The Charles River is once again safe for recreational activity party due to the work of the Charles River Watershed Association. Photo credit: Peter H. Dreyer “Boston University crew team on the Charles River”

When I asked to meet with Elisabeth Cianciola, a staff scientist at the Charles River Watershed Association (CRWA), I was surprised when she invited me to a golf course. Golf courses require large inputs of fertilizer and fertilizer, as a source of unnatural levels of phosphorus, causes algae blooms, which can cause fish deaths and any number of other ill effects. So, it was even more surprising to me that the reason Cianciola invited me to the golf course was that the CRWA’s office sits on the edge of that course. Their building is next-door neighbor to the golf course’s concession building, and the two look so similar that for a while I assumed they were both just parts of the course.

The CRWA was founded in 1965 in response to concern about the state of the Charles River. By this time, centuries of commercial use had left the water pink and orange with toxic waste. Pollutants like fertilizer, raw sewage, and even abandoned cars turned the river into a ghastly, stinking mess. Algae blooms had depleted oxygen levels in much of the river, killing fish. As early as 1955 historian Bernard DeVoto wrote an article for Harper’s Weekly that said the river was “unlikely to be mistaken for water.” Since its inception, The CRWA has advocated for better practices, using lawsuits designed to reign in polluters, all with a strong backbone of scientific inquiry. The organization has prevented dam construction, helped fish reach spawning grounds using “fish ladders”, restored wetlands that filter out pollution and protect against floods, encouraged better sewage treatment and much more. Thanks in part to the organization’s tireless efforts, 74% of the Charles River is once again safe for swimming. According to the CRWA, the Charles is now the “cleanest urban river in the United States” and between the years of 1995 and 2014, the river has gone from getting a water quality D grade, to a solid A-. Still, the CRWA’s fight has not ended. It has only evolved.

In general, the work of cleaning the Charles River has become more and more of a group effort. Most of the obvious, big-ticket fixes have already been implemented. “A lot of the more significant changes in water quality have been more than five years ago,” says Cianciola. Now, instead of finding single, large sources of pollution, the CRWA has been forced to combat the small contributions that everyone makes to pollution in the everyday course of their lives and “no one wants to be the first person to take on that extra burden.” The CRWA’s next hurdle is to involve the city at large. Fortunately, the CRWA has already begun to do that.

The first thing I noticed in Cianciola’s office was a traffic cone. When I asked her about it, she told me that it was a safety precaution for volunteers who might need to sample water flowing under bridges. While the end points of the Charles River are only twenty-six miles apart, but the river’s actual length is eighty miles and in total, the Charles winds through twenty-three different communities. In contrast, the CRWA is small and only has eleven employees. So the organization really depends on volunteers to sample water at the thirty-five stations along the river, and to pull out the invasive plants that phosphorus pollution encourages. There are some drawbacks to using volunteers for data collection, of course. The volunteers are not trained scientists, and in order to make sure the data are correct, the methods for data collection have to be simplified to reduce human error. The fact that the CRWA depends on citizens means that the organization sometimes hears about problems later than it would like to. Recently a fish kill that impacted eighty to one hundred fish was discovered by accident, because staff happened to be on the river, taking data for an unrelated study. Cianciola says, “It makes me a little uncomfortable that we only find out about these things sort of by coincidence.” Unless people are aware of what a water quality emergency looks like, it can be hard for the CRWA to find out that one has happened.

Despite all these down sides, the volunteer presence has some real benefits for the organization. Since volunteers are doing the sampling, the staff is free to do the more specialized work of data analysis and advocacy. In return, the volunteers get to feel more connected both to the river cleanup and to the process of citizen science. This broader involvement is important if individuals are going to make the contributions needed for continued improvements.

The office’s strange placement is another example of how the CRWA has learned to work with the community at large. In the past, the CRWA has had offices that more obviously faced the river, Cianciola explained, and the organization only has this most recent building because it is renting it from the State Department of Conservation and Recreation. And, as weird as the location might seem, the office’s placement has helped the CRWA reach more people. A company called Charles River Recreation owns this golf course as well as a number of boathouses. Since the CRWA and Charles River Recreation work so closely together, the two organizations have been able to cooperate on a number of projects. For example, when the CRWA finds that the water quality is unsafe, they tell the boathouses, who then raise a yellow or red flag. Not only that, but Charles River Recreation has helped the CRWA find the equipment it needed to remove invasive plants in the Lake District. Without this close relationship, that work would have been much more difficult.

The CRWA has been working with communities, companies, and housing developments in order to create better, more lasting solutions. For example, Cianciola is particularly excited about the CRWA’s various Blue Cities projects. These design ideas include planting rain gardens near parking lots, building green roofs, and installing porous pavement. These structures let stormwater filter through and clean itself similarly to the way it would happen in a natural environment instead of just running directly into the river, bringing with it a soup of pollutants such as phosphorus. Another initiative is the “green corridor.” These “corridors” are strips of green space that connect other green spaces. They soak up rainwater and clean it as the water slowly makes its way to the river. The “green corridors” would also improve the neighborhoods in which they’re built by providing green space.

Despite the daunting new challenges, Cianciola remains optimistic. “The water quality is very good for an urban river, but that’s not to say that we don’t have the power and the opportunity to make it better.”

Slivers of mid-morning sun shone through the windshield of my family’s ancient minivan as we pulled up to an unfamiliar driveway just past the interstate highway in South Salt Lake. My mom turned down the radio and reached for a crumpled Post-it with an address scrawled on it in cursive.

“Well…” She hesitated. “I think this is it.”

I craned my neck to look for a sign somewhere along the sidewalk, and just as we started to get out of the car, a woman appeared at the gap in the fence, strawberry-blonde hair tucked into a dusty baseball cap. “Hi!” she exclaimed. “Are y’all here for the farm tour?”

Amidst scorched asphalt accented by patches of grass and a chain-link fence, a flourishing oasis came into view: rows of fresh compost, a buzzing apiary, and raised beds overflowing with eggplant, Thai basil, peppers, and garlic. This is Real Food Rising, a community garden tucked away on just over an acre of restored urban land. Though it might seem a little out of place, Real Food Rising has, over the past three years, begun to open pathways for otherwise disenfranchised youth to shape their environment by growing and harvesting sustainable produce.

A group of teenage crew workers stand in the Real Food Rising farm plot; photo courtesy Kitchen Gardeners International.

Despite the fact that it is housed mere minutes from my old high school, my path to Real Food Rising started not in Salt Lake City but in Boston, where an organization called the Food Project has been running sustainable agriculture and youth development programs for high school students since 1992. The Food Project hires young people from a wide range of backgrounds and neighborhoods to work on urban and suburban organic farm plots throughout the Boston area, providing more than 250,000 pounds of fresh produce each year to local residents through farm stands and community-sponsored agriculture shares. Headquartered in historic Dudley Square, a predominantly Black neighborhood that has experienced numerous forms of intense disinvestment, the Food Project aims to increase access to affordable, healthy foods, and donates about a quarter of their annual harvest to hunger relief organizations. On top of all this, youth involved in the Food Project participate in workshops on the food system, developing a critical understanding of their own diverse cultural, racial, class, and gender identities before going on to lead similar conversations amongst their peers and community members.

Mike Evans believes fiercely in the Food Project’s model – so much so that after spending six years as the organization’s Youth Program Coordinator, he brought the idea to Austin, Texas and Salt Lake City, Utah. Evans sees the field of urban agriculture as a unique microcosm that illuminates – and grapples with – the deep connections between social justice and sustainable food. In a country where farming is inextricable from a history of African slavery and where food access falls along lines of racial and economic privilege, examining structural oppression as it relates to agriculture seems inevitable. Yet Evans senses resistance to such discussions among many White food activists, who often see the food system and social justice as two separate issues. “For some folks, they’re like, well, we’re actually pushing the envelope as it is, and you’re asking me to push it in this other direction,” Evans says, noting that those involved in sustainable agriculture tend to consider themselves fringe thinkers to begin with.

Program director Mike Evans leads Real Food Rising youth in farm work; photo courtesy KSL News.

When Evans began his work with Urban Roots in Austin and Real Food Rising in Salt Lake, he noticed that there was less willingness to delve into these complexities: his co-founders and new colleagues were far more comfortable talking about food cultivation separate from any broader social implications. Few were prepared to consider the role of race, class, and gender at the level Evans had wanted to see. Partly, this reflects a different timeline – each of these programs is new, while the Food Project has had two decades to get its bearings – but it also speaks to staff demographics. Over the years, the Food Project has been able to secure enough funding to ensure that its staff members mirror youth in terms of socioeconomic status, gender, and racial and cultural identities. Real Food Rising and Urban Roots, on the other hand, have so far had to rely significantly on programs like AmeriCorps. These financial challenges often mean that Real Food Rising and Urban Roots are staffed primarily by upper middle class White women, like the ones I met on my visit to the farm that summer morning. “Not that that is bad,” Evans says, emphasizing that there is a place for all people in the movement to build a better food system. “But I think it’s our responsibility to think deeply about it…think deeply about it regularly.”

Evans’ dedication to conscientiously supporting the youth in these programs – privileged and marginalized alike – stems from a long-term interest in dismantling various systems of oppression. When Evans got to Dartmouth College in 1996, he had one goal: “I wanted to major in anti-discrimination.” Having been inspired in his high school days by a summer youth program designed to teach students about the impact of racism, sexism, homophobia, and cultural diversity in society, Evans ended up pursuing a degree in African American Studies. After four years studying Black history and Black issues as a White man, he was familiar with the inevitable skepticism, raised eyebrows, and refrains of “what are you gonna do with that?” But what happened next took him by surprise: when a job with a social justice-oriented afterschool program fell through, he found himself on a farm. After that fateful summer, Evans began work as a crew leader for the Food Project – and the rest, as they say, is history.

In his own journey, from Dartmouth and Boston to Austin and Salt Lake (and back East to Williams College, where he now works in the Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives), Evans emphasizes the role of personal growth when it comes to productively recognizing inequality. He believes a lot of his progress has come from actively choosing to attend conferences, workshops, and classes where anti-discrimination is central to the overall mission. For Evans, navigating these issues means going against the mainstream. From his own experiences taking that risk, he has learned to be attuned to other people’s capacities for growth in these conversations, as well as to his own needs as a lifelong learner. But he also recognizes that in order to sustain this kind of learning, community is essential: “Find someone, or a culture, to fall into to get that continual training and that continual support.”

Though Real Food Rising and Urban Roots have a lot of room to grow, it’s clear that they are already starting to develop this critically supportive culture in their respective food scenes. As for Mike Evans? He is bringing what he’s learned to the terrain of educational administration, pushing for an intersectional approach to Environmental Studies, and thinking deeply about all of it, regularly.

Name: Jan Wright
Position: Volunteer and Historical Tour Guide at Assabet National Wildlife Refuge
National Parks She Most Wants to Visit: Glacier National Park and Grand Teton National Park

It’s a crisp October day at Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Gravel and leaves crunch under my feet as Jan Wright leads the way down the path through the woods wearing her official Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge sweatshirt. Ordinarily, Jan gives only two or three tours like this per year, to a group of up to 30 people. This week, she’s graciously come in to show me around. Up ahead, a small hill rises from the leaf-covered ground. On one side of the hill, the earth ends abruptly, and a metal and concrete wall surrounds a heavy metal door, like an apocalyptic Hobbit hole.

As she unlocks the heavy padlock holding the door closed, Jan explains what we’re about to see. The bunkers were built after the outbreak of World War II to store ammunition and supplies for the war effort. “The dirt is for insulation and security, because this was during the war, and because we’re thirty miles away from Boston Harbor. That was the main thing- the enemy gunboats, [their weapons] couldn’t go any further than about 25 miles at that point. So they built it here because they knew it was safe.”

To explain why there’s an ammunition bunker at a wildlife refuge, it’s important to understand where Assabet River came from in the first place. In order to give her tours, Jan had to learn about a century of history in a hurry. At her first tour, she jokes, “There’s the frying pan, and I just jumped right into it.” On our walk up the hill, Jan takes me back to the late 1800s, when the land around us was parceled into farms growing apples, cranberries, and root vegetables. But things quickly changed when the United States entered World War II. The military needed a large parcel of land near Boston where they could build a munitions depot, and they found it in a group of farms straddling the borders of the towns of Sudbury, Hudson, Maynard, and Stowe. Farmers were served an eviction notice, and had only a few weeks to relocate. Some of their homes were moved off site by the military, and still stand today in surrounding towns. Others were simply abandoned and burnt. Many of the farmers were paid as little as ten cents on the dollar for the land on which they’d built their livelihoods. Fifty years later, the actions of the military and their contractors rendered the land so polluted by arsenic and other toxins that it would have to be placed on the EPA’s national priorities list.

“[The farmers] were thinking they’d come back,” Jan explains. “But who’d want to farm on a Superfund site?”

Left: The Hill Farm House, circa 1928, courtesy of the Assabet River NWR records. Most of the structures on the property were demolished before the refuge opened. Right, the chimney of the house, all that remains of the building.

It took nearly twenty years for what would soon become the Assabet River NWR to be completely remediated. Soil contaminated with heavy metals was scraped away and sealed in pits, where it no longer posed a threat to the public. In 2000, the site was officially turned over to the Department of the Interior, replacing military aircraft with flocks of migratory birds. Jan’s involvement with project stretches back to 1998, when she saw a notice in a local paper for a discussion of the site’s future transition to a wildlife refuge. She decided to attend. “Three weeks later,” she says, “I got a snail mail invitation to come to Great Meadows in Sudbury for their informational meeting on how to start a friends group. And here I am, fifteen years later.” She’s a charter member of the Friends of the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge (her member number is “3”) and serves on their board. Now, she also sits on the board of directors of the Friends of Oxbow National Wildlife Refuge. Later, I ask whether there’s anywhere new on the property she’d like to visit, and she laughs again. “You mean, is there anywhere I’d like to go back to?”
As we walk back to the visitor center, we chat about Jan’s life. For many years, she flew across the country in her friend’s plane, called Whiskey, and has seen 40 states from the sky. Now that she’s retired, she still enjoys traveling. Today, she’s driving me up the refuge’s trails. Back at the visitor center, Jan heads back into the office to borrow the keys to one of the refuge’s vehicles, a hybrid Ford Escape. At one point in our tour, a family stops us to ask about the bunkers. Jan immediately leaps out of the truck to explain their former function, and the father is visibly stunned when she mentions German U-boats coming into Boston Harbor. After a conversation with them, we get back in the truck. “Every time someone comes down,” Jan says, “I go into tour guide mode.” This encounter confirms what I’d already observed about Jan: she knows a lot about this place, and she also truly cares about it. In the several hours we spend walking the property, her determination to make others appreciate Assabet River as much as she does is apparent in everything she says.

The refuge has changed a lot since Jan first encountered it. “We worked five years to get this place open, at least the trails, and that’s all I did for a long time. I learned to post boundary markers and find the bunkers.” She laughs. “This was like our private park for a long time. We were here, we walked every square foot of this place. You would not believe how many square feet there are.” Later, she grows somber. Jan worries about visitors who might not respect Assabet’s history, and the fragility of the ecosystems here. The refuge offers miles of biking trails, which have become extraordinarily popular in the last few years. She has become concerned that some riders don’t stay on the trails, which could put historical artifacts at risk. The wetlands at Assabet River also support unique species, like the threatened Blanding’s turtle– when visitors ride carelessly, or try to bring their dogs into the refuge, they put these species at risk.

This is precisely why historical programs like Jan’s are so important. For suburban dwellers, the refuge is a place to get outside and explore nature. For the volunteers and staff at Assabet River, it’s so much more than that. As the refuge becomes increasingly popular, it will be even more important that visitors remember exactly why this place exists, and how it got here. If they don’t, they won’t understand why it needs to be protected. After spending four hours with Jan, I’m excited by all the stories she’s told me. Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge tells three overlapping stories, of the farmers who lived here, the military and contractors that came in later, and the refuge it is today. These stories are inextricable from each other, but that’s sometimes easy to forget when you’re surrounded by lush green forest.

As for Jan, she’s around to make sure none of these stories are forgotten. As we drive back to the visitor center, I ask Jan how long she thinks she’ll volunteer at Assabet River. “Well,” she responds pragmatically. “As long as I can walk.”