THE ENVIRONMENTAL EAGLE

“At Home” Edition

The Sustainability Newsletter of Boston College

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This newsletter is a monthly publication by EcoPledge of Boston College.

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By Alex Capozziello

Having attended the United States Military Academy at West Point to earn a degree in me-chanical engineering, new As-sociate Vice President (AVP) of Facilities Services, Bob Avalle, is no stranger to a challenge. Growing up in the Berkshires, Avalle grew up surrounded by the great outdoors and eventu-ally found himself nominated to attend West Point by Boston Col-lege’s own Silvio O. Conte. Fol-lowing an over 20 year career at West Point, both as a student and later a professor, Avalle decided to challenge himself once more and branch into unchartered ter-ritory: higher education. With a background in me-chanical engineering from his

time as a soldier and a new-found passion in education, Avalle landed as the Dean of Student Affairs at Westminster College. After a few years in the role Avalle realized he wanted to more specifically apply his engineering background to his work, and was able to do so through the lens of facilities management, energy efficiency, and sustainability. “You really get an educa-tion when you’re a soldier and an engineer, but I’m also an environmentalist,” Avalle said. “I see the negative effects of things like the demand for oil and ultimately the effect that greenhouse gases are having on the planet. So my fit with sus-

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New AVP of Facilities Services Bob Avalle Rises Through the Ranks of Sustainability

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Meet Bob Avalle, New AVP of Facilities Services

BC Students Come Together Online to Celebrate Earth Day

EPA Rollbacks Under COVID-19 Endanger the Most Vulnerable

Meat Shortages Might Change US Culture of Meat Consumption

Peace & Trees: A Farewell from EcoPledge President Ellen Kang

The EcoPledge e-board adapted their meetings to a new online format over Zoom for the remainder of the spring semester, ensuring that the BC community would remain up-to-date with all things sustainability.

bcecopledge.weebly.com

BC StudentsCelebrate 50th Anniversary of Earth Day OnlineBy Alex Levine

On April 22, the 50th anniversary of Earth Day was anything but normal, as people came together online rather than in person due to the coro-navirus pandemic. Students rose to the chal-lenge in transitioning online as groups such as Climate Justice a t Boston College (CJBC) helped organize various online events from April 22 through April 24. CJBC was joined by other BC organizations including the Susta inability Action Commit-tee (SAC) and the Green Week

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Graphic by the Office of Sustainability

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from page 1

New AVP Brings Extensive Experience in Energy Efficiency & Sustainability to BC

tainability, wherever I’ve been, has been proven through my roles in facilities.” When the University of California established its tenth and newest campus, UC Merced, in 2005, Avalle immediately joined the team as Director of Facilities and served as a lead proponent for sustainability initiatives. As a new university, UC Merced offered Avalle the unique opportunity of building the university’s facilities and sustainability programs from scratch. In this role, he over-saw ten departments and 6,000 acres of space with a budget of over $5 million. Given Califor-nia’s abundance of sunshine, an investment in solar energy was an obvious choice for Avalle and his team. In all, this experience allowed Avalle to carve his own path and gain crucial experi-ence in both facilities manage-ment and sustainability to apply

toward future endeavors. In 2010 Avalle landed at the College of William and Mary (W&M) as their Director of Operations and Maintenance, where he oversaw the imple-mentation of their single-stream recycling system, several waste initiatives, and was responsible for W&M’s energy budget. Ac-cording to Avalle, with energy use comes the necessity for energy conservation. Given his background in mechanical engi-neering, conservation comes as second nature. Avalle then served for five years until 2020 as the AVP of Facilities Services at Brandeis University. There he oversaw construction projects, allocated funds for sustainability initia-tives, waste management, and considered proposals from ex-ternal companies to help advance Brandeis’ energy efficiency. In all, he supervised six depart-ments and managed a budget of over $30 million for over 100

buildings. Having held a similar AVP role at Brandeis, Avalle is confi-dent he can apply this experience and expand on it in his new AVP role at BC to improve facilities programs and efficiency initia-tives. “If you can show a payback as well as emphasize increased safety and comfort to occupants on top of energy savings, you can make a strong case for building improvements,” Avalle said. “A win across the board.” Avalle only served as AVP of Facilities Services at BC for two months prior to the shut-down of the university due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Ac-cording to Avalle, while recent operations have been almost exclusively devoted to dealing with the pandemic, he remains confident that BC will maintain its commitment to increased energy efficiency and sustain-ability initiatives in the days to come.

“I’m very new [here], and unfortunately we’ve all had to divert our attention almost ex-clusively at the pandemic, but if you’re a student and you’re in high school and you’re interest-ed in sustainability, from what I’ve seen at BC it’s a great place to come.”

Planning Committee in online protests and information ses-sions. CJBC also joined other Boston universities, including Boston University, Harvard University, and Tufts University in hosting a virtual “Earth Day Parade” on Facebook. Partici-pants could post artwork, poetry, and other modes of expression to allow an outlet for the activ-ism that is usually expressed at in-person parades and rallies. The Earth Day celebra-tions continued on April 23 with the livestream “Higher Educa-tion: Complicit or Leaders in Cli-mate?” on the Earth Day Live site. The segment was partially led by Kyle Rosenthal, a CJBC student

leader and CSOM ’21. “[Our universities] know the destruction caused by fossil fuels, and they know they’re profiting from climate chaos,”

Rosenthal sa id. “They know what is right—they simply choose not to do it.” The livestream mostly fo-cused on divestment, and offered

BC Students Remotely Celebrate Earth Day Online Amid COVID-19 Restrictionsfrom page 1

Courtesy of Robert Avalle

potential solutions to the prob-lems higher education is current-ly facing. Alongside CJBC and BC’s other environmental groups, Eco-Pledge members also celebrated Earth Day and continued to stay in contact with one another fol-lowing the transition to online classes. On several occasions, over a dozen EcoPledge members came together over Zoom to cele-brate Earth Day as well as to dis-cuss future planning for the club in this new online world. “Just seeing everyone’s faces over Zoom helps and gives us motivation to continue our environmental initia tives and activism in new and creative ways,” Stevie Walker, EcoPledge Co-President and MCAS ’21, sa id.The virtual Earth Day was hosted by several universities using the Facebook app.

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EPA Rollbacks Under COVID-19 Disproportionately Impact Marginalized CommunitiesBy Alex Capozziello

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has led to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) decision to create a temporary enforcement discre-tion policy in which the agency will not seek penalties for noncompliance with routine legal obligations interrupted by the pandemic. Such obligations include routine monitoring and reporting re-quirements, among other civil violations. Announced on March 26 with a retroactive start date of March 13, the EPA policy comes as a direct response to a request by the American Petroleum Institute (API) to ease certain non-essen-tial environmental regulations amidst the pandemic in order to better allocate resources and ensure economic stability. However, the non-enforcement policy has been met with resistance from several environmental groups, led by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). According to the NRDC, eased noncompliance creates a serious and

immediate risk to marginalized commu-nities and further asserts that the policy supports an anti-environment agenda. As a result, the NRDC has filed a lawsuit, Case No. 20-cv-3058, in hopes of winning an injunction against the EPA. The NRDC’s lawsuit includes fourteen complaints for which it seeks declaratory and injunctive relief. In sum, their complaints seek to explain how a suspension of routine monitoring, data collection, reporting, and other non-es-sential obligations, even if only for a few months, could have devastating effects to both human and environmental health. Gina McCarthy, President of the NRDC and former head of the EPA, criticized the current EPA for using this unprecedented crisis to push an anti-en-vironment agenda. “The EPA is using an unprec-edented public health crisis to justify al-lowing polluters to put our health at even greater risk,” McCarthy said. “... That’s especially true for communities of color

Photo by Alex Capozziello

who disproportionately live with higher levels of pollution close to their homes. And it’s especially egregious because these same communities face higher risks from COVID-19, as a result of pol-lution-related heart and lung problems. This agency is abandoning its responsi-bility to protect our health. It’s time for [the] EPA [to] do its job and stop doing polluters’ dirty work.” In a letter addressed to Congress on April 2, the EPA reiterated that the policy does not mean that the agency is ceasing all enforcement action during the pandemic. Rather, the EPA expects regulated entities to comply with all ob-ligations and that eased noncompliance will only be considered on a case-by-case basis where COVID-19 directly impacts the ability to perform routine duties. The EPA also noted that the non-en-forcement only applies to non-essential obligations. Safety requirements, such as those which impact clean drinking water, must be maintained. Similar EPA policies which exercise enforcement discretion during emergency situations are not uncom-mon, however this particular case is unusual as the COVID-19 pandemic impacts the entire nation rather than a single geographic area within one EPA regional jurisdiction, the EPA noted in the letter. API President Michael Som-mers, in his initial request, wrote to both President Trump and the EPA seeking eased noncompliance for non-essen-tial, non-safety obligations such as record-keeping, routine monitoring, and other civil requirements in order to meet the abilities of their limited healthy employees. This temporary relief also

includes a suspension of inspections, training, audits, and other permitting considerations. The Congressional House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that the EPA largely acceded to these requests within three days. On April 22, Democratic members of the committee sent a letter to the EPA which voiced their concern over the “outsized influence [of] the fossil fuel industry” on lobbying the agency to suspend regu-lations during the pandemic to benefit economic growth at the expense of both human and environmental health. “While we understand the vast financial impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on the U.S. economy, the ongoing health crisis is not an excuse to allow greater levels of harmful pollution and the resulting health risks,” Demo-cratic members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform wrote. The Democratic members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform echoed the concerns of McCa-rthy in their letter, highlighting the cur-rent administration’s focus on financial concerns over the health and wellbeing of citizens—especially those most at risk. As McCarthy emphasized, the EPA’s intention of easing environmen-tal obligations in support of economic interests disproportionately shifts the harm on human health to fenceline communities consisting of people of color and low-income status. As a result, these communities will face a greater risk from COVID-19. “Now more than ever, we need [the] EPA to do its job and protect our health—not put it at greater risk,” Mc-Carthy said.

COVID-19 Related Meat Shortages Might Change How Consumers Think About Meat

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By Hannah Murphy

The novel coronavirus has affected countless industries as the economy has grinded to a halt due to quarantine restrictions. In early April, the meat industry joined these industries as dozens of meatpacking plant employees

began to test positive for corona-virus, forcing approximately 30 meatpacking plants and slaugh-terhouses to close their doors. As of May 19, there have been 15,000 reported positive cases in 192 plants. With 12 of the 25 United States hotspots likely originat-ing from meat factories, the U.S.

is being forced to re-evaluate its national cuisine that is centered around meat, as the possibility of a meat shortage becomes very real. According to the U.S. De-partment of Agriculture (USDA), the average American consumes an average of 222 pounds of meat

per year, while the global aver-age is less than half of that at 75 pounds. This comes to no surprise when one considers the American cuisine of bacon, hamburgers, and chicken wings. For years, environ-mentalists and scientists have been

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urging people to switch to a more plant-based diet for environmen-tal reasons, and this could be the opportunity for such a reset. With the U.S. processing an estimated 100 billion pounds of meat per year, the environ-mental ramifications of this in-dustry are manifold. First, there is the enormous amount of land required to support livestock. According to a 2018 Bloomberg report, 41 percent of U.S. land is devoted to grazing and crops for livestock. Secondly, the meat industry requires enormous amounts of water. The global av-erage water footprint for a single pound of beef is a staggering 1,800 gallons. Lastly, there is the issue of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emis-sions from the industry. Globally, livestock contribute 14.5 percent of the total anthropogenic GHG emissions, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States. Cows in par-ticular pose a problem, as they contribute 40 percent of the total of human-sourced methane emis-sions.

At first glance the closure of meat plants appears to be a positive from an environmental standpoint; however, the rapidity of the closures have had severe ramifications. Without the ability to process meat, thousands of ani-mals are being either shot, gassed, or euthanized. Not only is this in-credibly wasteful, but it also poses the problem of what to do with the thousands of carcasses. A primary environmental concern is that the waste from the carcasses will start to leech into rivers and ground-water. To meet these concerns, enormous emergency composting sites are being created, where car-casses run through wood chippers before being properly disposed of. Additionally, heavy gov-ernment intervention has pre-vented the industry from com-pletely collapsing. Through the Coronavirus Farm Assistance Program, the federal government will purchase $100 million worth of meat products per month to distribute to food banks. Overall, $19 billion has been appropriated to go toward farmers and ranch-ers. President Trump also deemed the meat industry as critical in-

By Ryan Rafferty

Summer nights are usual-ly illuminated by fireflies, but for some residents in Southern Califor-nia, their nights have recently been brightened by sparkling neon blue waves along the coast. These biolu-minescent waves are a result of high concentrations of a single-celled plankton species known as dinofla-gellates. When found in high concen-trations, these tiny marine organ-isms discolor the water, resulting in toxic “red tides” which release harm-ful neurotoxins into the surrounding waters. While these algal blooms can be dangerous, if the dinoflagellates are bioluminescent, they can pro-duce beautiful nighttime displays of

neon-colored tides. According to the University of California San Diego, dinoflagel-late bioluminescence plays a role in the species’ protection from pred-ators. The dinoflagellates can flash their color to startle predators and

effectively reduce the number of di-noflagellates consumed. Their biolu-minescence can also serve as a sign to other secondary predators to come and eat the primary predator. Their bioluminescent flash can be triggered by a number of environmental stress-

Summer Tides Illuminated Neon Blue Along Southern California Beaches

frastructure on April 28, which forced the majority of plants to remain open or reopen. This move has faced backlash due to health and safety concerns within the plants. It has also drawn attention to how much value is placed on the industry by the government. With $38 billion in subsidies every year, prices are kept low so that Americans can afford to eat the enormous quantities of meat they are accustomed to. As prices rise, Americans are faced with paying closer to the actual price of meat. While meat packing plants have begun to reopen, meat short-ages and increased prices have started to occur. According to the USDA weekly report, beef produc-tion was down around 23 percent and pork 10 percent compared to last year. Less meat availability has already been noted in grocery stores and it is estimated that beef and pork price inflation could rise to as high as 20 percent more than prices last year, as reported from a CoBank report. With less choices and higher prices, many Americans are turning toward meat alternatives such as tofu and beans. Nielson has reported that

in the nine weeks leading up to May 2, alternative meat product sales have risen 264 percent in grocery stores. People are starting to reimagine their diet to meet the reality of less meat. Overall, the sudden clo-sures of meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses is not a clear victory for environmentalists who have long urged for a switch to a more plant-based diet. The rapid-ity of the closures have led to an enormous waste of life, and gov-ernment bailouts have prevented the industry from a complete collapse. What it has caused is for the industry to come under close scrutiny, as people question the deeming of plants as critical infra-structure at the expense of health concerns, and the widely reported mass killing of livestock has ex-posed how enormous the industry is. People are shifting to plant-based meat alternatives, and this could lead to a change in habits that could have long-term positive effects. Meatpacking closures are not an environmental win, but they are still presenting an op-portunity for a reset to a culinary culture less dependent on meat.

Photos by Ryan Rafferty

es, UC San Diego asserts, including surges in the waves caused by other animals, such as swimming humans. These natural neon lights have attracted many residents to Southern California’s beaches in recent weeks, despite social distancing restrictions placed under COVID-19. One San Diego resident, Ashlyn Rafferty, commented on the sparkling blue tide’s ability to bring joy to her and her friends at a time when they need it most. “At this time, we need some-thing that people can enjoy with each other,” Rafferty said. “And right now, this is the only time I get to see my friends, when we all go to watch the bioluminescence together—at a safe distance from one another, of course.”

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By Anne Marie Green

The people closest to me know that I like to talk about recycling. It was the topic of my now completed senior thesis, and I believe a completely fasci-nating, and surprisingly convo-luted, phenomenon. I harass my family by bringing up the topic of recycling at every opportu-nity, but I was stumped when my mom asked me this week, “should I even bother recycling this?” Let me start by saying that the item my mom held over the recycling bin was a clear plas-tic tub, formerly full of chicken salad. If she had an aluminum can in her hand, I would have told her to definitely recycle it. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), recy-cling an aluminum can requires 95 percent less energy than making one out of virgin baux-ite. Nearly 50 percent of all cans in the U.S. are recycled because they are so valuable. In this case, the benefits of recycling seem obvious. If my mom were holding a glass jar, I would be a bit more torn. The Sun reported in Feb-ruary that Baltimore County (our place of residency) hasn’t recycled glass in seven years. Boston struggled with a similar dilemma in 2018—a glass manu-facturer and recycler both closed in a domino-falling fashion. Recycling glass is theoretically phenomenal—it’s able to be mor-phed and recycled indefinitely without losing quality, and its base material, sand, is enormous-ly plentiful and also benign. But recycling glass in reality is fishy. It gets crushed and ruins paper in the stream, it’s all different colors, and it usually turns into aggregate instead of bottles. But let’s talk about what she was actually holding—a plastic tub made out of No. 5 polypropylene. According to the Graphic by Alinda Dersjant

MassDEP’s recyclopedia, and most basic recycling guidelines, plastic tubs are municipally re-cyclable, as is clear No. 5 plastic (like Starbucks’ cold cups). Ac-cording to municipal guidelines, my mom could recycle that tub without qualms. However, even if the tub is acceptable by municipal stan-dards, there are more realities to confront in assessing wheth-er she should recycle that item. Before 2018, many of the U.S.’s recyclable plastic and paper would be shipped to China. China became a global recycling hub in the 1990s, when small, informal recycling workshops popped up in counties like Wen’an, located in North China,

where other means of livelihood were unavailable. Researchers of waste consistently lament the lack of data or accounting of scrap in China, so it’s difficult to know for sure under what con-ditions those items were recy-cled. To help answer my mom’s question, Wen’an can be used as a starting place. Before its shutdown in 2011, Wen’an was once the larg-est plastic recycling hub in the world, home to 20,000 inde-pendent recycling workshops. Out of all plastic recycled in the U.S. in 2011, 60 percent went to China and Hong Kong. Since Wen’an was home to rough-ly one-third of China’s plastic recycling sector, one can esti-

mate that about 20 percent of all American plastic recyclables went to Wen’an that year. Conditions in Wen’an were infamously bad. The renowned waste and reuse Bloomberg journalist, Adam Minter, called Wen’an the most polluted place he had ever visited in his book, “Junkyard Planet”. Virtually no safety equipment was worn by workers, dioxins and fumes abounded with little protection from windows or ventilators, and the water was so heavily pol-luted by plastic cleaning liquid that everyone who could afford it drank bottled water. Young men in Wen’an consistently failed military health exams due to poor health in general, and enlarged livers in particular—caused by polluted water. Wen’an was shut down by the central government in 2011 and became an industrial park, but the poor conditions of plastic recycling have changed remarkably little. When China closed down its operation, other developing countries temporar-ily filled its place. Malaysia and Thailand increased imports of mixed plastics by 292 percent and 150 percent respectively in 2017, with Thailand also in-creasing imports of No. 1 plas-tic, commonly found in house-hold recyclables, by 876 percent. Canada became the top importer of U.S. waste plastic in 2018, fol-lowed by Malaysia, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Waste mismanage-ment, such as littering, dump-ing or burning, is high in each of those countries apart from Canada and Hong Kong. Little is known about the conditions under which plastic is recycled when we export it abroad. In the 2020 PBS doc-umentary, Plastic Wars, jour-nalists traveled to a port in

Falling Down the Rabbit-hole of “Should I Recycle This?”Letter to the editor

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By Hannah Murphy

Amitav Ghosh, the acclaimed author of over fifteen works of fiction and nonfiction, spoke as part of the Lowell Humanities Series in February. Exploring the intersection of climate change, literature, and history, Ghosh is seeking to rethink the ways in which artistic forms can un-derstand and represent climate change. Ghosh began his lecture discussing the Maluku Islands, or otherwise known as Spice Is-lands, where cloves are native to. The demand for spices from the Indian Ocean region throughout history makes the spice trade an easy phenomena to trace. Howev-er, the question arises as to why spices, especially in the Middle Ages, were assigned so much value by society? “The answer is simple, be-cause spices connoted luxury,” Ghosh said. “Because only the affluent could afford them. In effect, the clove was the primordi-al form of commodity. The thing that is desired, not so much for its uses, but for what it represents. It’s value lies not in its uses but precisely in its status as a fetish.” Ghosh went on to describe

that it was due to the societal fetishization of spices that drove the Age of Discovery, as well as countless wars between European powers over control of the Spice Islands. In order to protect eco-nomic interests, enormous forti-fication systems were built on the islands, and therefore the journey of the Spice Trade is intrinsically linked to war and military power. Ghosh traced the various trends throughout history of possession and control of a natural com-modity originating in the Indian Ocean region, whether that be spices, tea, or opium, to status and military power. Flash forward to modern times, one can see that the new fetishization is on the so-called “American-way-of life”, according to Ghosh. This lifestyle requires enormous amounts of fossil fuel to power planes, cars, refrigera-tors, and so on, and desire for it has spread rapidly due to the con-necting powers of the internet. “Today with very few excep-tions, people everywhere nurture the same desires, most of which are centered on commodities,” Ghosh said. According to Ghosh, these mutual desires have not fostered connections in this age of global-

ization, but have only increased rivalries and jealousies over access to resources—specifically oil—to fuel these desires. This competition between govern-ments leads to war, which in turn consumes enormous amounts of fossil fuels and leads to further destruction of nature. Ghosh goes on to explain how the American way of life, seen by many as the culmination of human progress, is in fact in-credibly destructive and damag-ing to the environment. Take for instance the enormous ecological footprint of America that is relat-ed to the projection of power, as the military is the greatest con-sumer of fossil fuels in the coun-try. This enormous military is needed to man a network of 800 bases in other countries, bases that primarily serve to protect trade routes and access to oil—and mainly located in the Indian Ocean region. “In the 1990s, the three branches of the U.S. military con-sumed approximately 25 billion gallons of fuel per year,” Ghosh said. “This was more than a fifth of the country’s total consump-tion and more than the total com-mercial energy consumption of nearly two thirds of the world’s

countries. Today, transitional operations alone, the US mili-tary consumes around 1.3 billion gallons of oil which is more than the annual consumption of Ban-gladesh, a country of 180 million people. At the same time, the Department of Defense generates 500,000 tons of toxic waste annu-ally, more than the top five worst chemical companies combined.” Similar to the age of the Spice Trade, the Indian Ocean region has become both a battle-field and a sweatshop, according to Ghosh. It is in this region that many commodities are manufac-tured, coupled with a high mili-tary presence to protect econom-ic interests. And of course there is also oil, which industry and the military are dependent on. These factors are all contributing to the rapidly warming climate. This densely populated region surrounding the Indian Ocean is already experiencing the effects of climate change, driving a mas-sive wave of migration out of the region in search of a better, more stable life. “There can be no doubt that climate change is an important link in the massive movement

Embattled Earth: How the Spice Trade Influenced Our Culture of Consumption

Indonesia to investigate how plastic imports were treated. They found that oftentimes, the less valuable or contaminat-ed materials were dumped in nearby villages, where much of the material was openly burned. Malaysia, already tired of being a “dumpsite,” made plans to ban scrap plastic by 2021, followed by other bans and restrictions from Thailand, Vietnam, and India. The number of countries willing to take plastic scrap is dwindling, but plastic produc-tion shows no signs of slowing.

it. Surely the majority of it is reused, because someone paid for it, but how and under what conditions is unclear. Picturing Wen’an, however, is probably not far off from the truth. So, back to my mom’s orig-inal question—”should I recycle this plastic tub?” If you follow municipal guidelines, then yes. If you con-sider that every other plastic item in the recycling bin will be recycled under ethically du-bious conditions, then maybe not. Either way, mulling over every recycling decision is te-dious, time consuming, and I

would argue, futile. Recycling is a convenient way for plastic manufacturing and packagers to blamelessly make more stuff. More productive than asking “should I recycle this?”, is asking why only 8.4 percent of plastic is recycled in the U.S., and why so little of it is recycled under conditions guaranteed to be en-vironmentally-friendly and eth-ical. Only once we question our long-held assumptions of recy-cling as an unequivocally good thing can we move closer toward a materials-recovery system that is truly ethical and good for the environment.

from page 5 The problem with plastic recycling is that it only some-times works in the way we would hope. In 2017, the national plas-tic recycling rate was about 8.4 percent. Of that amount, 40 percent is recycled domestically and is the highest quality stuff—mostly clear No. 1 and No. 2 plastic bottles. The other 60 percent is exported elsewhere. Some of these plastic exports go to Canada, but roughly 85 per-cent of plastic exports, or about half of all American recyclable plastic, end up in compara-tively poorer countries, where we’re not sure what is done with

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By Ellen Kang

Four years ago, I entered Boston College with little notion of what I wanted to study, who I’d become friends with, where Devlin 008 or Fulton 511 were, and how well I would adjust to life in college. What I did know was that I was passion-ate about the environment and was eager to find a community of peers who shared this passion. I remember making a beeline for the eco-clubs at the Student Involvement Fair, excit-ed to start my BC experience. After considering the variety of wonderful and hardworking environmental clubs on campus, I was particularly drawn to EcoPledge. At the time, it was a very small club of around 20 members, but the commitment to pursuing lasting change and the com-munity around that central goal was evident. I rushed to my Loyola dorm on Upper and applied to their men-torship program immediately. A few days passed and I was interviewed by the Co-President, Kate Weingartner. Little did I know that in the years to come, I would eventually adopt her role as Co-President and find myself leading this relatively small team of environmental-enthusiasts as it quickly transformed into a bustling organization of over 100 members. EcoPledge became an integral part of my BC experience and I can confidently say that this statement not only resonates with me, but with many active members of the organi-zation. We pooled together our fresh ideas, energy, and determination as a team and in collaboration with other amazing groups or depart-ments to execute some memorable and impactful actions or events both on and off campus. From initiating composting initiatives in McElroy,

publishing a monthly newsletter to all BC students, coordinating our annual Harvest Fest, collaborating with UGBC for the Earth Day Fair, organizing beach clean ups, hosting the renown oceanographer Sylvia Earle, rallying students from Gasson to Government Center for climate strikes, to successfully protesting for the protection of Webster Woods, we have accomplished so much as an organization. It has been extremely rewarding to see the fruits of our labor, whether through watching students walk around with their new succulent plants or raising hundreds of dollars for relief efforts benefitting the California Wildfires that have been intensified by erosion and cli-mate change. Though EcoPledge’s hard work is laudable, what I’ve found most moving is the community we’ve formed over the years. Throughout my time in this organization, I have seen this club grow exponentially. Though this reflects a growing appre-

ciation and concern for the environ-mental crisis, I would like to think it also reflects the welcoming com-munity EcoPledge has created for students. Our goal has always been to educate the BC community about the urgency for environmental action in both individual and larger-scale con-texts. We are an organization made up of a diverse set of majors, home-towns, and backgrounds, all welded together by our common goal of pro-moting a more eco-friendly mindset in the community at large. Through our many meetings, social events, volunteer outings, and protests, our members have been able to form meaningful connections that extend beyond the scope of our club. These connections have extended to rela-tionships as roommates, bandmates, tailgating buddies, neighbors, and genuine friendships. I am confident that this strong community will continue to make waves on campus. Our current three committees, Events, Outreach, and

Peace and Trees: A Farewell Letter from EcoPledge President Ellen Kang

of people that is occuring now,” Ghosh said. “But the relationship between them is not a simple one of cause and effect. It’s more

accurate to think of these move-ments as being intertwined with the same feedback loops that are driving climate change, that is the same accelerating cycles of information and consumption by

needs and desires.” Ghosh closed the lecture by returning to the cloves and the cycles of desire that they generat-ed. Today, these cloves are dying as a result of climate change. In

the age of the Anthropocene, humans are faced with the reality that the relentless march forward has not resulted in progress, but rather destruction on an enor-mous and irreversible scale.

from page 6

Members of EcoPledge gathered to celebrate their graduating seniors and say goodbye before leaving campus in March.

Volunteer, along with our new Ac-tivism committee, which will make its debut this coming Fall, will con-tinue to work hard and collaborate with organizations like The Office of Sustainability, BC Dining, Real Food BC, and Climate Justice BC, to move the BC community into a greener direction. The necessity for a more eco-conscious Boston College is more pressing now than ever given the state of our climate crisis. I have high hopes that both students and faculty will work tirelessly to adjust individual actions and greater pol-icies to move in the right direction. With our incoming Co-Presidents, Stevie Walker ’21 and Alex Capozzi-ello ’21, I know that EcoPledge will enter into the new decade with fiery determination and groundbreaking movements. A special thank you to everyone who has mentored me or worked alongside me on this journey.

Peace and Trees,Ellen Kang ’20