2025 Rachel Carson Campus Fellows and Stanback Fellows Articles

Fossil Fuel Racism and Coal Ash in Alabama
Ben Trost
01-24-25

A 56-foot statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of blacksmithing, watches from a ridge above Birmingham. From the 1880s to early 1900s, the “Magic City” erupted as a significant industrial center for the southern US. It was one of the few places on earth to contain iron, limestone, and coal, all three resources necessary to produce steel. The city’s population boomed with the sudden need for factory workers; mines sprouted across Alabama to feed the blast furnaces in Birmingham. The steel and coal-mining industries quickly replaced Alabama’s agricultural economy.

Today, Vulcan looks over a city where old slag furnaces and historic skyscrapers hint at a prosperous industrial past. With only 14% of the state’s energy generated by coal in 2023, the resource extraction and industrial chapter of Alabama’s past is largely closed. Read more


Climate Change and Seasonal Affective Disorder
Anna Hyslop
01-24-25

The craving for reinvention seems to suck all of the life out of January. Weight Watchers ads work in tandem with gym promotions to shame Americans into “getting healthier.” Individuals set new regimens, hoping to sleep more and spend less time on their screens. How can people possibly have any fun with so many new standards implemented in their lives at once?

I confess that my sourness towards January is motivated by more than the lack of enjoyment I find in pursuing New Year’s resolutions. Frankly, I feel a little left out. I rarely have enough energy to set a goal and then try to achieve it during the month. I’d rather be in my bed, sleeping or reading — my ideal form of hibernation. Read more


Could “Finding Nemo” Become a Fantastical Movie?
Zoe Tseng
01-24-25

The opening scene of the movie, Finding Nemo, begins with clownfish hatching in the sea anemone of a coral reef. More specifically the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, which expands for 1,429 miles and is teeming with more than 9,000 species.

But I must wonder if the natural beauty that exists today will even be here in a matter of decades. The Great Barrier Reef has been on my bucket list since I was a child because of my fascination with the ocean, which stems from spending family reunions on the South Shore of Massachusetts. In 7th grade, I read about Migaloo, an albino humpback whale that had made many appearances near the Great Barrier Reef. Being an avid whale lover, I became enthralled and immediately wanted to visit this natural wonder. I remember being struck by the colorful beauty of the Great Barrier Reef. Read more


Humanitarian Crisis to Climate Crisis: All in One
Dae Borg
01-24-25

As a descendant of Palestinian heritage, as well as having a Jewish background, I have felt extremely conflicted by the situation that’s been unfolding in Gaza over the past 15 months. I never really questioned what my “Jewish-ness” meant, looking at the bigger picture. I knew that Jews were people who were discriminated against all over the planet. I knew that six million of us died in the Holocaust. I knew that if I wanted to, I could go on the Birthright trip for free to go to Israel and “see my homeland,” but I didn’t think about the other people who originally occupied that space. I didn’t know about the 75+ years of genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people. I am culturally Jewish with roots in Palestine, and I stand with the Palestinian people who had their lives stolen from them. I couldn’t believe my family were colonizers. Read more


Nature as Infrastructure: Exploring Nature-Based Solutions in Chicago
Cassie Varrige
01-24-25

Communities everywhere must adapt to a changing climate. Today, cities are built using highly engineered ‘gray infrastructure’ that falls short in the face of extreme weather and other climate disruptions. Green infrastructure offers an alternative opportunity to rebuild natural connections and solve complex urban challenges.

What is green infrastructure?

Green infrastructure can be defined in many ways. The Conservation Fund defines green infrastructure as “intentionally structured and managed networks of natural areas, working landscapes, and other open spaces that preserve ecosystem values and functions while also providing benefits to human populations.” Unlike traditional built infrastructure to manage human impacts on the environment, green infrastructure recognizes the interconnectedness of nature and supports natural health. Read more


Our Energy Estrangement: Getting Reacquainted with What Powers Our Lives
Brianna Cunliffe
01-24-25

Watching the waves crash and winds howl as the sun hovers just under the Arctic horizon, I huddle with my friends near the warmth of the radiator, and energy keeps coming back into my mind.

The Westfjords of Iceland, where I’m now studying just transitions in coastal communities, is a place of abundant yet sparse energy. The kinetic forces of air and water are always churning, but sunlight never touches the earth through several months of winter. The long Arctic night and the wild weather make it challenging to power this small community in the ways we have come to rely on, with long transmission lines and wires stretching over the mountains and fjords to connect us with power plants in the capital region. Blackouts were such a persistent issue that, a few decades ago, the towns in our area banded together and now have a backup generator that kicks in when the main line goes down. Read more


Reminiscing About the D.C. Streetcars and the Georgetown Circulator
Chiara Grimes
01-24-25

In 2019, on the final day of my junior year of high school, a friend and I skipped school and paid two euros for a bus to take us to downtown Kaiserslautern, Germany. I was no expert at taking public transportation, but it was easy, cheap, and reliable enough to figure out. We walked along the cobblestone streets, went to the mall, ate pasta, and drank wine; it was the perfect way to welcome our last year and for me to say goodbye. That summer I moved to the United States from Germany and completed my degree in Virginia. I was excited to move back, and it was easy enough to assimilate into the school and culture. Even once the pandemic began, I was privileged that my plans were not upturned in a life-altering way. I continued to live with my parents, took an overflow of classes online at Northern Virginia Community College, and on the weekends, I worked at a local coffee shop. Read more


The Green Divide: The Unequal Access to Parks and Green Spaces
Sophie Valkenberg
01-24-25

I grew up living on the York Road Corridor in northeast Baltimore. York Road, which eventually becomes Greenmount Avenue as you head south towards downtown serves as a historic dividing line between race and class. In the “Predominant Race” map shown, the harsh, straight line that separates predominantly Black census tracts from predominantly White ones is York Road/Greenmount. At one point, between the affluent Guilford neighborhood and the middle to lower-income Wilson Park community, there is even a looming, stone wall that serves as a physical reminder of Baltimore’s history of segregation. Growing up here, it was impossible to ignore the consequences of historical, systemic racism as I witnessed them every day. In high school, I drove down York on my commute, staring at the wall and looking at the jarring contrasts between the left and the right sides of the road. Read more


Twilight of the Fireflies
Sabrina Kianni
01-24-25

Nestled in a bed of smooth, speckled stones, I peered through the meticulously arranged shrubs that framed the top of my hidden refuge. All clear, I thought, crouching back down, careful not to crush the tiny flowers brushing against my knees. The cool summer night carried an air of familiar excitement as my neighborhood friends and I gathered for our cherished tradition—Ultimate Hide and Seek. Our entire cul-de-sac transformed into an expansive playground, where one person would stand at the center of the asphalt and count down from 180 while the rest of us scattered to find the most ingenious hiding spots. The dreaded fate of becoming the next seeker awaited the first person to be found, making the pressure to remain hidden almost palpable. Read more


We Degrade; It Warns
Carson Mease
01-24-25

The hellbender is the largest North American salamander with two subspecies, the Ozark and Eastern hellbenders. The slimy, spotted amphibian is characterized by a flattened head and small eyes. At maturity, they grow up to be many feet long and live as long as thirty years. Hellbenders are primarily nocturnal and walk on stream bottoms, occasionally swimming short distances to avoid predators. Their camouflaged complexion and tendency to hide beneath large, flat rocks and small stones disguises them from predators.

Historically, Eastern hellbenders were found in clear, fast-flowing mountain streams in 15 states. As of late 2024, it was found that only 12 percent of populations are stable and successfully reproducing, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

The hellbender is such a rare sight that I have never seen one, despite spending a significant chunk of every summer soaking in Appalachian waterways. Read more


We’re Alive and We Have the Power to Breathe
Ana Young
01-24-25

In early January, clouds of smoke changed the air quality in Los Angeles. Breathing outside without a special mask ran the risk of the intake of thousands of tiny, but toxic, cancer-causing particulates. People in the area have been warned not to breathe their air — the air from which millions of Angelenos took their first breaths, the air that gives them life.

The sight of blood orange and the sound of embers crackling remained on my mind after I scrolled endlessly through videos of the multiple wildfires ravaging the shrubbed hills of LA County. The videos were filmed by LA residents, whose voices shattered as they spoke about the fire engulfing their homes—and all the keepsakes and memories inside.

As more videos come out of LA, so have scores of social media posts calling the disaster what it is—a symptom of climate change. In 2024, global temperatures exceeded the 1.5°C pledged by the Paris Agreement, the world’s leading climate commitment. Read more


When Leaders Fail, Communities Rise
Anusha Kumar
01-24-25

This past November, hundreds of politicians, leaders, organizations, and activists from around the globe gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan for COP29. The COP, or Conference of the Parties, has met every year since 1995 to make decisions about solving the world’s most pressing issues related to climate change. Just outside the halls of the climate summit, hundreds of protestors came together. Among their demands was a greater allocation of funds for climate finance, which calls on wealthy nations to provide lower-income countries in the Global South with funds to adapt to climate change. After requesting $1.3 trillion in climate finance, developing nations instead received $300 billion in a deal reached after two weeks of intense negotiations. The results of COP29 left many disappointed, with some viewing it as a failure and others as a disaster. Read more