Environment

More than 175 volunteers joined Rock Creek Conservancy, the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF), and the National Park Service to celebrate National Public Lands Day (NPLD) on September 28. As the signature site of thousands of NPLD events across the country, the day of service attracted an intergenerational crowd of enthusiastic volunteers. Volunteers also had the opportunity to participate in Rock Creek Park Day, an annual celebration of Rock Creek Park’s establishment on September 27th, 1890!

In a major 2020 victory, UCS helped California implement a first-in-the-nation policy requiring a sales standard for electric, zero-emission freight trucks. The policy, which UCS pushed hard to strengthen, will help reduce air pollution among the most exposed communities.

NVCT is your local, nonprofit land trust that protects and preserves the natural areas that define our Northern Virginia communities. From forests and streams to battlefields and cultural sites, our region’s lands and waters are more precious than ever before in the face of a changing climate and growing pressure to develop.

Protect the Adirondacks has worked for more than 100 years to defend and expand environmental protections for the Forest Preserve and wild lands of New York’s Adirondacks Park for current and future generations to enjoy. Spanning 92 towns and 12 counties over 6 million acres, the Adirondack Park is the last remaining piece of the large, intact, northern hardwood forest that once extended from Minnesota to Maine, and contains over 2.6 million acres of public Forest Preserve lands, protected as “forever wild” in the NY Constitution.

FRESHFARM is a nonprofit that promotes sustainable agriculture and improves food access and equity in the Mid-Atlantic region. We operate producer-only farmers markets that provide vital economic opportunities to local farmers and food producers, pioneering food distribution programs that increase food access for low-income communities, and innovative food education that builds healthier communities. Our core programs include:

When Hurricane Maria took down Puerto Rico’s electric grid in 2017, some residents endured nearly a year without power. On Culebra, an island off Puerto Rico’s northeast coast where Dulce del Rio-Pineda lives, people relied on noisy, dirty diesel generators for 18 months, but fuel was scarce. Del Rio-Pineda is a co-founder of Mujeres de Islas, a women’s collective that’s rebuilding Culebra’s self-reliance. As climate change threatens Puerto Rico with increasingly damaging storms, the group is turning to solar power, starting with a community kitchen that doubles as a culinary school.

Tribal Partnerships

Surfrider secured 10 victories to protect ocean ecosystems in 2019. The organization helped to block new offshore drilling proposed in more than 90 percent of U.S. waters by the current administration. The Surfrider network educated millions of people about the threat of offshore drilling, organized thousands of businesses in opposition, and helped pass hundreds of community resolutions protecting the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts.

With COVID-19 challenging global food security, this project (and others like it) are more important than ever. We have already seen that families want to be able to grow their own healthy food in the safety of their home. Food security panic peaked in the beginning months of the pandemic. Seed companies were experiencing unprecedented seed shortages, and families who relied on growing their own food found it difficult to access seed. These shortages not only affected gardeners in developing countries, but in the U.S. as well.

It has been nearly a decade since the deadly earthquake that destroyed much of Haiti’s capital, impacting nearly 3 million people and killing upwards of 200,000. UUSC’s response, which is in its ninth year and has included partnerships with more than a dozen grassroots organizations, serves as an important counterpoint to the humanitarian “crisis caravan” that left Port-au-Prince long ago.