Vassar College and the Environmental Movement

If you had to choose a spot where the American environmental movement had its origins, it would be, surprisingly, just north of New York City and along the Hudson River, including upstate New York. That’s what Rachel Carson Council President and CEO, Dr. Robert K. Musil, told his audience at Vassar College at the start of his fall tour of campuses. Musil was invited to Vassar and hosted by the chair of the Environmental Studies Program, Dr. Alison Spodek Keimowitz. During his time at Vassar, Musil also spoke in classes on plant biology and climate change and on nuclear power and weapons. He also met with student leaders and met with both the Director of Fellowships and the Director of Sustainability.

Founded in 1861, Vassar, the historic women’s college that opened its doors in 1865 and went co-ed in 1969, is listed in Princeton Review’s “green” colleges and is known for highly interdisciplinary and creative programs in environmental studies . It is also an Arboretum Campus where every view of its quadrangles includes classic architecture surrounded by specimen trees, including, across from Vassar’s Gothic library, a mammoth British Plane Tree at least a dozen feet in diameter. Given this setting, it is easy to imagine how, over 150 years ago, Vassar was at the epicenter of environmentalism.

That’s because Ellen Swallow Richards, the founder of environmental science, consumer advocacy, the AAUW, and the first women chemist, graduated from Vassar in 1870. Richards gained her master’s at Vassar and studied astronomy there with the renowned, pioneering astronomer, Maria Mitchell whose observatory still stands and was one of Vassar’s first buildings, Mitchell Observatory. Although she worked closely with Mitchell and discovered a comet, Richards chose chemistry over astronomy because she believed it offered a better way to use science to improve people’s lives. With Mitchell’s highest recommendation, she sought admission to MIT’s new graduate program. But Richards was only admitted as a “special student” with no real standing. Though she taught advanced courses and ran the laboratory at MIT, Richards was never given real faculty status and was denied her well-earned Ph.D. because MIT refused to give its first Ph.D. in chemistry to a woman.

It is this proud lineage, Musil told his audience, that continues to this day and needs a new generation of environmental leaders to expand and carry on the environmental movement. That lineage includes Vassar students like Adam Green, class of 1996, who joined with Pete Seeger aboard his sloop Clearwater that Seeger sailed up and down the Hudson for decades singing, speaking, organizing, and building the new environmental movement. Inspired by Seeger, Green went on to start an afterschool program, Rocking the Boat, for girls in Harlem to learn about the environment.

The long line of Vassar environmental leaders also includes Jane Fonda who has been active in solar energy and climate change since the 1970s, and who at 87 still leads rallies and commits civil disobedience in the nation’s capital. Fonda attended Vassar for two years in the 1950s and still expresses regret that she did not graduate, having left to begin her acting career.

Vassar even connects with Rachel Carson whose literary agent, friend, and colleague Marie Rodell graduated from Vassar in 1932. Rodell helped turn Carson’s four books, including Silent Spring, into best sellers. Rodell did the same for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s first book, Stride Toward Freedom, and upon Carson’s dying request, founded the Rachel Carson Council in 1965 to carry on Carson’s work.

Today, the Rachel Carson Council carries on that work as a leading national environmental organization with a focus on climate and environmental justice and recruiting mentoring, and supporting the next generation of environmental leaders. With a growing RCC Campus Network with thousands of active student and faculty supporters, annual Advocacy Days in Washington D.C., an RCC American Environmental Leadership Institute (AELI), and over 40 RCC Fellows selected each year to work with the RCC, the Rachel Carson Council leads a major grassroots and advocacy campaign against the wood pellet industry that clear-cuts American forests to produce industrial scale wood pellets that are then shipped overseas to be burned in former coal-fired utilities to produce electricity.

Musil urged Vassar student to join the RCC network, to apply for RCC Fellowships, and to join with those students who have already helped gain victories again the wood pellet industry and weakened the financial standing of the two main corporations, Drax and Enviva, who are responsible for the continuing destruction of trees, ecosystems, frontline communities, and the global climate.

At the conclusion of his Musil’s visit, Vassar College became the 85^th campus to join the Rachel Carson Council Network.