot be forced to follow the same urban planning guidelines as the rest of Delhi. 

As an architect for over 35 years, Mr Ghosh has worked on several urban expansion projects including college campuses, single-developer housing developments, and tourism facilities. He is a former President and founding member of the Institute of Urban Designers-India. Mr Ghosh currently teaches urban design at the University of Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture, where he has taught since 1983.

His work in urban design at higher institutions has been central in shaping his perspectives on the future of Delhi’s urban landscape. “My teaching and academic work gives me the platform to discuss urban development issues,” he says smiling. He attributes his beliefs regarding urban design to one of his own professors during his time at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Jon T. Lang. “He pioneered the idea of human behavior affecting design.”

Through his professional background and as a long-time resident of Delhi, Mr Ghosh has found that a lack of regulation led to the development of buildings and other infrastructure that were seemingly urban, yet do not meet the regulations required of the rest of Delhi’s urban areas. Lal dora lands now possess banks, post-offices, and other infrastructure common to other zones in Delhi, but they often lack needed sanitation infrastructure and reliable water access.

Today, lal dora lands are home to Delhi’s large population of domestic staff, construction workers, and other migrant workers from India’s rural communities. They serve as a site for small-scale manufacturing businesses. “When we need to fix our pressure cookers, where do we go?” Mr Ghosh asks, “Or when we need to tailor clothing?” It is evident that urban villages are the pulse of Delhi’s service industry. 

Imagining a ‘planned’ urban village

“[Urban villages] need to be planned, not incrementally developed.” For Mr Ghosh, this means incorporating the commercial, industrial, and residential features of lal dora lands into these new plans. Mr Ghosh stresses that Indian residents cannot hold the immediate needs of these communities to the same standards expected of higher-income areas in Delhi. Government subsidies and other intervention methods have had little success. Instead, he believes that it is important that urban planning must reflect the needs of the area’s population in an affordable and economically sustainable manner. “We have to be tolerant. They know that they can’t afford everything.” 

To do this, he believes urban villages need to be given special consideration on several counts:

Population density. This is usually controlled in Delhi’s urban areas. Only certain numbers of people are allowed to live in a house or room. These figures are determined by the size and accessibility of the space. Mr Ghosh affirms that density guidelines cannot exist the same way in lal dora lands if they hope to provide affordable housing that accounts for the area’s rising population. 

Remaining mixed-use. Most cities in India (such as Mumbai) have buildings that are ‘mixed-use,’ which incorporate both commercial and residential facilities. However, colonial Delhi developed differently. It possesses strict zoning rules, such as a central financial district, residential areas, and industrial areas that are clearly segregated. In order to preserve the residential and commercial aspects of urban villages, Mr Ghosh believes they must remain mixed-use, unlike Delhi’s other urban areas. 

Mixed-use buildings in Shahpur Jat with stores on the ground floors, and residential housing above. 

Leniency with infrastructure. In order to preserve the spatial needs of the population, Mr Ghosh believes that urban planning requirements in lal dora areas must be different from the greater city. For example, he believes that vehicular roads must remain at a minimum. “They’ll satisfy emergency requirements and some automobile access.” This need exists because urban villages do not currently meet Delhi’s urban planning requirements. If these areas hope to continue remaining financially accessible, spatial compromises are necessary. 

From the classroom to the city

Mr Ghosh’s love and belief in the importance of urban design shone through his discussion of his work. To him, urban design is ensuring that the socio-cultural needs of a community are being met. In regard to the lal dora lands, Mr Ghosh explains that while urban planners will find out how to accommodate half a million people in a given area, urban designers will account for the population’s needs. These may include considering how commercial zones may affect residential life or accounting for public spaces that foster community. 

‘Planned’ urban villages can only be actualised in areas facing urban sprawl or in newer cities. Existing urban villages have more of an upwards battle as, although the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) has released numerous plans for developing lal dora lands, Mr Ghosh believes that besides improving access to energy and putting in sewage treatment, there is not much that can be done. Nor does he believe that lal dora lands are top priority for the DDA. 

Instead he looks to a future that will be defined by urban sprawl and growing urban populations. “We need to find a self-sustainable idea for the urban poor.”

“As an architect, I teach lots of things that I don’t practice,” he says with a chuckle. But by providing an academic space to discuss how to mitigate the future of urban development with his students, combined with his professional expertise in rural-to-urban architectural development, Mr Ghosh’s work is critical to India’s future. 

“It’s not just a river,” it is an economy and culture for 70 million people in Southeast Asia. That is how Courtney Weatherby sees the Mekong River. Over the Mekong’s 2,610 miles, it has many different things: culture, tourist attractions, and drinking water.

Over the Mekong’s 2,610 miles, it is also a fishery, source of hydroelectricity, and irrigation for agricultural products. While the Mekong may seem far away to most people, it is a major source of freshwater fish globally. It is also an important regional source of hydroelectricity. The consequences of developing dams on the Mekong will be felt globally.

Map of Mekong River Basin

“It was actually an academic paper” that jump started Courtney Weatherby’s interest, she explained with a chuckle. Courtney was studying abroad in Beijing in the 2010s while China’s environmental record “was hitting the fan.” It prompted a period of intense discussion about China’s impact on climate change and pollution. Courtney now works as a Research Analyst and Deputy Director at the Washington D.C. based Stimson Center. The center hosts the Mekong Policy Project, which analyzes the geopolitical situation in the Mekong. Courtney and her colleagues are working to raise awareness of the dam impacts regionally and globally and assess policy solutions.

Impacts and Interests of Development

In 1995, the Mekong River Commission (MRC) was developed to support sustainable river development by Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, but not Myanmar or China which are not members. The Commission reviews development projects to assess benefits and concerns. The Commission positions the Mekong region well according to Courtney. Yet, of the three dams it has reviewed, there has been a noticeable decline in the quality of review. Experts like Courtney fear that the Commission’s commitment to quality is fading over time, which poses a threat to the river and the communities that depend on it. 

China controls the faucet of the dam as the country at the head of the river, but Laos is manipulating water levels and pressure through their 16 dams. Over her career, Courtney watched the conversation shift from where each country sits along the river, to how each country’s development projects impacts.

Laos has recently seen the consequences of a lack of information provided to communities and improper development. In July 2018, the Xe Pian Xe-Namnoy dam in Laos near the Sekong River, one of the most important Mekong River tributaries, collapsed. The ensuing flood killed 49 people and caused long-term property damage for 7,000 people. The dam was rebuilt, but the government advised villagers not to return for fear the dam would break again. Despite its poor track record, Laos continued to develop new dams on the Mekong River. 

The Mekong River could power 23 million homes based on the dams’ energy production. The Mekong River provides 70% of Laos’s energy, including energy exports, and significant energy for other countries along the river. Laos is slowly becoming the “battery of Southeast Asia,” by exporting hydropower to other countries.

Development on the Mekong is riddled with irony. A new dam in Laos will impact Thailand, which is just downstream, but that has not stopped the developer, which is Thai owned, from building it. These investments raise concerns about hydro-diplomacy, and the muddled interests of each country. 

But what Courtney made clear is that hydro-diplomacy depends both on positioning along the river and each country’s impact, not just one. 

Costs of Dams Versus the Benefit

According to Courtney, the Mekong is a global common good because it is “the world’s most productive freshwater fishery.”

But that may change as many fish species are gone and remaining fish are harder to find because of the dams. Most of the fish disappeared after the Xayaburi dam in Laos began operating in 2019. Fishers are concerned that there will be no fish in the future, rendering their jobs obsolete. Yet, Courtney has still found fish from the Mekong river in American grocery stores.

The Mekong River at Luang Prabang, Laos

These fisheries are essential to the economic welfare of communities, but they are under threat. The profits from energy production on the river go almost exclusively to the government and developer, but the profits from fishing go to the communities along the river who catch the fish and prepare it. Even if the economic benefits are local, they add up to a significant contribution to many nation’s GDPs. Fish products from the Mekong make up about 12% of Cambodian, 7% of Laotian, 3.1% of Thai, and 1.8% of Vietnamese GDPs. With diminishing fish populations, the GDPs are expected to fall and communities will need to find new industries. 

An Upstream Battle for Solutions

The Mekong Dam Monitor, the Stimson Center project Courtney works on, began as a way to promote transparency by using available dam activity reports, satellite technologies, and downstream sensing to piece together a picture of river activity. Because it uses almost real time data, it allows for data-driven conversations and negotiations within the region and MRC about dam development and water usage. 

While the Commission and Courtney’s work both focus on data transparency, they are bound to different expectations. The Commission reports diligently on what member countries allow it to disclose, meanwhile Courtney’s work started from an interest in unreported Mekong River activities that continue to be secretive. China and other countries view dam activity as a state secret. To get around that, non-governmental organizations like the Stimson Center have started to create independent data sets. While China’s residents were growing concerned over environmental impact during her study abroad, Courtney stressed how little concern there seemed to be for the international impacts of China’s activities and inhibiting transparency.

The gap between the technical experts and the communities that need to act on that information isolates the different interest groups. China’s data availability is one of the biggest hurdles to accessibility. There have been “significant steps by China, still insufficient steps, but significant steps forward” to make data more accessible, but projects like the Mekong Dam Monitor continue to be necessary. 

Courtney excitedly told me how the project began as a monitor to oversee dam activity, but has since also grown to include early warnings for communities. Now, when river levels on the Mekong are projected to rise or fall by half a meter, the monitor issues community alerts to enable community action such as moving livestock, preparing crops, and changing fishing itineraries. 

Global Connections

The lack of data transparency has exacerbated tensions because there is no evidence to validate concerns about river level changes and the impact of downstream fishing, agriculture, and livelihoods. Lower basin countries continue to regularly criticize and blame Chinese hydropower development for its downstream impacts. China maintains that its development has a negligible impact on the river itself. As China and Laos, and other countries, continue to develop the river, tensions continue to build.

“The Mekong region is in better hands than many other transboundary river basins” Courtney said half optimistically. Water can be a powerful source of geopolitical tensions. The work of Courtney and the Stimson Center offers a model for other international natural resources under threat from persistent development. What becomes apparent is that transparency and cooperation are essential to good governance.