***Check out my D2E final proposal in the Pics and Vids section***

My name is Katherine Walsh and I am a recent graduate of Boston College. I was born and raised in Boston and got interested in environmental issues during my high school career at Boston Latin School. When I was at Latin, I was a three sport athlete and spent my entire life focused around sports and academics. When I decided to go to Boston College, a university with so many opportunities for activism and volunteerism, I knew my priorities needed to change. Now, my greatest loves include environmental activism, Mama Jane and the children of Weirwood, Virginia, dancing, weekly visits with my 90 year-old spunky grandma, my job as high school special ed TA, and my wonderful friends.

As a freshman, I got involved with the student environmental group, Ecopledge. We were a small group of five, focusing on national environmental campaigns, like the Cape Wind proposal, Victoria Secret's abuse of old-growth forests for their millions of catalogues, and the Declaration of Independence from Oil movement. I got to attend the annual Northeast Climate Summit at UVM and it changed my life. To be at a conference with hundreds of my peers who shared the same energy and passion was completely inspiring and invigorating. At the time, the general atmosphere at BC was anti-environmental ("You crazy hippie tree-huggers" was a common insult."), so the conference was an injection of positivity and a feeling of "We CAN create change." 

Sophmore year, myself and two other sophmores had no choice but to take the Ecopledge reins, our former leaders having graduated. We started questioning our focus as a group and realized we could not continue focusing on the national issues without trying to change our own issues at BC. We started off slowly, establishing and nurturing better relationships with Facilities Management, Residential Life, and Dining Services, or as we liked to refer to them as "The Big Three". And so began the next three years of triumphs, disappointments, lessons, and great change. Some highlights: BC moving from 33rd to 12th in RecycleMania; the beginning and continuation of campus events like Harvest Fest, Mt. Trashmore, and the Better Off Contest; the changing of over 800 incandescent bulbs throughout campus to fluorescent bulbs; hiring of an Energy Manager, promoted to Director of Sustainability and Energy Management; the creation of a BC sustainability website (bc.edu/sustainability); the purchase of five BigBelly solar trash compactors; numerous energy retrofits in garage and Plex lighting and heating and cooling mechanisms; the creation of a campus organic garden. BC even just had its first (and very successful) "BCisGreen Week". BC Dining has been a true "Changent" of its own, establishing a Green Cafe of organic and local foods only, composting and new recycling patterns in the dining halls, and no longer selling bottled water within the actual food areas. These many accomplishments came through our committed long hours of meetings, campaigns, collecting signatures, hosting campus events, and campus-wide publicity through "The Heights". We in Ecopedge were rewarded for our work with the Mass Lottery Community Champions Award, the "Ever to Excel" Award, the "Skills: Leadership Award", and the 2008 Heights Person of the Year Award.

Despite our many eventual accomplishments, our great focus on campus sustainability left little time or resources for a focus on the social justice aspects of environmentalism. Luckily through classes in the Environmental Studies program, and Sociology and History departments, and through the Urban Ecology Institute, I got some time for and education on EJ in Boston. My D2E proposal stems from my work with UEI and my Environmental Scholars project. During the summer of 2006, 19 other college kids and I were hired to inventory Boston's urban forest. We walked the neighborhoods measuring and recording the data of trees into ArcPad on our Dell handhelds. It was one of the top three summers of my life. I cherished being outside every day, talking with residents about urban ecology and urban health issues, learning about trees and their linkages to socio-economic issues. I found an idol in the work of Dr. Frances Kuo of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has studied the connections between urban greenspace and issues of mental and physical health, crime, and economics. My time with UEI gave me the chance to work with a bunch of amazing Boston youth groups and environmental teams, all passionate and dedicated to their neighborhoods. The tree data we collected showed pretty obvious environmental injustices across the different neigrhborhoods. I hope that by improving our urban forest, we can improve the health and safety of our city's residents.