 "Photo:")
"Going Green" may be the popular catch phrase of '08, but environmentalism is nothing new. People have been fighting to save our planet in peril for decades. In '88, TIME magazine dubbed "The Endangered Earth" the Person, or Planet rather, of the Year. While these five Boston College seniors were mere toddlers when this issue landed in newsstands across the globe, it would eventually evolve into the defining issue of their generation.
Twenty years later, Katherine Walsh, Peggy Fox, Jessica Young, Katie Cava, and Merril Putnam, all A&S '08, have already done more than most care to do in a lifetime to stop the looming threat of global warming and to protect the environment. Here at BC, their efforts have been seen and felt by everyone from the students living in the residence halls to the upper administrators perched in their offices at the top of campus.
Their dedication, enthusiasm, and enduring spirit have set the bar high, as BC and the world continue to battle the environmental sustainability crisis, and because of this, The Heights is honored to recognize the Senior Board of Ecopledge as the 2008 "Person of the Year."
These five young women remember those first few (or dozen) awkward moments of freshman year well, as do most; but from the first open meeting of Ecopledge, the tentative newcomers had found a place to call home. The group was small then; no more than nine or so students were actively engaged in the club's efforts which, Walsh said, were more based on national campaigns than the specific needs of the BC community.
Nevertheless, they made themselves heard on campus. Yelling at people to recycle in McElroy freshman year and getting the varying confused, thankful, and occasionally hostile reactions was a favorite pastime of the group. Now a senior, Young admits to yelling at her neighbors in the Mods on a consistent, and likely annoying, basis.
Though they may have felt slightly out of place in these situations, playing the part of the "crazies" on campus, their willingness to take a stance when others typically stepped aside showed their devotion to this cause right from the start.
A lot has changed for these five seniors since those first couple of Ecopledge meetings. After the senior class of '05 graduated, the club numbers dropped significantly, so these then-freshmen decided to take up the challenge and rebuild the club from the ground up.
"We had no choice but to step up and turn it into a force on campus," Walsh said.
With the help of the recent boom in environmental concern, they worked tirelessly to spread the word about Ecopledge and scope out new members. To date, there are over 600 students on the Ecopledge listeserv, and around 60 active members.
"We were originally just a small group with a common interest," Young said, "and when we grew, we made sure we kept that same spirit even though we had so many more people join."
Aside from rebuilding the Ecopledge community, these five seniors have made significant and lasting changes that have reinvigorated student involvement in environmental concerns.
In their sophomore year alone, they helped create the now-annual Harvest Fest celebration and the Recyclemania competition in the resident halls. By their junior year, the Clean Energy Project was well underway, and the organization's growing success was made evident by their showing of An Inconvenient Truth, with over 300 students in attendance.
Now in their senior year, the girls have worked on more new initiatives than the two previous years combined.
"This is our senior year," Cava said, "so we are making this big push to the finish."
The fall semester kicked off with the Think Outside the Bottle Campaign, which sought to decrease the consumption of bottled water on campus. This spring has seen a wealth of new efforts, including the Environmental Film Series, the organic vegetable garden, the Bulb Brigade, and most recently the installment of three trash compactors on campus.
As the years continue, the efforts of these girls have finally made it to the forefront of the administration's attention, allowing them to find even greater success then they ever anticipated. Nevertheless, the girls have seen the results of the work they've done over the years and know it was not an isolated effort, but rather their long-term dedication to protecting the environment.
"Our voice is getting heard more now, but I'm proud of what we've done in the past," Young said.
By taking on these leadership positions so early on, these five girls were able to make advancements in not only the club's organization and efforts, but also for the school at large. Pushing environmentalism at a major university like BC, in contrast to smaller liberal arts colleges across the nation, is a daunting task, Cava said, requiring that the girls be more knowledgeable about the corporate and economic side of the movement.
This necessity led to one of the most powerful and influential efforts put forth by Ecopledge in recent years: Sustain BC.
The group of students, faculty, and staff has been working together since the spring of '07 to study means by which to make BC a more environmentally sustainable institution.
The ultimate goal of this group from its inception was to get upper administration to realize how important this issue has become for BC, and how critical it will become in the future.
"This was a really smart move these girls made," said Deirdre Manning, the new director of sustainability at BC, an office that was created as a result of Sustain BC's efforts. "They looked at the organization and knew they could make an impact by looking at the system and working with administration."
"How things work at BC is the same as in the nation. Grassroots can try as hard as they can, but without that help from upper administration, we can't get it done. It needs to be institutionalized so it's no longer a group interest, but something everyone cares about," Young said.
Recognizing this need, Sustain BC met with Executive Vice President Pat Keating and Provost and Dean of Faculties Bert Garza, in the spring of '07 to present to them why sustainability is so important for a university, especially one about to undergo major reconstruction, from both an environmental and financial standpoint. It was at this meeting that the group proposed the creation of the director of sustainability and an official advisory committee to continue to work on these efforts for the school.
Though disappointed to see little progress made by the fall of this year, Fox said the group was willing to continue to bridge the gap between the student interests and the administration, and now the group has not only accomplished the goal of establishing an office of sustainability, but has a stronger working bond with Facilities Services, BC Dining, and ResLife that will only make future efforts more realistic.
At its heart, however, their role as the leading environmentalists on campus is not only about improving the economic and ecological sustainability of BC, but also about helping those outside the school's small bubble.
"If this is supposedly the issue of our generation, college campuses across the world are choosing the next leaders," Walsh said. "If we're this school that's touting this commitment to social justice, we need to be taking care of this issue that is so global."
While the seniors are pleased to see the swell in student interest in environmental issues, they are wary of the recent "going green" trend.
"It's something troubling," Fox said, "for an issue we care about to be trendy and trivialized."
"There is a difference between 'consumer green' and 'environmental justice green,'" Young said. "We want those suffering from environmental problems in poor communities to be getting help."
"Being 'green' is not going out and purchasing 'green' things," Walsh said. "Reduce is the most important 'R,' then 'reuse,' then 'recycle' - it's in that order for a reason."
At the same time, these seniors do not want to turn people away from becoming engaged and getting excited about helping the environment. Ultimately, they simply want people to realize that protecting natural resources is the equivalent of helping to save lives.
"We would do it for ourselves," Walsh said. "But we want to do it for other people - that's why you really want to do these things, for the school and the people and the places you care about."
As these five active and dedicated seniors move on to bigger and better things, their only hope is that the passion for environmentalism that exists on campus today doesn't fade after they're gone.
"They've been true agents of change," Manning said.
After graduating, Young plans to return to her home state of North Carolina to take care of her mother, and perhaps write a novel or screenplay in her free time from helping her church start up an organic vegetable garden similar to the one at BC that these girls made possible. Walsh, refusing to end her run at BC just yet, will return to campus this summer to work for the school's new office of sustainability. Cava will be participating in a service trip in the Virgin Islands this summer to do environmental work and help clean up the beaches. Fox plans to attend graduate school in the fall, working toward a degree in forestry, and hopefully pair this with service in the Peace Corps. Putnam, one of this year's Fulbright recipients, will be spending the next year in Honduras, studying the eco-tourism tract and working to improve the issues with sources of sanitary water in the country.
"It's a burden we've been blessed with," Walsh said. "You can't just graduate and turn your back on it."
Be the first to comment on this article!