Alumni Notes: News from CES Alumni and Friends

Helen Song ‘14
After serving as an AmeriCorps Member with City Year New York last year and a summer with The Nature Conservancy, I am now working for NYC Parks at Fort Greene Park. For any CES Ephs in NY, please stop by and say hello!

Cedar Blazek ‘13
Having just moved away from beautiful Western Massachusetts, I will spend the summer backpacking solo through Central America. Upon my return in August, I plan to look for environmental work in my home state of Colorado.

Sophie Robinson ‘11sophie
Sophie lives in Brooklyn and is the Executive Producer and Director of Outreach on a film about how climate change impacts national security and global stability, called The Age of Consequences. She is also working toward a masters in Sustainability at the Harvard Extension School.

Chris Law ‘10
Chris Law just completed his tenure at the U.S. Green Building Council in D.C., where he helped develop location and transportation requirements for the LEED rating system. He is heading back to school this summer to pursue an MBA at Cornell. It has been a great six years in DC!

Evelyn A. Aguilar ‘08
After Williams I spent a year with AmeriCorps Public Allies doing service work with at-risk youth in south central Los Angeles. Immediately afterwards I went to work with an urban garden non-profit within the same community as a program assistant. While there I promoted various urban gardens and worked to bring more local, organic, and affordable produce to the inner city. After a few years in the city I was itching to be in a more rural setting and in 2011 decided to go to El Salvador (where my family is from) and intern and live at a permaculture institute set in a tropical foothill community. During my spare time there I compiled a database of medicinal plants used in the area. Such intimate knowledge of the plants is quickly being lost with the folks born after 1985 or so. While in El Salvador I was able to interview and land a job with California State Parks, so after a year there I returned to the U.S. to begin my three-year stint as an environmental scientist field lead with the state. I was stationed in the Angeles District and the gig mainly consisted of invasive plant removal and other forms of restoration ecology work. Now I am getting ready to enter my second year of a master’s program at California State University-Fullerton in environmental science. My research focuses on campus trees and figuring out where they obtain their water from (groundwater, rain, and/or irrigation). I am looking at the stable isotopes of water found in such sources to figure this out. The idea is that not all trees on campus need to be irrigated, thus knowing which trees will survive without irrigation will allow the university to save on water (very important as the heavily urbanized southern California area is in constant drought mode!).

Zoe Fonseca ‘08
I am wrapping up a year teaching at a STEM high school in the Dominican Republic that focuses on environmental awareness and applied knowledge. Starting in August I will be the program manager for outdoor education and the summer camp at the Green Chimneys School in the Hudson Valley. I 28
can’t wait to reach out to more alumni as I dig deeper into both the literal and figurative “fields” of nature-based and experiential learning!

Elana Boehm ‘06
In January I started a new job as the Director or Operations at Zagster, a Cambridge-based startup that provides bike share programs to 130+ business, commercial properties, cities, and universities across the country.

Dan Auerbach ‘01
After completing graduate study in Fort Collins, CO and a postdoc in Ithaca, NY, both concerned with modeling freshwater ecosystem functions and services and their relation to global change, I’m enjoying a fellowship at EPA headquarters in Washington, DC. As I gain a more nuanced understanding of how data and decisions intersect. I’d welcome conversations with other folks working on water or at the science-policy interface.

Christia Katz Mulvey ‘97
Last May, my husband Eric and I welcomed our little boy (Frederick Martin Katz) into the world, and have been enjoying watching him learn and grow and explore the world. I am still working in the field of affordable housing lending in Oakland, CA after 15 years. Our need is currently the greatest it’s ever been, and our available funding nearly at the lowest levels (though with some promise of improving).

Wendi Haugh ‘91
WendiI am an Associate Professor (recently tenured!) of Anthropology and African Studies at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. I am now teaching courses on Environmental Conservation in Africa, Humans and Other Animals, and Social Movements (including environmental movements), and it feels great to combine my interests in Anthropology and Environmental Studies in the classroom. I have lots of Environmental Studies, Conservation Biology, and Anthropology students taking my classes alongside students of many other majors, and I love the kinds of discussions that get going among students from these different disciplinary backgrounds. I launched a new research project on African bird guides last year by attending the British Birdwatching Fair and the American Birding Expo to study how their services are marketed.

Cliff Majersik ‘91
I’m the Executive Director of the Institute for Market Transformation, in Washington, DC a non-profit that seeks to harness policies and market forces to drive energy efficiency in buildings. I look forward to meeting and reconnecting with other alumni working areas at the reunion in June.

Ted Wolf ‘81
I recently joined the board of Columbia Riverkeeper, a great river protection organization based in Hood River, Oregon that has been instrumental in many of the recent fossil fuel infrastructure victories along the Columbia, protecting the River of the West from the hazards, pollution, and disruption brought by coal trains, oil trains, LNG export facilities, and other vestiges of a carbon era
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now in accelerating decline. I also work in Portland on a variety of initiatives including state policies related to school facilities and the resilience of the built environment — currently dealing with a maelstrom of challenges including airborne toxics, water-borne lead, radon, and other things that do not belong in classrooms or on playgrounds. Portlandia indeed!

Marti Ikehara ‘79Martika
In Sacramento, we are continuing to survive drought conditions. Although we got only 86% of normal (average) rainfall this water year, water use restrictions will not be as draconian as in the past two summers. We get basically no rain in summer here (Mediterranean climate), where it is not abnormal for the highs in July to be in the 100’s, so much water is used externally. I personally reduced my (metered) usage 50%! and my lawns have survived; the additional benefit is that I had to mow only half as often! In my retirement (3 years, 3 months now), one of the things I do is steward a small grove of 30 native oak trees along the American River Parkway. I water them one-two times a month in the summer and keep other plants out of their (anti-deer) cages.