Nurturing Our Future

One morning last fall, Anna Stine-Uchino ’27 stepped out of Pomeroy Hall to head to class. “The air smelled just like California,” she says. “I said to myself, ‘This is a wildfire that shouldn’t be happening here.’”

Stine-Uchino is from Palo Alto, Calif., where the acrid scent of wildfire is distressingly familiar. She didn’t expect to encounter it on Wellesley’s leafy campus. Yet after an extended severe drought in the Northeast, there it was.

November 2024 was an unprecedented month for brush fires in Massachusetts, with 410 reported, according to the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation. Multiple brush fires also burned in Pennsylvania and New York, including one that broke out in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in New York City. Genea Foster ’12, director of climate resilience and land use for Groundwork USA, an organization based in Brooklyn, could smell that one. Like Stine-Uchido, Foster was concerned.

“There’s always an air of uncertainty in managing climate crises,” Foster says. “But when I was being trained, I don’t remember having to consider wildfires in New York City.”

Most of us worry about the advancing effects of the climate crisis, whether in our backyards or around the globe—as this issue was in production, Los Angeles was battling unprecedented and devastating wildfires. A growing number of Wellesley alums, like Foster, are dealing with them directly, seeking effective and equitable solutions in a world that is rapidly changing.

Reclaiming Neighborhoods

As the frequency and severity of extreme weather rises around the world, vulnerable populations often bear the brunt of the impact, particularly in regions where climate change has already had an effect, such as coastal cities and drought-prone areas. Those who have contributed least to the problem, such as low-income communities and developing nations, are often the least equipped to adapt.

Groundwork USA is a network of 21 place-based environmental organizations across the country whose work is focused on climate resilience. “That means working closely with residents … to understand why their neighborhoods look the way they do, and to be a part of identifying the solu-tions for how to address their climate priorities and community concerns,” Foster says.

Foster is the manager of Groundwork’s Climate Safe Neighborhoods program. “[We] look at the relationship between housing discrimination and institutional racism in modern-day climate risk,” they say, citing research on 17 cities across the nation that showed a relationship between institutional racism, redlining, and urban renewal. “Top-down policies of the past created conditions that led to disinvestment in communities of color,” Foster says. What that looks like in terms of climate risk is hotter air temperatures due to more paved surfaces and a lower tree canopy in these neighborhoods, as well as flooding vulnerabilities related to an increase in impervious surfaces and fewer green spaces.

Foster’s work to combat these conditions starts at the neighborhood level. “A lot of data misses the lived experience, like when you walk down the street to take your kid to school, you might be walking down a street that’s too hot because it doesn’t have a lot of trees,” they say. “We’re able to work with residents to identify the things that they care most about and support them through community-organizing training, through demystifying how government works, to be able to advocate for themselves.”

Groundwork USA programs also engage youth in being a force for change. They learn how to do community science and how to communicate with their neighbors about what the data they collect means. “Youth have a very keen sense of fairness, what is right, what is wrong,” says Foster. “And honestly, they’ll be bearing the brunt of the decisions that we’re making today, so I feel a responsibility to nurture their power.”

Making Space for Change

Wellesley student Anna Stine-Uchino’s passion for environmental justice took root in high school when she was involved in community advocacy groups as well as climate education for children. “That broadened my perspective on the climate crisis,” she says. “How do we make sure that people are empowered to make change, but also not feel too stressed out about it, especially young children? How do we deal with space, how do we deal with resources? How do different communities respond?” Looking for answers to these questions led to her interest in environmental studies, she says. She also serves on the board of EnAct, Wellesley’s student environmental action organization.

Stine-Uchino is considering a double major in environ-mental studies and architecture, with the idea of using design as a way to tackle climate challenges. “What’s worrying me most is that we’re running out of time. But what gives me hope is the amount of discourse that’s happening,” says Stine-Uchino. “The ability to talk about [the climate crisis] and have it come up in many different fields feels hopeful and provides a lot of room for growth.”

Working Close to Home

Francelis Morillo Suarez ’21 works at both the community and the regional levels as a clean energy and climate planner for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. The MAPC is the regional planning agency serving the people who live and work in the 101 cities and towns of metropolitan Boston. Morillo Suarez grew up and still lives in Lawrence, Mass., which is defined by state law as an environmental justice community. Environmental justice communities comprise groups of people disproportionately impacted by environmental hazards due to factors such as race, ethnicity, income, or geographic location and who face barriers to addressing these issues.

Living in Lawrence helped shape her career path, Morillo Suarez says. “We’re an urban heat island. We don’t have a lot of green space compared to other communities, so really hot days can affect a lot of the population’s health, such as people who have asthma. I think both that lived experience aspect and what I’ve learned in school and through the environmental justice movement motivated me to get into the climate space,” she says.

Morillo Suarez works on clean energy planning at MAPC, as well. Within the clean energy context, community resilience can look like using clean energy technology, such as battery storage, for weather-related impacts. “It means if there’s a power outage, making sure that the community is resilient by helping people who need to have their insulin refrigerated, so there’s a place where they can do that, or if there are people who are breastfeeding, they have a space to freeze their milk,” she says. She has also been involved in a grant program that has provided funding for a range of municipal projects such as a rainwater harvesting program in Ipswich and a resilience hub at a community center in Cambridge.

“What keeps me up at night are the compounding social and political forces that are interconnected with the work that we’re doing,” she says. “It’s just so large and daunting, and such hard work, and I know that progress can be slow.”

But as a planner, Morillo Suarez takes joy in seeing innovative solutions, such as resilience hubs. “Whether it’s a church or a community center, it can be a place you can go to on a daily basis for other programming, but then also a space to go when there’s an emergency and you need support,” she says. “There’s a lot of thinking about the importance of trust and social connection, which I think will make us more resilient overall.”

Protecting the Waterfront

Catherine “Cat” McCandless ’14 is a senior climate resilience project manager for the City of Boston. Her work is at the hyper-local level; she lives in East Boston, the neighborhood several of her projects seek to protect.

In a city with 47 miles of coastline, McCandless focuses on coastal resilience, preparing for the impact of sea level rise and big coastal storms. Addressing the coming consequences of climate change that we are already essentially locked into is a multi-layered task. “We must prepare physically, socially, ethically, economically, and environmentally,” she says.

“A lot of people forget that Boston is definitely a coastal city, “ McCandless says. A sixth of it is built on landfill, a practice that began in the 1800s when different types of materials were dumped into the harbor and filled in wetlands to create space for water-dependent industry and railroads. “They weren’t thinking about climate change back then,” she says.

Most of the land created was built at the current sea level. “Our land is very low-lying in relation to where the ocean is, and so there are a lot of areas that are at risk. It’s fascinating to overlay historic maps of the old Boston coastline with where our projected flood risk moving forward is, because it’s almost identical. Basically, water wants to go back to where it used to be,” McCandless says.

Boston is already experiencing the effects. The city’s sea level is likely to rise approximately 9 inches by around 2030, and 40 inches by around 2070 if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current pace. Coastal flooding threatens places and services that are vital to community safety and well-being, including homes and businesses, evacuation routes, community centers, public parks, and natural areas.

McCandless says that a number of studies show that sea level rising and ocean warming is happening faster in the Northeast than in most parts of the world. “In order to keep all of the things that we’ve built and the people that live here now safe, we actually have to elevate land along the coast to prevent water from overtopping it,” she says. “That’s the core of coastal resilience work: How do we identify the areas that need to be elevated?”

For Boston, adaptation will mean investing in open space, preserving tree canopy, planting new trees, elevating land, renewing wetlands, and better managing stormwater. “We know what the strategies are, and we actually have the technologies to do it. What keeps me up at night is human will, that we need large-scale behavioral change,” she says. “Change always happens at the local and community level, and so for me, working in local government makes me feel very close to the ground and to the people and the places that I have a responsibility as a public servant to serve.”

Evolving Definitions

Mayrah Udvardi ’14 is an architect and design director with the nonprofit MASS Design Group, which stands for Model of Architecture Serving Society. She presently works in its Santa Fe, N.M., studio. (The group also has studios in Boston, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Kigali, Rwanda.) Her work focuses on supporting primarily rural and Indigenous nonprofits and tribal entities in building more resilient communities.

“When I was looking for my path following Wellesley, I really wanted an opportunity to deep dive into some of the contexts where the built environment and communities have been most stressed by the impacts of climate change or by corporate resource extraction,” Udvardi says. She has done this all over the world, working with Urban–Think Tank on shack upgrading in South Africa, with Global Citizens for Sustainable Development on migrant housing in India, and with the Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative on building design and technical capacity in Indian Country.

Udvardi would like to see an evolution of the term “climate resilience,” she says. “The history of the term is rooted in national and international agencies’ response policies to disaster, which have historically centered reactive, short-term, and hardiness-focused interventions,” she says. “But that can only go so far. There’s been a lot of great work to push back against this very nearsighted model. Resilience is not just about the climate piece; it goes hand-in-hand with community cohesion. Imagine what could be achieved if cultural and social resilience were seen as inextricable from physical resilience, and if sustainability and resilience were seen as one and the same.”

Settled in the mountains of New Mexico, for the last few months Udvardi has been at home with a newborn daughter— an experience she once thought she would never have. “I remember taking an environmental ethics class at Wellesley, and I questioned whether I wanted to have children,” she says. “There’s still just so much uncertainty about the type of world that [my daughter] is going to be growing up in. But I also feel like we need to continue raising and nurturing and cultivating generations to come. We’re going to need resourceful, creative, compassionate people.”

Some of those people may well emerge from Wellesley.

Since it was first offered in 2022, some 200 students have taken ES 125H: The Climate Crisis, an interdisciplinary course supported by the Anandan Endowed Fund for Climate Change Initiatives. Designed to foster activism and hope, the class is an opportunity for students of all majors to study the complexities and challenges of climate change, drawing on perspectives from across the liberal arts to imagine possible ways of responding to the crisis. This spring, Jay Turner, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Environmental Studies, is one of its co-leaders. “It’s a team-taught class that brings the best of the liberal arts and applies it to the climate crisis and hope,” he says. “Hope really is essential for helping students both reckon with the challenges and think about all the kinds of actions that they can be part of.”

When it comes to addressing the climate crisis, Turner says, “Giving up is not an option. We should be pouring energy into the local level, the state level, and remembering that there’s still important work to do protecting everything we can. Hope is the work.”