Michelle's Earth Foundation Newsletter
| Winter 2015
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Michelle's Earth Foundation, P.O. Box 5140 Preston King Station, Arlington, Virginia 22205
michellesearth.blogspot.com [email protected]
Donations are possible on Paypal or by mail.
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Dear Friend of MEF,
This January 28th would have been Michelle's milestone 30th birthday. Environmental awards given in her name to H-B Woodlawn High School and the University of Vermont graduating students have encouraged them to pursue various interests in living sustainably. In this issue William and Mary sophomore, Ashley Meredith, tells of her many environmental activities at college. It is in knowing that these young people are growing in their love of and concern for their natural world that we feel Michelle's presence moving amongst us.
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Native Plant Garden at PWFP Dedicated to Michelle
Michelle was an SCA intern at Prince William Forest Park during the summer of 2006. Her supervisor, Paul Petersen, conceived of and oversaw the planting of a native plant garden that would be dedicated to her memory. The garden has rain barrels to recycle rain water from down-spouts to water the garden and a vegetative screen to shade the administrative building it's near. This fall the garden was completed after the addition of a fence to keep out park deer. It is marked by the stone shown above with the first sentence of Michelle's, This I Believe Essay.
Paul has since moved to Denmark to begin a new phase of his life. We wish him well!
Above: Michelle as a SCA intern in 2006 at PWFP and fenced native plant garden
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Ashley Meredith's Second Year Environmental Activities at William and Mary
 Since high school, I've been involved in several different Environmental groups and activities, both on and off campus. Upon starting college, I joined both the Marine Science Society and the Student Environmental Action Coalition. While I haven't been able to make it to as many meetings this past semester, both groups are involved in different clean-ups around campus, organizing rides to protests (like People's Climate March!) or seminars in the area, and encouraging the community at large to participate in activism.
This past spring, I helped out with a water quality monitoring project on campus, and started my summer Freshman Monroe Scholar project asking coastal Williamsburg citizens whether or not they use by catch reduction devices on their crab pots. This project took some strange turns, but I learned a lot.
As far as classes go this past semester, I took two that were of note--Ropes Course Facilitation and Physical Geography. The latter was focused on human-environment interactions and really helped to re-affirm my interests in that area of study--I also found a great role model and mentor in my professor. The Ropes Course class taught me all about outdoor leadership and I got certified to work on the course on weekends at school. In that same vein, I just got a job working with the Rec Center leading Outdoors trips all over the region. I'm excited to learn more about facilitating outdoor learning--and we go on our first of three training trips this January!
Perhaps the most significant experience I've had was this summer as an entity. I did the most traveling I've ever done--Iceland, then Mississippi, then a couple of brief trips to the coastal New England states. It was an incredible journey. Iceland is renowned for it's feminism and geothermal energy--so it was great to learn about renewable lifestyles. My time in Mississippi really was something else. I was interning in the benthic ecology lab at the Gulf Coast Research Lab in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. While that work was very interesting and I learned a lot about research, I might have learned more about myself and other people during my time down there. The culture was very different from my upbringing, which brought challenges, but challenges that I welcomed and learned from. I did a lot of kayaking, paddle boarding, fishing, and went boating/swimming on the weekends. I got to explore the area quite a bit--with a trip to New Orleans, the Biloxi casinos and bowling alleys, and many trips to the Gulf Islands National Seashore Visitor's Center. It too reaffirmed my interest in Marine Science and my love for learning.
I'll be applying to several different Research Experience for Undergraduates (REUs) for this summer, with the hope of traveling to somewhere new inside (or out) of the United States!
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Fracking in the George Washington National Forest: An Unnecessary Risk
 Statement of Partnership for Policy Integrity Senior Counsel, Dusty Horwitt:
The Obama administration took an unnecessary risk with drinking water supplies today by allowing horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in a portion of the George Washington National Forest. While the Forest Service decision deserves some credit for placing most of the forest off-limits to drilling, there's no reason to gamble with the rest. Every major water provider in the DC area located downstream from the forest has opposed such drilling until science can show that it can be done safely. Local governments and elected officials have taken similar positions, including the Arlington County Board, Falls Church City Council and Alexandria's mayor in Virginia; Montgomery County Council and Prince George's County Council in Maryland; Washington, DC's mayor and city council, several jurisdictions near the forest, and Virginia's Governor, Terry McAuliffe. The Forest Service itself identified serious risks of drilling in its decision as it did in a 2011 draft in which officials recommended a moratorium on horizontal drilling and fracking in the forest.
Yet to protect the public on lands that could be drilled and fracked, the Forest Service relies on a dubious combination of government oversight and the assumption that the industry is not currently interested in drilling in the forest. A recent GAO study documented that government oversight of drilling on federal lands has been poor, finding that between 2009 and 2012, the federal Bureau of Land Management failed to inspect more than 2,100 of 3,700 wells (57 percent) drilled on federal land that the BLM, itself, had designated as high risks for water pollution or other environmental harm. The BLM would be one of the major regulators of fracking in the George Washington forest, if it occurs. And while the drilling industry might not have much interest in drilling now with historically low natural gas prices, what happens when prices inevitably rise? With risks ranging from leaks and spills of radioactive wastewater to the use of secret and often toxic fracking chemicals, why roll the dice with drinking water supplies and the forest itself?
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Factoid
Question: What was the warmest year globally since record keeping began 130 years ago in 1880?
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Doug's roses and Anthony's sunflowers on the UVM Green - 1/28/2015
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Ashley Meredith Attends People's Climate March in NYC
On September 21st, we met at the terrace at 3:30 AM to catch the bus, filled with around 50 William and Mary students, and several students from Old Dominion University. After nearly 8 hours cooped up on the bus, we made it to New York City, where the city was abuzz with energetic protesters. The very first we saw were an older couple. A wonderfully bearded man was pushing his wife in a wheelchair covered with signs. As we got closer to the staging area of the march, the crowds were unbelievable.
There were an estimated 310,000-400,000 people that came to Manhattan for this historic protest. The thing I found most interesting was the wide and varied demographic that attended the event. I met an older woman from Alaska, a couple from Hawaii, a group from Canada, and countless east coast students. It was great to witness so many people from different walks of life come together for an important cause. Also incredible was the sheer quantity of different organizations people came to represent. There was a great deal of intersectionality--between environmental justice, social justice, feminism, and other causes. While we were representing W&M's Student Environmental Action Coalition, there weren't a lot of us compared to the other organized groups. For a while, we marched with the Socialists, then with the "Butterflies Against the End of the World", then the Vegan group, and we even witnessed a counter-protest group with "We Love Fossil Fuels" signs. We had about an hour to roam around downtown Manhattan before meeting back up on the bus. We settled back in to our seats for a long ride home in the middle of the night, more than content with our participation in a world-record protest.
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T.H. Culhane Promotes Home Energy Biogas Systems
 Mercy Professor of Environmental Sustainability and Justice T.H. Culhane took his students on a trip to the Dominican Republic this winter break to introduce his Solar CITIES home scale biogas systems there in two different villages. But it might be more accurate to say his students took HIM! This is because some of the Mercy College students who organized the trip are from this Caribbean island and they decided last year, while on their first "faculty led student service learning trip" to Israel and Palestine, that the next time they got out in the field to teach people how to turn food scraps into clean fuel and fertilizer, they would do it in their own homelands. This will hopefully become a Mercy tradition. As Culhane explains,"The great thing about teaching in America is that we are a nation of Immigrants. Therefore, when we activate our young people and get them to consider the American Dream and our mutual desire for sustainability and justice, they realize that they truly are the world and that they can act and think locally and globally at the same time all the time. What we learn in school we can then take out to places where people don't have the same privileges as we do. So that is what we do!"
And because the world is now connected on Facebook and twitter and YouTube, the students just got pictures and posts showing that the biogas systems they taught people to build are now providing their first clean blue flames. Since these smoke free, tree free, charcoal free cooking fires comes from what would otherwise be garbage we know this is one torch that can stay lit forever!"
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Michelle's Red Osier dogwoods at the Intervale - 1/28/2015
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Thank You
Many thanks to each of you who gave during MEF's matching grant campaign and to those of you who gave throughout the year. We will strive to use those funds wisely, keeping Michelle's spirit moving amongst us. Best wishes for 2015.
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