Generation Green

Call them the "Inconveniet Truth" generation, young adults of college age for whom melting glaciers, Al Gore's Nobel Prize, and soaring oil prices have created an unprecedented awareness of environmental issues. 

by Michele Owens

Every year, the Student Conservation Association (SCA) places thousands of 15- to 25-year-olds in conservation internships nationwide. In recent years, the number of applicants has jumped 25%. “That is tremendous willingness to take action,” says spokesperson Kevin Hamilton.

However, most college students still need mentors to help them translate their interest in the environment into a meaningful vocation. In Massachusetts, The Trustees of Reservations have gone all out to play that role. By offering work experience of all kinds to students – whether through internships, summer jobs, volunteer positions, or partnerships with other organizations – The Trustees are inspiring the next generation of conservation-minded professionals, as well as professional conservationists.

Amanda DeLima clearly seems destined to be one of the latter. She grew up in the city of New Bedford, and at age 13 convinced her skeptical parents to allow her to bypass an urban school in favor of the Bristol County Agricultural High School. Initially, she was interested in a career as a veterinarian. However, an after-school and weekend job with The Trustees’ Fall River-based Bioreserve Youth Corps in Copicut Woods revealed that domestic animals were not her calling. “I fell in love with the place,” she explains, “and with the wildlife out in the woods.”

A summer position at The Trustees’ Buzzards Bay properties followed, and in 2007 DeLima went off to UMass Amherst to major in Natural Resource Studies. Her Trustees experience, which included water testing, helped her win a highly competitive internship with the U.S. Forest Service last summer assessing the health of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest.

DeLima, who will graduate from UMass in 2010, intends to work in a field related to forest ecology and calls her time with The Trustees inspirational. “With the Forest Service, if I had a question, the answer was written down in a manual,” she says. “At The Trustees, they were constantly emphasizing problem solving. I not only used all my skills, I learned a lot about myself.”

Of course, there are city kids like DeLima who take to the great outdoors like a duck to water – and then there are others who behave more like a duck fleeing to the sky after a shotgun blast. Fortunately, The Trustees offer conversion experiences for the second group. “The first time The Trustees sent me out into the woods, I was horrified,” laughs Angel Vega. “I grew up in Fitchburg, where there’s not much greenery. I could just see the headlines: ‘20-Year-Old Puerto-Rican Man Killed by Bear.’ ”

Vega arrived at The Trustees through the Partnership for Latino Success, which advances Hispanic cultural, social, and educational opportunities throughout northern Worcester County. Working as a part-time program assistant for The Trustees’ Putnam Conservation Institute (PCI), based at the Doyle Conservation Center in Leominster, Vega served as the registrar for PCI events. PCI director Andrea Freeman recognized his interests and potential, and broadened Vega’s job to include planning a new outdoor skills program for kids and scouring Trustees properties for a hemlock-devouring pest called the woolly adelgid. It all culminated in an inspiring trip to the SCA’s EarthVision conference in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2008 and a shocking moment of self-discovery: “I love being outside. I love visiting Trustees properties.”

Vega’s time with The Trustees has profoundly influenced his career plans. He was recently named Youth Services Coordinator at UMass Medical School in Worcester, where he is setting up a program that assists children and teenagers with mental health issues.

Well aware now of the healing powers of nature, Vega considers hiking a big part of his mentoring plan. Though he is currently studying for a criminal justice degree, he sees himself eventually “working with at-risk youth in a proactive way – getting them outdoors.”

Many of the college students The Trustees have attracted are like Vega: civic-minded young people likely to be very influential in their communities in very short order. In introducing them to conservation issues, The Trustees are addressing a key goal of their 10-year strategic plan: to “multiply themselves” by a factor of many. But success is possible only because so many staff members have such a welcoming mindset.

Jim Younger, Trustees Director of Structural Resources and Technology, offers a terrific example. When Younger began to take charge of another of the strategic plan’s goals – reducing The Trustees’ carbon footprint by 20% within a decade – his first task was to measure that footprint today. “We realized,” he explains, “that we didn’t have to hire a major accounting firm to collect the data. Instead, it could be a learning experience.”

For help, he turned to PCI’s Freeman. She had recently recruited MaiKee Lee and Djenald Saint-Louis from nearby Mount Wachusett Community College as work-study interns, and together Freeman and Younger set the pair to work using utilities bills to create a quantitative tool to analyze The Trustees’ energy usage.

Younger also brought in Wesleyan University student Kethaki Nair to do the qualitative analysis of employee behavior and fossil-fuel consumption. Nair arrived at The Trustees through the New Sector Alliance, which places college and graduate students in consulting assignments for nonprofits. An economics major at Wesleyan from Delhi, India, she quickly zeroed in on transportation as an area where The Trustees had a “huge footprint that is fairly easy to reduce.”

Nair concluded that a lot of gasoline was being wasted by staff driving from meeting to meeting at properties across the state, often in not-terribly-efficient Trustees-owned trucks. As a direct result, The Trustees purchased video-conferencing equipment that should cut inter-office travel by as much as 25%.

This has not been a one-sided transformation, either. After her summer with The Trustees, Nair is now interested in a career in green consulting. She’s also changed her mind as to the stance emerging economies such as her native India ought to take in the climate-change debate. Initially, she felt that nations should develop first then worry about carbon later. Now, after having analyzed the legacy problem exemplified by the inefficient, gas-guzzling Trustees’ trucks, she’s concluded, “That’s illogical. It’s more efficient to be green from the start.” Her influence is already being felt in Delhi, where she has convinced her father, a shopping mall developer, to do an energy assessment of his properties in order to cut fossil-fuel consumption.

Another key player on the carbon project, 21-year-old Djenald Saint-Louis, came to The Trustees without a particular interest in conservation. Nonetheless, he found his eyes opened by his summer experience collecting raw data on The Trustees’ utility use and transforming it into meaningful spreadsheets. Currently a transfer student at UMass Lowell studying civil engineering, he’s crystal clear about the kind of progress he’d like to see in the next few years: “By the time I have a job as an engineer, we may have all these energy-saving technologies to use.” 

In the meantime, Saint-Louis is now hyper-aware of conservation issues in his own life. “Everything I do now,” he says, “I have to think twice about energy use, whether it’s taking the elevator versus the stairs or walking instead of driving.”

Saint-Louis’ sense of responsibility for his own environmental impact is right in line with a shift that the Student Conservation Association sees nationwide. “When the SCA was founded 50 years ago,” Kevin Hamilton explains, “it was specifically about saving our national parks. Now we see less engagement with saving trees or endangered species half a continent away. Instead, it’s about taking personal action against climate change and students doing something in their own communities.”

The college students The Trustees have worked with see conservation opportunities in cities as well as in forests, in business as well as on public lands, in dorm rooms as well as in legislative chambers. It’s hard to imagine a more attractive future than one in which young people care so much about preserving the planet that they are willing to take charge right at home.