In the September heat, a line of �ֲ���ý students stood outside Commons, talking about this and that. As they waited to board a yellow school bus, they waved to their friends and passed around sign-making materials.

Members of the Environmental Coalition, the �ֲ���ý student group that works to raise awareness of climate and sustainability issues, walked around calling the names of those registered to take the bus to Portland, wondering how everyone would fit.

Students gather outside of Commons before boarding the bus for Portland. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The �ֲ���ý students heading to Portland were among the millions of people worldwide who went on strike on Sept. 20 to demand climate action ahead of the Sept. 23 United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York City.

“I don’t understand how people can actively oppose this,” said Matt Suslovic ’21, sitting at the back of the �ֲ���ý bus. Around him, students crammed three to a seat recounted protests they’d attended and brainstormed slogans to put on their signs.

“I’m striking because at the end of the day I don’t feel confident about anything in my future,” Suslovic said. “I don’t feel confident that I or anyone in my generation will make it to retirement.”

A crowd of 2,000 gathered outside of Portland City Hall for the Youth Climate Strike. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“I do believe that strikes work, especially if you get a critical mass to send signals and make institutions respond,” said Sonja Pieck, associate professor of environmental studies. “I’m in solidarity with people who are younger than I am and will have to sit this out in a different way.”

For some of the �ֲ���ý professors in attendance, joining the event reflected their identity as an academic.

“I talk a lot about the importance of getting engaged and organizing,” said Francis Eanes, visiting assistant professor of environmental studies. “It’s not good enough to just talk about issues and solutions — we have to really get involved. I personally would feel like it’s the antithesis of what I’m teaching if I’m not willing to make space for that in my life.”

Alexis Hudes ’20 of Owings Mills, Md., holds a sign as she stands with Francis Eanes, visiting assistant professor of environmental studies, at right. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As the bus rolled up to Portland’s City Hall, activists already crowded around the building began to cheer. The �ֲ���ýies who had driven their own cars and vans cut through the crowd to meet up with their friends, who took in the crowd with wide eyes.

The crowd numbered some 2,000, joining others worldwide: 1.4 million people in Germany, 250,000 in New York City, and a handful of researchers in Antarctica.

Organized by several Maine-based environmental organizations, the event had a strong �ֲ���ý vibe thanks to the Environmental Coalition’s connections with statewide groups. Of the dozen or so speakers, two were �ֲ���ý students: Muskan Verma ’21 of Shimla, India, who is the Lewiston hub contact for the Sunrise Movement, and Environmental Coalition president Dianna Georges ’22 of Clifton, N.H.

“I’m not from this country,” Verma said from the steps of City Hall, “but that shouldn’t matter. This is affecting us all. And whether we like it or not, we have to take action.”

Muskan Verma ’21 of Shimla, India, addresses the crowd gathered in front of Portland City Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

, Georges told the audience that “climate change is the greatest crisis facing humanity, period. Period. …It will affect the lives of people from every part of the world, from every economic class and from every ethnic group.”

Though the speakers’ discourse was aimed primarily at their peers, they reprimanded older generations for their failure to act. They spoke about how climate change is already challenging communities around the world and won’t relent unless citizens, governments, and corporations come together to bring about change.

The Portland protest was “a lot more justice-oriented than the past climate actions that I’ve been to,” Maggie O’Shea ’20.

“People are talking more about equity and inclusion in this, and their signs aren’t just like ‘We love grass and trees.’ It’s about clean air and clean water for all, and that’s super exciting.”

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Sonja Pieck congratulates students after the strike. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

When the speeches ended and the crowd dispersed, some of the �ֲ���ý folks made their way to Lincoln Park to enjoy some pizza in the shade and debrief each other on the event. Students also caught up with some of their �ֲ���ý professors who had attended the event.

Notwithstanding the somewhat disappointing outcome of the UN’s Climate Action Summit a few days later, Pieck remarked on the positive vibe of the Portland strike. “A lot of the climate discourse is very negative, and so it’s cool that we can rally and be really positive and optimistic about change. You could feel the youth.”

“We were part of the largest climate mobilization in U.S. and global history,” added Georges. “To me, that represents how much people are caring and noticing this issue. But we can’t rest now: There is so much left to do.”

�ֲ���ý students, faculty, and staff pose for a group photograph after the action at Portland City Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In a classroom at the St. Mary’s Nutrition Center in Lewiston one Thursday evening in late November, every inch of space was in use.

Pine frames, built to fit into the smallest bathroom window or the largest bay window, lined each wall. About a dozen people worked at several stations in assembly-line fashion, taping the sides of the frames, wrapping the frames with polyolefin film, heat-sealing the film into place, and finishing the frame with weatherstripping.

The final product: an easy-to-install window insert that keeps homes well-insulated in the winter cold and brings down heating costs.

At a Window Dressers community workshop on Nov. 29, community members along with �ֲ���ý students, faculty, and staff assemble window inserts at St. Mary’s Nutrition Center. The workshop was one part of an semester-long environmental studies project for three �ֲ���ý students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Three �ֲ���ý students — Grace Ellrodt ’20 of Lenox, Mass., Newell Woodworth ’19 of Lambertville, N.J., and Griffin Golden ’19 of Riverside, Conn. — moved among the different stations, answering questions, giving instructions and, in the process, helping to solve a knotty problem for , the nonprofit behind the inserts.

Based in Rockport, Window Dressers has saved Maine residents, from Berwick and Blue Hill to Wells and Wiscasset, upwards of $2.2 million in heating fuel. To keep the inserts inexpensive, the nonprofit asks purchasers to volunteer at community workshops to assemble them. Window Dressers operates in towns all around the state; this year was the first that it had a workshop in Lewiston.

A Window Dressers insert might run between $25 and $50, depending on the window size. The insert pays for itself in a couple of years due to energy savings, and it’s certainly cheaper than replacing a window — but the demands of time and money still put the inserts out of reach for many low-income families.

Window Dressers’ goal is to give 22 percent of its inserts to “special rate” participants at free or reduced cost, but recruiting these participants, and seeing them through from recruitment to installation of the inserts, has proved challenging.

Newell Woodworth ’19 works with a community member to wrap a pine frame with polyolefin film. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“We wanted to know what we can do to change our process to better meet the needs low-income households,” said Laura Seaton, director of community workshops.

Seaton turned to Francis Eanes, a visiting assistant professor of environmental studies at �ֲ���ý who, with biology lecturer Karen Palin, is teaching a community-engaged environmental studies research course.

Required for all ES majors and one of dozens of community-engaged courses supported by the Harward Center, the course combines academic research with collaborative work in Lewiston-Auburn. In small groups, students complete semester-long projects ranging from building a rental property database to creating a visual history trail along the Androscoggin River.

To Eanes and Seaton, the twin tasks of making the inserts more accessible to low-income families and establishing Window Dressers in Lewiston sounded like a great project. Ellrodt, Woodworth, and Golden got the job.

Grace Ellrodt ’20 uses a home-made dispenser to apply tape to the insert frame. The tape is then folded onto the polyolefin film to secure the film to the frame. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The group had two objectives: help Kristine Corey, the AmeriCorps volunteer in charge of bringing Window Dressers to Lewiston, recruit participants and run community workshops; and, through interviewing participants and workshop coordinators, determine the incentives and barriers to participating in the Window Dressers model.

At first, Ellrodt said, the group tried to talk to potential special-rate participants by setting up formal interviews. That turned out to be unfeasible.

“People have a million and eight things to do, and inserts are the last thing,” Ellrodt said.

Instead, the students went to St. Mary’s Nutrition Center during its food pantry hours, and a staff member introduced them to pantry clients, emphasizing that the window inserts were free. That yielded several participants, who in turn referred the students to still more participants.

Griffin Golden ’19 heats foam weatherstripping before applying it to the edges of the window inserts. The weatherstripping creates a snug fit for the window inserts. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In the end, the community engagement (recruiting participants) and the research (asking about the barriers and incentives to participating) happened simultaneously.

“If you’re no longer the person advising — you’re just sitting and saying, ‘You tell me your experience with inserts, and I’ll tell you what we offer and how those align’ — it’s better,” Ellrodt said.  

Over the course of the semester, the group helped recruit 35 participants, going to their homes to measure windows and signing them up for shifts at the community workshop. �ֲ���ý students, faculty, and staff also helped fill out the ranks of volunteers.

At the second workshop shift, Auburn resident Claire Poirier and her sister, Lise Schulze, worked together to attach double-sided tape to the window frames before another group wrapped the frames in plastic.

The apartment building where Poirier lives with some of her children and grandchildren can get drafty, she said.

The inserts would “be a really good heat saver for me, because my windows are wicked old and it’s too expensive to replace them,” she said.

Griffin Golden ’20 and a community member move through the process of finishing window frames with weatherstripping. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

From participants’ stories, Ellrodt, Woodworth, and Golden began to identify reasons why people would sign up for inserts and help build them, and reasons why they wouldn’t or couldn’t. They laid them out for Window Dressers staff and volunteers, as well their professors, in a presentation in early December.

The incentives for participating — lower heating costs, the ease of getting to the Nutrition Center for the workshop, rave reviews from family and friends, the fact that the inserts don’t damage windows — were numerous.

Also numerous were the barriers. Some participants didn’t speak English; others felt uncomfortable getting the inserts without landlord approval; still others couldn’t attend a workshop because of work or childcare conflicts.

As they recruited participants and measured their windows, the team was able to “convert a lot of these barriers into incentives,” Ellrodt said.

Camille Parrish (right) and Lisbon Falls resident Val Cargill wrap a pine frame. Parrish is a lecturer and learning associate in Environmental Studies.  (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

For example, some people did not speak English, but it was easy to label the inserts in other languages. In other cases, people were reluctant to sign up because they didn’t have vehicles to transport the inserts home from the nutrition center.

“We saw that coming, so we ended up transporting 80, 90 inserts to people’s homes instead,” Ellrodt said. 

The team also recommended strategies local coordinators could use to recruit special-rate participants: Ask a trusted community partner to introduce Window Dressers volunteers and emphasize that the inserts are free. Hold the workshop in a familiar location close to people’s homes, and offer varied and flexible shift times. Put a special-rate section on the Window Dressers website.

Train volunteers one-on-one with physical demonstrations so that knowing English isn’t necessary to participate, or get family, friends, or volunteers to translate. (Val Cargill of Lisbon Falls, a workshop participant who came to the presentation, volunteered on the spot to interpret for Spanish and Portuguese speakers.)

Seaton said some local coordinators in other Maine towns will start using the �ֲ���ý students’ suggestions right away.

Grace Ellrodt ’20, Griffin Golden ’19, and Newell Woodworth ’19 present the findings of their semester-long research project to an audience of Window Dressers staff and volunteers, community workshop participants, and �ֲ���ý students and professors at Lewiston Public Library on Dec. 6 . (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Working with them “was a fantastic experience,” she said. “They were really thoughtful about how to set up the project; they offered great suggestions; they were incredibly committed, and followed through with everything.”

“One of the fantastic things about community-engaged learning programs and Window Dressers is that it gives you a really meaningful local, personal action to do,” Seaton added. “Students develop personal relationships with these families, they see the need, and they’re able to make a meaningful difference in these families’ lives.”  

The measures farmers can take to protect water and soil are well-known, says Francis Eanes, a visiting assistant professor of environmental studies at �ֲ���ý.

What’s less understood, he says, is “what sorts of cultural, social, and economic factors motivate any given farmer to actually implement those practices on their farm.”

It’s likely that farmers are influenced in overt ways. The federal , for example, gives farmers advice and financial incentives to reduce pollution.

Now, according to a study led by Eanes and published in the journal in November, we know of another potential influencer not normally associated with conservation: crop advisers.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Francis Eanes poses in his Hedge Hall Office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Crop advisers work independently or for retailers like seed or fertilizer companies, helping farmers be more productive and efficient.

Because advisers offer value, farmers are likely to follow their advice, Eanes says.

“Farmers believe these folks understand the agronomics,” he says. Advisers “understand the context, and they’re working in the best interest of the farmer.”

That’s also the experience of ’78, a crop adviser certified by the American Society of Agronomy who specializes in dairy farming in Maine. He says farmers trust the advice they’ve paid to get.

Kersbergen, an extension professor for sustainable dairy and forage systems with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, has helped Maine dairy farmers go organic in recent years and researched pasture and forage systems for dairy cows, farm safety, and soil health. While he still works directly with dairy farmers, he now also runs seminars, helps would-be crop advisers study for the certification exam, and provides recertification training.

Kersbergen says farmers turn to crop advisers for all manner of farm management decisions.

“The trend has been for farmers to hire crop advisers to provide pest management advice as well as manure, nutrient, and herbicide-pesticide advice,” he says.

Rick Kersbergen ’78 (at left), a professor at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, visits an organic dairy farm. (Courtesy of Rick Kersbergen)

That influence, Eanes and a team of coauthors found, could be directed to conservation. Before coming to �ֲ���ý, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Purdue University’s lab, which has explored more generally how to get farmers to adopt conservation practices.

In collaboration with , the group surveyed farmers in the Saginaw Bay region of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where phosphorus and nitrogen from farms can get into waterways and end up in the Great Lakes, creating algae blooms and dead zones.

Crop advisers can and often do help farmers with conservation. The advice is just not framed that way.

They asked the farmers how likely they were to follow crop advisers’ recommendations on “conservation” generally, and how likely they were to follow crop advisers’ recommendations on specific practices that are relevant to other aspects of farm management.

For conservation advice, farmers said crop advisers were only “somewhat influential,” the surveyors found. But farmers said crop advisers were “very influential” on their decisions to adopt practices related to soil testing and crop disease — practices that themselves help reduce pollution.

The results tell Eanes that crop advisers can and often do help farmers with conservation. The advice is just not framed that way. For example, crop advisers often recommend variable-rate nutrient application, which means applying fertilizers where they’re most needed in a field. It’s better for the environment and for farmers’ yields.

“Where production and conservation practices overlap is where I think crop advisers have the largest potential to be influential,” Eanes says.

Though Eanes’ study focused on the Midwest, it’s easy for Kersbergen to see the same overlap in New England. Many conservation practices make sense from a production or financial standpoint — for example, the requirements for organic or non-GMO certification often have a conservation component.

The problem is that it can be difficult to see an immediate return on a conservation-related investment.

“When we talk about conservation on a farm, we’re talking about resources we’re trying to protect — whether land, soil, water, or air — which are integral for farmers to survive,” Kersbergen says.

“The real issue for most farmers, at least a lot of farmers I work with, is that the financial implications of conservation don’t necessarily show themselves in the short term.”

Eanes thinks conservation-focused nonprofits and government agencies should work directly with crop advisers to steer farmers toward practices that both improve yield and reduce pollution.

And according to a second study that Eanes says will be published next year, crop advisers might be on board.

“They love conservation practices and see themselves as being really influential on farmers’ decision-making,” he says. 

The hurdle, Eanes says, is that conservation agencies often don’t engage crop advisers to help shape the agencies’ own programs. There are also “institutional differences,” he says.

“Crop advisers see themselves in the private sector as being much more nimble and moving very quickly,” Eanes says.“They see conservation programs as being bureaucratic, very paperwork-dominated.”

Nevertheless, as both cooperative extension services and other public agencies that promote conservation shrink, crop advisers may be the only ones who can reconcile government regulations, farmers’ economic and production needs, and the health of the environment.

“For farmers to stay viable given the resources we have, conservation needs to be a big part of their whole farm system,” Kersbergen says.