It is a hard enough job getting government officials to commit to reducing plastic waste. Add in persuading business owners concerned about their bottom line to limit their plastic use. For me, convincing these two groups to take action on plastic waste seems difficult and unpleasant. For Megan Byers at the Product Stewardship Institute (PSI), creating successful partnerships with them is the most rewarding part of her job.

Megan Byers is an Associate for Policy, Programs, and Outreach at PSI. While PSI is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, the non-profit works across multiple US states to minimize the negative impacts of consumer products and packaging. Besides managing PSI’s newsletter and website, Byers promotes both legislative and voluntary plastic waste reduction strategies to commercial businesses, universities, and municipalities. At a time when the amount of plastic waste in America is at an all-time high of 34.5 million tons per year, her work with PSI is crucial.

Reducing plastic can be a hard sell. “I tried so hard not to sound like a telemarketer!” Byers said. As part of a PSI-led project in Long Island’s North Fork region in 2017, Byers had to persuade restaurant owners to implement plastic waste reduction initiatives. She did most of it over the phone. Known as the Trash Free Waters project, it aimed to get restaurants near the coast to reduce the use of disposable plastics so that plastics were kept off Long Island’s beaches. As a pilot, four participating eateries received direction and funding to switch to more sustainable alternatives. Byers notes that some restaurants were reluctant, and some were just not interested in taking part in the pilot. Her strategy? Appealing to their bottom line – making the case that reducing plastic waste would save them money.

PSI uses diverse messaging to convince restaurants and eateries to give up plastic. (Image from Product Stewardship Institute)

Byers champions PSI’s distinctive approach to environmental action: consultative, consensus-seeking, and informed by current research. The aim is to find workable solutions for the diverse stakeholders involved in reducing plastic waste. As advocating for plastic reduction always meets with resistance, her job entails being adaptable and presenting a suite of options. For example, Byers mentions that in stakeholder meetings with local government and municipal waste officials, legislative bans against single-use plastics were not a particularly appealing prospect. What was supported was public education and voluntary plastic reduction schemes.

Flexibility extends to how she conveys the reasons why reducing plastic waste should matter. “You have to diversify your message,” Byers said. “There’s a lot of other ways to frame it: it is also a social justice issue and a health issue.” She notes that PSI has a large spectrum of members and partners that includes corporate retailers, government officials, and non-governmental groups. This means that PSI’s recommendations need to be varied as well, while still aiming to minimize the negative impacts of consumer products and packaging.

Having the buy-in of all these groups is unique, especially in a time where environmental advocates often seem pitted against groups unwilling to go green. It is clear from our conversation that Byers succeeds by bringing stakeholders together. She highlights community engagement and relationship building as central to the work that she does with PSI, which often comes with pleasant surprises.

One of those surprises was how students got involved in the Trash Free Waters project: as participating businesses were set to meet with PSI in a local elementary school, two teachers came forward and volunteered their students to be involved in the project. Students participated in a logo competition. The winning logo was displayed in the windows of participating businesses.

Winning Logo for the Trash Free Waters project. (Image from Product Stewardship Institute)

“It’s really incredible how many chance meetings can turn into something bigger,” Byers reflected. The fact that students participated also attracted local media attention, which helped her promote her cause – as Byers commented, who doesn’t love a story about 5th graders trying to do good?

Community engagement does not take away from her approach of being well-informed. Creating best practices for plastic reduction is something Byers takes seriously. Part of her work also entails keeping abreast of the latest policy innovations around regulating single-use plastics and disposable foodware. She is familiar with global initiatives, such as Starbucks in the UK charging consumers for disposable cups, and India exploring extended producer responsibility schemes for plastics. The challenge is to figure out what works best and why.

“Every town is working on it separately from everyone else!” Byers explains. “My job is to synthesize all of their efforts and come up with best practices.”

Back in 2016, Byers researched trends in municipal plastic bag reduction policies. Some of this has already made its way to PSI’s website in the form of sample policies about placing a fee on carryout bags. She has also researched other forms of legislation to reduce plastic waste at its source, including requiring all foodware to be recyclable.

To my surprise, Byers shares a key insight that single-use plastic bans do not work well. Looking at plastic bags specifically, Byers notes that bans are usually written with a certain type of plastic bag in mind: bags of a certain thickness for example. The unintended result? People just switched to bags of a different thickness, which might even be worse for the environment. She remarks that bans constitute an older generation of policies; what has seemed to work better in the current landscape is to levy a fee on single-use plastics. That approach does not just ban a particular type of plastic – it can change consumer behavior.

What is next for Byers? She is excited about a future project that PSI will be carrying out in upstate New York, where they are looking to replicate the success of the Trash Free Waters project with restaurants in the city of Buffalo. Changing consumer behavior around reducing plastic use requires an understanding of what concerns various groups the most, and Byers’ consultative approach to advocacy is the way forward.

In Lawrence MA, Terry Greene worked on a project called, Casa De Salude that hired and trained residents to be community leaders on environmental health issues such as mercury, lead poisoning, and asthma. The leaders then conducted trainings at culturally familiar sites like daycares, public housing facilities, and faith-based places. The project proved the power of listening; mercury training was focused on mercury in fish, but residents asked, what about the tradition of sprinkling mercury on babies’ cribs? With this knowledge, Greene worked with the community to get local shops to stop selling mercury for such purposes. Casa De Salude, was among the first to test a peer-leadership model. Initial leaders also helped to identify new leaders, and so began a ripple effect.

Today, Greene is the Senior Environmental Health Associate at John Snow, Inc.(JSI)- a public health consulting organization dedicated to “improving the health of underserved people and communities” locally and internationally. Social determinants reveal that the most vulnerable communities are the most affected by environmental challenges to health. Greene’s work with JSI belongs to a broader movement for health equity via community-based participatory research (CBPR). CBPR’s collaborative approach involves community members as equal partners in research and decision-making. In this way, it aims to be responsive to community needs and address root causes of health problems.

https://medium.com/@JSIhealth/kickbutts-for-a-healthy-generation-270b972a1984

During graduate school Greene worked with an advocacy group addressing the childhood cancer cluster in Woburn MA. Residents had been the first to connect the leukemia outbreak to water contamination. The residents’ work is an example of barefoot epidemiology and, along with the pollution disaster of Love Canal in New York, paved the way for a public health model in which those who are affected become leaders in strategizing solutions. Greene’s advocacy work led, in part, to her and two colleagues founding the Environmental Health Center at JSI in 1990. This center, which provides communities with technical assistance, values that those most affected have expertise in the problems facing their communities.

“I guess what’s novel in what we’re trying to do is combine the field of health literacy with environmental literacy and CBPR,” Greene explains. The goal must be to both give individuals the information they need in ways that they can understand and “also to recognize their expertise and place in the decision making.”

Always with a warm smile, Greene spends a lot of time organizing community-based adult and family literacy programs in the field befriending everyone along the way. “Since so many of the affected populations are not necessarily literate [we] do things like adult education classrooms for English and speakers of other languages,” she explains. These programs offer lessons about issues including asthma, toxic substance exposure, tobacco use, and civic participation. Everyone can benefit. But as Greene explains, literacy barriers tend to overlap with poverty, racially segregated communities, and more harmful environmental exposures. That means that environmental health works needs to begin with basic literacy.

In Lowell, MA, Greene is collaborating with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health on the Reducing Older Adult Asthma Disparities Study. It’s the first asthma home-visiting intervention study to use a community health worker model. Using low literacy materials, health workers engage with residents in their homes, showing them how to reduce asthma triggers and properly use medications. Writing a prescription is ineffective if medication is unaffordable or inaccessible, instructions are complicated, or when a person’s home remains full of asthma triggers. Community health workers break literacy, language, and cultural barriers by serving as liaisons between medical providers and patients. The state health department is also conducting racial equity trainings for its employees in order to bring more awareness to racial disparities in health. Working groups are strategizing frameworks for applying a racial equity lens and identifying where changes can be made in existing programs and tool-kits.

Back in Lawrence, Casa Santos Nina Santos or “healthy homes for children,” was a project that trained daycare providers in keeping healthy homes free of asthma triggers. From the initial training, day care networks developed, and thousands were trained as providers both taught one another and the children’s parents.

The key to this approach is entering a community asking about residents’ interests and priorities, Greene says. “Don’t go in with a set program.” She expresses that we need to begin by leaning into conversation and asking: what’s the health status of the community and where are the overlaps in health outcomes, such as with cancer, asthma, and low birth rates? Then we can strategize solutions together. Strategies shouldn’t be done topeople, but with people.

Tox Town is one digital tool that Greene uses with residents and experts to help them to think about perceptions of health hazards. In this virtual town- which presents a variety of potentially polluted sites- residents tend to identify the vacant lot as the most hazardous location. Environmental experts tend to say it’s the least. This signifies that there are differing perceptions of risk, so shared learning needs to be a two-way interaction between residents and experts that combines local and expert knowledge.

But there are critics of course. Greene commonly hears, “these folks have so many stresses in their lives, they don’t have bandwidth to think about environmental health, they’ve got to survive day to day.” But she expresses that in her experience families are extremely concerned about their kids, especially with worsening pollution and droughts and floods due to climate change. Greene refuses to buy into what she calls “that elitism.” It is, she argues, “like that old jobs versus the environment argument…a false dichotomy.” Among people with better environmental health, there is less poverty, improved health conditions, and greater equity.

Community Based Participatory Research offers a promising pathway to health equity. The Center for Health Equity was formed at JSI in order to expand diversity and value the stories of those with lived experiences in the practice of public health. In 2018, the American Public Health Association’s focus has been “health equity now” which speaks to growing recognition of the value of Greene’s efforts. To move the needle in public health, Greene shows us that opportunities for residents to learn at their literacy level and be active stakeholders in bringing about changes in their environment must be present.

https://www.apha.org

“It’s not hard to find leaders, it’s a matter of giving them environmental health information. It’s great when you share it, and then they run with it,” Greene says. “In communities highly impacted by environmental justice, say, or environmental health, I mean, there’s a leader on every block.” With passion and care Greene is finding them, and that is making all the difference.

Feature image: https://cssr.gmu.edu/cssr-capabilities/community-based-participatory-research

Julie Wormser didn’t always see herself as a change maker.

In her younger years, Julie’s father, a Holocaust survivor, would ask her, “how will you change the world, singlehandedly?” It wasn’t until her mid-20s that she realized the folly and burden of this question. “Nobody does anything singlehandedly.”

Since then, Julie has realized her passion for facilitating change. She recently took the position of Deputy Director for the Mystic River Watershed Association (MyRWA).

Julie Wormser recently became Deputy Director for MyRWA, where she’s spearheading a groundbreaking effort to organize coastal resilience at the watershed level.

With MyRWA, Julie is facilitating a groundbreaking effort to organize coastal resilience at the watershed scale. She is focusing on building the Resilient Mystic Collaborative, which spearheads climate resilience efforts throughout the watershed. In trying to coordinate the Mystic River Watershed’s 21 municipalities, 500,000 residents, and countless stakeholders, Julie is ambitious. But Julie’s strength lies in communicating climate science and motivating community action. In her words, “there’s a problem and we can do something about it—and, we can be more beautiful at the end.”

Julie is no stranger to being at the forefront of making positive environmental change. She has a history of successful coalition leading and people organizing. For 20 years, she was a senior strategist in multiple regional and national conservation and fisheries policy campaigns with the Environmental Defense Fund, The Wilderness Society, and the Appalachian Mountain Club. But by 2010, bipartisan environmental policy-making at the national level had become almost impossible, as Congress increasingly butted heads along party lines.

That’s when Julie shifted her focus more locally: she became the executive director of The Boston Harbor Association (TBHA). She spent the next 5 years ringing alarm bells in Boston about flooding and the risks of climate change. In 2014 she devised and co-led the Boston Living with Water international design competition, in which more than 250 people from 7 countries submitted resilient design proposals for Boston. Julie got the City of Boston and the Boston Society of Architects on board, which both cosponsored the competition with TBHA.

The competition fueled the city’s focus on climate change. “It infused both city officials and the design community with this idea of this can be beautiful, and we actually have to think about this, this is a real challenge,” Julie explains proudly. It was largely due to Julie’s efforts and community organizing strategies that the City of Boston began to take climate change seriously.

Accessible Waterfront, Vibrant Resilient Community: one visualization in a winning entry from the Boston Living with Water international design challenge. Becoming more resilient also means making our waterfront more beautiful and accessible. Courtesy Daniel Bernstein, Ellen Watts, Nikul Patel, Caitlin Gilman, Pete Hanley, Jaime McGavin, Matt Calvey.

Now that this communication campaign in Boston has paid off, engineers and contractors are picking up where activists like Julie have already done their job. Julie moved on to work with MyRWA, covering new grounds outside city limits. “So what I’m doing in the Mystic River is really the same process we did in the City of Boston,” she explains. There is one big difference: while Boston is tackling resilience on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis, MyRWA wants to make change on the watershed scale.

Working at the watershed scale is inherently difficult. Numerous municipalities must make changes with the hydrology, ecology, and chemistry of the entire river system in mind. The Mystic River Watershed spans 76 square miles, starting with the Aberjona River in Reading which feeds into two lakes, Upper Mystic and Lower Mystic, which then drain to Boston Harbor via the Mystic River.

Map of the Mystic River Watershed. Image courtesy of MyRWA

Land use in each of the 21 municipalities along the watershed has major impacts on its hydrology and ecology. Environmental problems in the Mystic are inherently directional, pushing damage done upstream onto communities downstream. Gathering system-level knowledge about the watershed is hard enough, let alone getting communities to work together.

Creating coastal resilience through watershed management may seem far-fetched, but with Julie facilitating the movement, it seems possible. She’s a self-identified extrovert, down to earth, and relatable. Her expertise is organizing and motivating groups of people. While it’s clear she is proud of her central role in Boston’s journey towards resilience, she sees herself more as a facilitator than an iconic leader. “It’s how we lay the groundwork for people to be creative. And for people to discover ideas on their own,” Julie says. She brings this mindset to every aspect of her work.

Julie explains that making change at the watershed level makes conceptual and even practical sense for the communities along the Mystic River. For example, flooding in Medford has its origins in upstream communities. Conversely, flood damage downstream to resources like Logan Airport could have impacts that reverberate regionally.

With Julie’s leadership, MyRWA reached out to nearly 50 stakeholders throughout the watershed about interest in regional collaboration. Turns out, there’s a lot of interest. It just needs to be coordinated. Municipalities continually expressed that they can’t manage coastal and riverine flooding on their own. Flooding doesn’t stop at municipal boundaries, nor do floodwaters always originate in the places hit hardest. Without strong county governance in New England, MyRWA is filling an essential gap by organizing multiple municipalities around the Mystic River Watershed.

Julie throws out a number of possibilities for regional collaboration. Managing the amount of water that enters the watershed is the central goal. Every municipality could decrease impermeable surfaces like pavement and concrete by 20 percent, for example. Or, downstream communities could pay upstream communities to build parks where they might make more of an impact and reduce runoff.

Right now, Julie’s top priority is building coalitions and relationships. She’s starting with the Resilient Mystic Collaborative, a group of stakeholders from 10 of the 21 municipalities most interested in making change and getting prepared. The collaborative seeks to better understand regional challenges throughout the watershed, and just what exactly is at risk.

By carrying out a regional assessment, they’re beginning to understand the large-scale implications of managing the watershed in the face of climate change. Julie effortlessly reels off what’s in harms way: Logan Airport, two subway lines, major road networks, 100 large fuel tanks, Deer Isle wastewater treatment plant, the Mass General Hospital’s business center, and one of the largest privately owned fruit and vegetable distributors in the nation. In a nutshell, “energy, transportation, and food security are all at risk,” Julie explains.

It’s not just regional resources at risk. Half a million people live along the Mystic Watershed. They are diverse in every way. From Nobel prize winners to recent immigrants, the Mystic is home to a huge range of socioeconomic levels, people with different backgrounds, and privilege. That will make equity and climate justice a central piece of the climate resilience puzzle. “In doing this climate collaborative, we’re really trying to share resources across the income spectrum,” Julie says.

Recently, the climate collaborative held a meeting to pin down its values. They found wealthier communities want to help communities with fewer resources. “We’re not just looking at resilience of buildings, but resilience of people and communities,” says Julie. “That’s exciting.” The collaborative hopes to support an environmental justice peer group that brings best practices to the entire watershed.

Julie is organizing people who will take the lead, communicate risks, and infuse the watershed’s communities with motivation and passion. Working at the watershed level, she’s taking on an ambitious project, because watersheds inherently distribute impacts of environmental disaster unevenly, due to their directionality.

But Julie is a change maker. “My superpower is to help groups of people to move in the same direction,” she says. Her superpower is facilitative leadership, and with it, she’s bringing a watershed of change to the Mystic.

“Watch your step.”

On a brisk November morning, I found myself at Savin Hill Cove, where the Neponset River meets the Atlantic Ocean just south of Boston. This is one of the sites of the Green Harbors Project, an environmental restoration program founded and directed Dr. Anamarija Frankic. An ecologist and Biomimicry Fellow at UMass Boston, she and her students are using biomimicry – the application of nature-inspired solutions – to revolutionize the health and function of Boston’s harbor.

In her bright yellow windbreaker and tall blue rain boots, Dr. Frankic expertly leads me through coastal underbrush down to the water, where she points out debris and pollution that plague the cove. Over the course of several decades – even centuries — urban wastewater and nutrient-rich pollution have destroyed Boston’s coastal habitats, creating dead zones devoid of vegetation and aquatic wildlife.

After Vice President George H. W. Bush declared it “the dirtiest” harbor in America in 1988, Boston finally launched a massive multi-billion dollar cleanup project that spanned over a decade. The project culminated in a Deer Island Sewage Treatment Plant renovation that installed a 9.5 mile pipeline which diverted raw sewage beyond the harbor and out into the ocean. While the water quality has improved, Frankic knows more must be done to restore a resilient and sustainable coastal ecosystem in this urban harbor. To do so, she’s enlisted the help of a natural ally: oysters.

Oysters from a reef in Savin Hill Cove. Photo: Ron Cowie

Oysters were once an abundant feature of Boston’s colonial-era harbor. Records from the 1630s describe oyster banks large enough to keep boats from navigating Boston’s rivers, and oyster shells were even a popular material for paving colonial Boston’s streets. By the beginning of the 20^th century, however, overfishing, pollution, and habitat degradation from landfill and dams drove the native oyster population to extinction.

Why bring oysters back? Oysters are natural filtration machines: as filter feeders, oysters naturally remove overabundant micronutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous from the water. In fact, one adult oyster can purify 50 gallons of water per day. Simply by existing, oysters improve water quality and make aquatic environments more conducive for other forms of life.

Oysters’ abilities are not limited to water filtration: oyster reefs also stabilize coastal sediment from erosion, provide shelter for creatures like snails and crabs that like to hide in the crevices between oysters, and are a food source for larger organisms, like birds and humans. An increase in their population could even help the Massachusetts fishing economy.

In an adjacent cove, Dr. Frankic and I carefully make our way down a rocky slope to the water at low tide to check the health of an oyster bed she established in 2013. What was once a desolate cove now holds a giant cluster of 150,000 oysters. As we explore the bed, Frankic’s admiration of oysters bubbles up to the surface. “Oysters are smart. They like to live together, to be close to one another for support and for protection.”

Oyster beds stretch out into the water at Savin Hill Cove. The UMass Boston campus sits on the horizon.
Photo: Ron Cowie

Frankic then draws my attention to abundant slimy, leafy plants that line the rocky shore, suitably named rockweed. Its existence here is a good sign – an indication that the oysters are helping to reestablish a livable habitat.

Despite signs of the project’s progress, there is still more work to be done. Her UMass Boston students are busy restoring eelgrass and salt marsh grasses – plants that work in tandem with oyster reefs to attract aquatic life – and exploring other natural technologies to facilitate the process of coastal ecosystem recovery.

And sometimes, there are setbacks. As we walked further into the oyster bed, Frankic stopped short. “Someone was here,” she said grimly. “This area has been raked.” Sure enough, a long strip of bare sand cut through the bed. This is the first time she has ever seen the bed damaged. When asked why someone would do this, Frankic was at a loss – perhaps it was an accident, an act of hostility, or someone harvesting the oysters to eat or to sell.

Dr. Frankic (right) and her students regularly perform research to analyze ecosystem health.
Photo: Green Harbors Project

Dr. Frankic is used to challenges in her career. After growing up on a small Croatian island and attending university in Zagreb, she commenced a nonlinear journey to ecosystem restoration. “I didn’t have a simple track. I just went like organic growth, like a sprout of mold going everywhere.” Her aptitude for holistic and interdisciplinary thinking, however, meant overcoming professional challenges. “I tried to fit the form in science, in academia, in government, in the World Bank and the UN,” she recalls, but time and time again she became frustrated by a culture of fragmentation and compartmentalization, and a lack of collaboration across sectors.

Tired of compromising efficacy to conform to the status quo, Frankic carved out a niche of her own creation. In addition to teaching at UMass Boston and two universities in Croatia, she also works to engage local residents, politicians, fisherman, and elementary school students in ecosystem restoration.

She works as an educator to make it easier for future generations to follow a holistic path like hers. “Education needs to follow the needs of the next generation, and we are not very good in that,” she says. Rather than create reactionary solutions to environmental problems, she wants her students to be leaders that proactively create healthy and thriving environments. By empowering students to perform exploratory field research and question existing systems, she hopes her students will promote positive change in the world.

Already, the positive ripples from the Green Harbors Project are spreading beyond Boston. Dr. Frankic now has oyster restoration projects in Cape Cod, Nantucket, and internationally in her native Croatia. Similar initiatives have been adopted in Brooklyn and the Chesapeake Bay. Inexpensive and low-maintenance, oysters are a natural, simple, and extremely effective tool that can improve aquatic ecosystem health around the world. “Water is life,” she reminds me. “We have to let the water teach us how to build our cities.”

When considering progress to address the climate crisis by reducing fossil fuel use, many people may think of the Paris Climate Agreement. However, Alyssa Lee’s career redefines the scale of success in the climate movement. Rather than relying on politicians and diplomats to shape the future of our planet, divestment campaigns at colleges across the United States are empowering young people to take control of the world that they want to live in.

Alyssa Lee wearing a 350 Mass Action T-shirt. 350 Mass Action is the volunteer grassroots group affiliated with the Better Future Project.

In September of 2015, Alyssa left her home in
sunny California to join the Better Future Project in Boston, Massachusetts. The Better Future Project is a non-profit organization that works to promote grassroots movements to address climate change. Working as a campus organizer, Alyssa pioneered the new Climate Justice Fellowship Program for Massachusetts college students. This fellowship provides mentoring, training, and helps establish connections among students seeking to start or strengthen their own divestment campaigns on campus.

Alyssa succinctly states the goal of college divestment campaigns as “putting pressure on school administrators to consider whether it is ethical to profit from fossil fuels.”

Students can take control of what Alyssa describes as their “access to power.” Through these campaigns, students can realize their ability to make a change by putting the spotlight on school administrators. This type of public exposure is all part of a larger mission to stigmatize or brand fossil fuels as undesirable.

Interestingly, Alyssa points out that many colleges don’t have direct investments in fossil fuels, yet school administrators still refuse to take a public stance on the issue. It may seem strange for students to fight so hard for divestment when their schools don’t actually have fossil fuel investments. However, divestment campaigns are symbolically important.

Although money often equates to power, reputation is everything. When colleges refuse to take a stance against the fossil fuel industry, they perpetuate its “social license to operate.” This legitimacy allows fossil fuel companies to continue operating, generating pollution, and contributing to the climate crisis. Divestment challenges this legitimacy by raising opposition to fossil fuels and publically questioning the acceptability of college administrators profiting from this industry.

The fossil fuel divestment movement was born at Swarthmore College in 2011. Since the movement started, there have been notable divestment wins at two-dozen colleges across the country. This past May, University of Massachusetts Amherst became the first major public university to divest its endowment from fossil fuels, with the president proudly stating, “Important societal change often begins on college campuses and it often begins with students.” Despite these successes, many college students face challenges mobilizing movements on their campuses.

This is where Alyssa comes in.

Through the Climate Justice Fellowship, Alyssa provides coaching to college students struggling with their leadership roles on campus and the difficulty inherent in positions of power. “People feel uncomfortable being asked to lead. They hesitate to delegate and ask for people’s time, push people, and make decisions.”

What qualifies Alyssa to guide these students?

Alyssa speaks from personal experience. She was a devoted leader and organizer as a student at UCLA up until she graduated in 2014. During her time, Alyssa co-founded a student-run food cooperative and started the Fossil Free UCLA divestment campaign. Alyssa recalls that, as she became an organizer, “a lot of people I respected told me to step into a role I may be uncomfortable with.” It’s easy to see why Alyssa was asked to step up to the plate — she’s a natural organizer, balancing both charisma and optimism. Alyssa went on to train at the Divestment Student Network her senior year, while continuing her critical role in her own school’s divestment campaign.

In addition to mentorship, the Climate Justice Fellowship fosters a sense of solidarity among students fighting for divestment across Massachusetts. Young leaders come together monthly, where they receive training and form cross-campus relationships. These connections help form a broad network of support as students face the daunting task of confronting school administrators and one of the most powerful industries in the world. Alyssa helped to coordinate a cross-campus effort between Amherst, Lowell, Dartmouth, and Boston, bringing these schools together for the first time. Previous fellows have emphasized the importance of these relationships as a source of inspiration and reassurance. Nina Hazelton, a spring 2016 fellow from UMass Amherst, stated, “every time we get together, we are shifting power.”

In the efforts to provide mentoring, training, and connections among schools, Alyssa admits that time for conversation regarding environmental justice issues such as pollution from fossil fuel production and transportation is limited. The “main problem is that we assume many people already know. We all take it for granted.” However, referring to the pollution associated with fossil fuel production and transport, Alyssa said with full sincerity, “I would love to spend fellowship training talking about this.”

Issues of environmental justice are what sparked Alyssa’s passion towards divestment as a student—leading her to the role that she plays now in supporting many other divestment campaigns across Massachusetts.

After so many campaigns, including the UCLA campaign in which the school did not fully divest from fossil fuels, one might think Alyssa would be worn out. However, when asked how she deals with disappointment, Alyssa acknowledged that many divestment campaigns do hear no. But “each disappointing moment should never be bad, it is just momentum for the next thing. Every moment is an opportunity. The next action will always push forward.”

In the spring of 2015, Helena McMonagle, a college student, collected samples for her Sea Semester project in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. With fine meshed plankton nets, she trawled the top of the ocean. But with the plankton came the unexpected.

“I was so surprised to be in a place that seemed so remote and so pristine. But then you pull up this plankton net and there is plastic in there and evidence of human waste. It was really shocking how much plastic we found.”

Plastic found by Helena. Photo credit: Amy Siuda (Chief Scientist)

For the past 45 years, Sea Semester (SEA) has been training the next generation of oceanographers about marine environmental issues by getting them out of the classroom and onto the ocean. Integral to Helena’s experience was one of her mentors, Dr. Erik Zettler. A recently retired Sea Semester professor and current researcher with SEA in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Dr. Erik Zettler has been pivotal in research on marine plastic debris. Utilizing the research power of undergraduates, Dr. Zettler has investigated the living communities whose homes are on our plastic. He calls these plastic communities the “Plastisphere.”

Dr. Erik Zettler at work. Photo credit: http://www.sea.edu/plastics/team/erik_zettler

These communities may be small, but they have large and devastating impacts. These pieces of plastic transport harmful creatures as they drift in the ocean’s currents, including human pathogens and algae responsible for toxic red algae tides.

With about eight million tons of plastic entering the oceans every year– the equivalent of two empire state buildings every month– the fate of this plastic and its consequences are worth investigating.

For 22 years, Dr. Zettler has investigated microbial communities, focusing on the Plastisphere in the past decade. Before working for Sea Semester, he was a research technician at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He was attracted to SEA by their boats docked right across the street.  Sea Semester is known for their two sailboats, which look like relics of the 1700s with their huge white sails and two masts. In fact, they are sophisticated research vessels.

Sea Semester boat. Photo credit: https://syr-sa.terradotta.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=programs.ViewProgram&Program_ID=10287

Dr. Zettler realized Sea Semester was a perfect match when he got the opportunity to travel with them on a short research trip. “I absolutely loved it. It was a combination of everything I like,” he reminisced with a smile during our Skype conversation. “It’s fieldwork on a sailing boat, high quality science, and teaching. Three things I really enjoy in one, ” he said counting each aspect on a finger. When a permanent position became available in 1994, he joined Sea Semester full time.

Since his first ocean research voyage, Dr. Zettler has spent up to one-third of every year at sea doing research. But, he still depends a lot on student research. “All of my research at SEA pretty much was done through student research projects,” Dr. Zettler said appreciatively. “Essentially they’re acting as research assistants.” At SEA, students like Helena McMonagle help with ideas, processing and analyzing the samples, and collecting data.

“They treated us like colleagues,” Helena described of her time working with Dr. Zettler and his wife, Dr. Amaral-Zettler. “It was empowering.” And it is easy to see why his students respected him so much.

During our Skype conversation, Dr. Zettler was modest and friendly, seeming more like an engaging professor and sea-weathered researcher in his blue fleece and wire-rimmed glasses, than a renowned researcher. He has worked on more than 30 published papers, including a 2015 paper that was featured in the Falmouth Enterprise, a local Massachusetts paper.

The paper discussed policy implications of the Plastisphere, the composition of which Dr. Zettler and other Woods Hole based researchers discovered is dependent on its location. Plastics in the North Atlantic Ocean had different organisms, like disease causing pathogens, living on them than in the North Pacific Ocean. This is an important discovery because it means that plastic debris might have site-specific effects on the environment and marine organisms that accidentally ingest the plastic. Political efforts to mitigate the impacts of marine plastic debris will require equally regionally specific efforts.

Dr. Zettler clearly loves the research he does, but he also highlighted the importance of policy in bridging the divide between science and change—a bridge this 2015 paper starts to build.

“You have to stop plastic at the source, which is land,” he emphasized, when I asked what we must do now to solve our marine plastic debris problem. He stressed the importance of minimizing the use of single-use plastic. Single-use plastics are about half of the 300,000,000 million tons of plastic created every year, and some of it can be replaced by biodegradable materials, which can be industrially composted. Examples of policies that minimize single-use plastics include plastic bag bans and fees.

Stopping plastic at its source is especially important because researchers don’t know where most of the plastic is ending up once it gets into the ocean. “We are putting in eight million tons of plastic every year, but when we try to count the plastic that’s floating, we find only 300,000 tons” Dr. Zettler said. That’s like the weight of 20 empire state buildings going missing every year. This means that marine plastic debris may be having other unknown effects on oceanic ecosystems.

With the help of Sea Semester student research, maybe Dr. Zettler will solve that mystery.  For now, he continues to lay the foundation for future policy that will alleviate our ocean’s plastic pollution crisis and impacts of the Plastisphere.

It’s a crisp, sunny fall day perfect for pressing fresh apple cider. I’m at the Tobin Montessori School in Cambridge to volunteer at one of CitySprouts’ annual cider pressings and speak with Andrea Locke, their Community Relations Director. CitySprouts is a non-profit organization that partners with public schools to build school gardens and incorporate them into the curriculum. It began in two Cambridge schools in 2001 and has since expanded to include 24 public schools in Boston and Cambridge.

Andrea and I find a spot to sit on the leaf-strewn lawn of the school, with the garden plots behind us, and begin discussing her journey to CitySprouts. Although she has only been working for the organization since last spring, it is clear that she believes in the CitySprouts mission, especially its commitment to experiential learning.

Andrea is a firm believer in the idea of “learning best by getting your hands dirty.” She explains that planting seeds and watching them grow is “very hands-on” and “a very visceral experience that I just think is vital to learning.”

Andrea Locke, Community Relations Director of CitySprouts

As a native of the Finger Lakes region of New York, Andrea grew up playing in gardens. When it was time to go to college, she chose Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. Warren Wilson is a very different from a typical college because, as Andrea explains it, “The entire campus is run by students.” She worked in the Office of Admissions, but other students were responsible for doing the plumbing and electricity, and everyone had to work on the 500-acre farm that provided the food for the campus.

“I feel like a lot of my life experiences have been building on each other,” Andrea explains. Her major at Warren Wilson was History and Political Science. It wasn’t until she attended graduate school at the Lund Institute in Sweden that she became more interested in social policy, which led her into the nonprofit world. Before CitySprouts, Andrea worked as an AmeriCorps VISTA member with Give US Your Poor, a Boston organization which seeks to increase public awareness of homelessness. That experience, she says, helped her gain many of the skills she is using in her work today, especially social media skills.

As Community Relations Director, Andrea is responsible for cultivating and maintaining relationships with donors as well as arranging volunteers for events such as the cider pressings. One of her goals for this year is to get the students’ families more involved with CitySprouts. As she was arranging the volunteers for cider pressing, she tried to get as many parents involved as possible. She is also responsible for planning the spring fundraising event, Dig It!, and has lowered the ticket prices to encourage more parents to come.

The importance of fundraising for a non-profit cannot be understated. None of CitySprouts’ work would be possible without Andrea’s work. In addition to the school partnership program, CitySprouts offers an after-school program and a summer program for middle school students. Adequate fundraising allows them to provide these programs free for all students, permitting more children from lower-income families to participate.

The school garden plots that CitySprouts helps the students to tend do not produce enough vegetables to supply the cafeteria, so instead the students or teachers take home the produce to share it with their families. Andrea also tells me that they like to allow some of it to “die on the vine,” so that students can see how vegetables decompose and understand that as a part of nature.

CitySprouts does, however, interact with the school cafeterias in other ways. Andrea tells me that the cafeteria staff will sometimes use fresh herbs from the garden. Last spring, the 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th graders in CitySprouts’ after-school program each developed their own sauce for the local coconut-crusted redfish that is served in Cambridge cafeterias. The students voted to select their favorite, and the winning sauce is now served in all Cambridge cafeterias.

CitySprouts Summer Program

The summer program allows middle school students to engage more with the gardens and understand the larger food system. The lunches provided to the students as a part of the program are made with the produce they helped to grow. Furthermore, the activities encourage them to consider the larger food system outside of the garden plot. In one assignment, they imagine the journey of a product from the farm to the grocery store and calculate what percentage of the final price goes to the farmer. The students also volunteer at Gaining Ground, a farm in Concord that provides produce for food pantries, which gives them the opportunity to see how a full-scale farm operates.

Today, nutrition is often broken down into nutrients and calories, but CitySprouts takes a more holistic view. Andrea explains, “we believe that introducing vegetables and just getting students more familiar with them will just make them more comfortable, so when they see it again, they’re more likely to eat it.”

She also appreciates the sense of ownership the CitySprouts method gives the kids. She explains how the little kids will plant the beans, measure them, watch them grow, “and then they eat the beans, and they really like them,” she concludes, visibly giddy.

The cider pressings are a little bit different than the majority of CitySprouts events. Although it is still hands-on, it is less of an educational event and more of a fun one to get the kids outside to see the garden and involve teachers who have not used the garden in their curriculum. The apples are from Kimball Farm, about 40 miles outside of Boston, and are what is known as “second-pick” apples, “so they’re pretty gnarly looking, but it makes no difference for cider,” Andrea explains.

As a Texas native, I’ve never made cider, so I get a quick explanation of the process before the next class comes out. I am at the chopping station, helping the students to cut the apples into chunks with butter knives. After the washing, chopping and mashing have been completed, we all gather around the cider press, a wood and red-painted metal contraption that, like the apple masher, looks most akin to something the pioneers would have used.

A CitySprouts cider pressing

We all take turns helping to twist the press until it is tight and then to pump the lever until all the juice is squeezed out of the mashed apples. Next, we distribute the cider in compostable paper cups, and ask the students to wait to drink because we are going to do a toast. Since apple cider pressing is a fall tradition in New England, we decide to toast to fall. We all say “To Fall!,” clink our paper cups together, and have a sip. It’s easily the best apple cider I’ve ever had and the kids can’t get enough of it.