By Gabriel Miller-Trabold, 2024 Eastie Farm Climate Corps Fellow
After graduating from college this past December, I joined the year-long Climate Corps fellowship program with Eastie Farm. I had studied geography and environmental sustainability and policy, and was hoping to enter the workforce in a way that allowed me to address the social and environmental issues created by climate change. The experience I have had with the Climate Corps has given me insights that have shaped my understanding of environmental jobs, as well as my own future career goals.
Before joining this program, I had notions of environmental jobs that I now realize were perhaps inaccurate or incomplete. I thought that if I wanted to do hands-on environmental work, I would need to be in a place with lots of “nature”; I would conjure up images of rural farming, national park conservation, or field research immersed in remote undeveloped environments. I didn’t view urban spaces as having much potential for direct environmental work – sure, climate change could be addressed through political, corporate, or legal methods, but I thought of cities as places that were largely limited to office work that often took top-down approaches to environmentalism. The work I have done with the Climate Corps has radically shifted this; I now realize that hands-on environmental work is not only possible in cities, it is perhaps most important in these spaces as well.
Through Living Lands and the CSA program, I have spent time doing urban farming that involved direct engagement with the land through cultivating and harvesting crops, and have participated in distributing CSA shares in order to create more just and equitable food systems. This allowed me to experience types of urban-based environmental work that were not only hands-on, but addressed multifaceted and intersectional issues: helping the environment by practicing and promoting sustainable farming methods; helping people by supporting small local farmers and distributing their produce to community members; addressing the economic and racial inequalities of climate change by providing healthy and affordable food to an economically disadvantaged, majority Latino environmental justice community that is considered a food desert.
Additionally, the work we did with Emerald Tutu allowed me to participate in immersive environmental work in East Boston by producing “green infrastructure” in efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Our goal was to create floating salt marshes; these are sites of immense biodiversity that provide ecosystem services such as water filtration, and serve as “buffer zones” that protect coastal areas from flooding during intense storms. To do this, we spent time in urban salt marshes, harvesting an invasive species called “phragmites” which we used to construct rafts. These were secured in coastal areas of East Boston that had once been salt marshes, but were destroyed by industrial activity. We then planted native salt marsh grasses inside these rafts so that they could grow and create the foundation for salt marshes to become reestablished.
These experiences profoundly altered what I thought was possible in the world of “green jobs”, and what I want to pursue in my own career path. The dense populations and extreme levels of industrialization that characterize cities had formerly led me to believe that they were not places for the direct, hands-on, environmental work I was looking for – working with the Climate Corps has shown me that they can be. Additionally, these same factors are why environmental jobs are perhaps most important in urban spaces; because of how many people live in cities, many of whom face the consequences of racial and economic inequality, and how much environmental degradation has occurred through urbanization, cities are places where the positive impacts of environmental work can have the greatest potential. After my time with the Climate Corps, rather than seeking careers in the “natural environments” of rural or remote locations, I have a new desire to pursue green jobs based in cities; I believe that doing so will allow me to better address the intersectional racial, economic, and environmental issues of climate change in order to promote environmental justice.
