Service Day
This is a picture of me in a wetsuit.
This is a picture of a Kenilworth Park pond.
Alongside other College Park Scholar groups, Science and Global Change (SGC) particpated in Service Day, which is when all of College Park Scholars does community service. For Service Day SGC went to Kenilworth Aquatic Ponds and helped with restoration efforts on paths and in their ponds.
Metro Scavenger Hunt
This is a picture for one of the scavenger items.
To learn about the DC metro and bond with our SGC cohort we traveled to DC via the metro and explored the Smithsonian Musuems. We had to take picture of our scavenger items with our team and the item.
Bay Advocacy Institute Series
Title: Bay and Advocacy 101, Environmental Litigation
Date & Location: October 11, 2023 in 1202 ESJ
By: The Chesapeake Bay Foundation
This talk in the series covers the basics of the environmental issues plaguing the Chesapeake Bay, actions taken to restore these issues, how advocacy plays a role in those actions, and how litigation has played a role in the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Some important issues discussed were the declining clam populations, land use, and pollutants. To address those issues the Chesapeake Bay Foundation mainly uses social activism and litigation to accomplish their goals. Some culminations of this were the Making History Campaign and The Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint, where they used community agitation to push for legal change and created a series of steps for the government to follow to restore the bay. We also outlined the weight of various social actions, where an in-person meeting is the most effective and petitions are the least effective and there’s a purpose for all of them. Lastly, we developed our appeals to showcase the importance of conveying how personal and impactful these issues are to legislators. Then we acted our our appeal to a legislator for a campaign.
I agree with their main points regarding advocacy and its relevance to creating change. It’s been shown time and time again throughout history that social activism is an important driver for change. For example, the Civil Rights movement was only successful because of the number of people involved and the strategic steps they took to divest when they needed power. It is the same for the climate justice movement. While there has been less divesting on this front, the combined efforts of civilians to overwhelm politicians' inboxes are effective at telling them what their constituents want and the benefits of following through. The only way to organize people for these actions is through advocacy. It starts with education and motivating people on individual levels.
Another thing this presentation did was differentiate various forms of activism and where they’re applicable in the campaign process. I agreed with the timeline of advocacy events where you start on a smaller scale with education, peer, and individual advocacy. As I said, it starts with motivating people on an individual level which can only happen if people are informed of a cause and able to relate to it. Education informs, and individual/peer advocacy to stand up for what you or a friend need develops skills to stand up for a cause. The step after that is community advocacy where you help advocate for an issue plaguing a community. If a group of people accomplish the first two steps they’ll have the confidence to stand up for what they need and know the logical steps to achieve their goal. The next step is regulatory advocacy where groups work with expert organizations, like USDA if it’s related to agriculture or the EPA, and develop legislative proposals. The last step is applying this plan with legislative advocacy where you look for a violation of a law within the current system or speak with legislators to implement your proposal. Bottom-up organizing is very effective for developing the community necessary for movements such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation movements. While it isn’t a grassroots organization, grassroots method all groups to cover a lot of ground in differing ways. Aside from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s main campaigns listed above, they also have smaller projects such as their Regenerative Agriculture Initiative and their widespread plans to plant more trees in urban areas. They have more projects that they’re working on, but this is because of how broad bottom-up organizing can be. They’re still one organization, but they’re working on a lot of projects.
One thing I disagreed with was how the Bay Advocacy Series works in itself. The ultimate goal of this series is to certify people as Chesapeake Bay Advocates and there isn’t anything else to the program after it. While the program does prepare people to address climate issues in the Bay and develop plans to tackle them, no active action takes place where people can truly implement what they learn. The way they described it was as a resume filler, but I believe that this has a lot more potential. They could use this series to pipeline people to work on specific projects for a longer period so that they have more labor and people can get hand on experience working on a climate cause.