Young Change Makers: Why and How Mackenzie Feldman and Bridget Gustafson of Herbicide-Free Campus Are Helping To Change Our World
An Interview With Penny Bauder
Don’t take no for an answer. If you ever get discouraged (and trust us, you will), just remember that there are so many people supporting you from afar. You are on the right side of history, and anything that changes the world takes a lot of time, patience, and grit. When you hit a wall, you just need to find a way around it. And trust us, there always is a way. You got this!
As part of my series about young people who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mackenzie Feldman and Bridget Gustafson.
Mackenzie Feldman and Bridget Gustafson created Herbicide-Free Campus, a youth-led organization that empowers the next generation of environmental leaders to create a safer, more sustainable environment for all, by starting locally and advocating for organic land care on their college campuses. While attending UC Berkeley, Mackenzie and Bridget successfully banned herbicides from their beach volleyball courts and expanded the campaign to the rest of campus. Since 2017, HFC has supported campaigns to end the use of synthetic herbicides in over a dozen colleges across the country.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit how you grew up?
Mackenzie: I was born and raised on the island of Oahu, Hawai’i. Growing up in Hawai’i, a place with limited natural resources, I learned the importance of protecting the environment at an early age. I experienced the effects that corporate agribusiness and the resulting pesticide exposure had, and continues to have, on my community. Simultaneously, I witnessed the power of the Hawaiian food sovereignty movement made up of grassroots organizers working towards a fair and sustainable food system.
Bridget: I grew up in a town in Illinois that is home to my whole extended family. My two older brothers and I were incredibly active and could either be found playing outside or reading. Growing up in the Midwest, the only surrounding landscape was monoculture corn and soy, of course, often drenched in herbicides. Brain tumors and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, both cancers linked to glyphosate (the main ingredient in the most widely used herbicide Roundup) gravely affected my family and my community at large, and diagnosis after diagnosis, we could not ignore the correlation between these exposures to chemicals and occurrence of disease. My home and hometown are where my passion for creating and protecting non-toxic communities originates from.
Is there a particular book or organization that made a significant impact on you growing up? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
Mackenzie: When I was in high school, I came across this book at an event, Facing Hawai’i’s Future, written by the organization Hawai’i Seed. This was my first introduction to the pesticide problem in Hawai’i. It brought light to the grassroots movement happening on the islands in which everyday folks were standing up to corporations and working to address the excessive pesticide use by GMO companies, particularly on Maui and throughout Kauai County. It really inspired me, and I knew that one day, I would figure out a way to join the movement. If you’re interested in learning more, this film does an amazing job telling the story.
Bridget: The Harry Potter series. I think getting to read the books and visualize that fantasy world in my own mind before the movies came out allowed me to build my imagination, something that has been so crucial to the activism and organizing work we do at HFC that requires creating and imagining ways to change landscaping practices that have become so entrenched in common practice.
How do you define “Making A Difference”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
We view making a difference in terms of longevity. We want our mission to be self-sustaining, especially since we’re working with college students who typically rotate out of our fellowship every year, and out of college every four years. A lot of our work is focused on imparting the knowledge we’ve curated throughout our work advocating against synthetic herbicides and sharing it in a way that can be passed down through generations.
We give students the tools and training from top to bottom- starting a student group, getting a resolution passed in the student government, and advocating for high-level policies so that the work they do will live on after they leave campus. We trust that our student fellows will take the organizing skills they’ve learned from us beyond graduation to become engaged citizens working for environmental justice in far-reaching ways.
Also, tangibly, our work towards longevity looks like bringing in a professional organic horticulturist to train groundskeepers in a kind of land management that doesn’t involve pesticides and reframing their jobs as caretakers of the soil instead of weed killers. Then, groundskeepers/landscapers are able to take what they’ve learned in our sessions and apply it to the green spaces they manage on campus and beyond, eventually showing their successors in groundskeeping how to carry on their organic work.
Ok super. Let’s now jump to the main part of our interview. You are currently leading an organization that aims to make a social impact. Can you tell us a bit about what you and your organization are trying to change in our world today?
Herbicide-Free Campus is working to train students to advocate for the reduction and eventual elimination of herbicides on their college campuses by working with groundskeepers to transition to organic land care. Although we focus on eliminating herbicides, we’re really a youth-empowerment group giving students advocacy tools and helping them realize that they have what it takes to make this change on their own campuses and beyond.
We started Herbicide-Free Campus as undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. We played on the UC Berkeley Beach Volleyball team, and one morning when we showed up for practice, our coach cautioned us not to retrieve the balls if they rolled off the court. Why? Because the surrounding area had just been sprayed with an herbicide.
We asked our coach to connect us with the Athletic Grounds Manager who informed us that he had been spraying Ranger Pro, which contains the active ingredient glyphosate, which was declared a probable carcinogen by the World Health Organization in 2015. The Grounds Manager told us he was willing to stop spraying, but he just didn’t have the staff capacity to pick the weeds. We looked around and volunteered our 19-person volleyball team to help him pick the weeds so he wouldn’t have to spray Ranger Pro.
When he agreed, we thought it was remarkable how receptive he was to our help. Perhaps we could take this same approach to the rest of campus and reduce our dependence on chemicals by working together. Mackenzie wrote an op-ed for The Daily Californian after the day at the courts, and it generated a lot of support from the greater Berkeley community. It was then that we realized we were not alone- there were many people both on and off campus who supported the end of herbicide use on our green spaces and beyond.
We worked with the Grounds Manager to conduct an organic pilot project on the two largest green spaces on campus. Now, UC Berkeley has almost entirely eliminated the use of herbicides from its campus. In the four years since its creation, we have expanded the campaign first to other University of California schools, and then to universities nationwide. To date, we have worked with over 50 student fellows across 20 college campuses in the United States and successfully led a campaign to ban glyphosate-based herbicides from all 10 of the University of California campuses as well as every public school in Hawai’i.
In 2021, we launched the HFC Accelerator Program, a one-year intensive student fellowship for 6 schools in 6 states. Our goal by the end of 2021 is to support these students in pushing for policy that reduces and eventually eliminates herbicides from their campuses.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
Mackenzie: As I mentioned before, I grew up in Hawai’i, which is ground zero for industrial agriculture. The majority of GMO seed corn is developed on our islands, meaning these corporations are testing the seeds’ resistance to pesticides, and as a result, an immense amount of Restricted Use Pesticides (RUP’s) are being sprayed in close proximity to communities and schools. In high school I began to hear of “cancer clusters” of communities living near the testing sites and a dramatic increase in birth defects. There was a huge grassroots movement to get a moratorium on the cultivation of GM crops until an environmental impact study could be conducted, and the grassroots movement ended up winning! Regrettably, the ballot measure’s result was struck down in federal court.
When I went on to college at UC Berkeley, I was inspired to study Society and Environment and Food Systems so that I could one day become an advocate and work to protect my community from future pesticide poisoning. That day during volleyball practice when our coach warned us not to run into the grass because it had recently been sprayed with weed killer, I realized that exactly what I was hoping to advocate against post-graduation was right at my feet, I knew I couldn’t ignore it. Bridget, a teammate of mine, was the first to respond when I voiced my frustration with the harmful chemicals being sprayed so close to us and putting our health in danger.
Bridget: Before moving to Berkeley for college, I lived in the Midwest, where I was used to driving more than four hours without seeing anything but genetically modified, crop-dusted corn fields. Additionally, I watched loved ones be diagnosed with illnesses that have now been linked to herbicide exposure. Mackenzie and I had both seen the dangers that herbicides and pesticides had in our own communities, so on that day of practice, the threat of these chemicals was more than theoretical for us.
Many of us have ideas, dreams, and passions, but never manifest it. They don’t get up and just do it. But you did. Was there an “Aha Moment” that made you decide that you were actually going to step up and do it? What was that final trigger?
That day on the volleyball court in 2017 was the beginning of Herbicide-Free Campus, and our most valuable lesson came early on when we spoke with the Athletics Grounds Manager. We learned that it was possible to accomplish both parties’ goals- ours to eliminate herbicides and his to remove the weeds efficiently- by substituting toxic weed killers with willing hands. Our aha moment was realizing that our work in achieving an herbicide-free campus must start with meeting the needs of the groundskeepers.
Most maintenance workers are underpaid and undervalued, and groundskeepers are no exception. Groundskeepers at University of California schools are spread much too thin, trying to manage huge swaths of areas and maintain them to a certain aesthetic standard. Offering our group of 19 girls to help pick the weeds and take this task off the groundskeeper’s plate turned out to be a symbiotic relationship, helping the groundskeeper reduce his workload while meeting our goal of halting the herbicide use on our athletic field. This made us realize that with these same tactics of offering to help, we could expand this campaign to the rest of campus and get herbicides eliminated from the entire school… which is exactly what we did.
Many young people don’t know the steps to take to start a new organization. But you did. What are some of the things or steps you took to get your project started?
After talking with the Athletic Grounds Manager and successfully convincing him to stop spraying Ranger Pro, we talked to every single person we could, knowing full well that we weren’t experts in the field but that we were ready to learn everything we could for this cause that we cared about. We just wanted to understand why something that was known to be so harmful was so ubiquitous across campuses simply for aesthetic purposes! We talked to folks in the business school and environmental health and safety department; professors working in toxicology and human health; and staff working in landscape architecture. We understood that we needed to take a step back and understand the literal landscape before diving in so we weren’t arguing for or against something without understanding the full picture.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?
Mackenzie: I happened to be in San Francisco in the summer of 2018 after graduation and I heard that there was a trial of a former groundskeeper, Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, who was suing Monsanto (now Bayer) after being diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which had been linked to the daily spraying of his glyphosate-based herbicides. We knew that Lee Johnson’s case would have ripple effects across the country. I was able to pass a note to Lee during the trial telling him how much I admired him and sharing the work we were doing with Herbicide-Free Cal. Once the trial was over, he reached out over email to ask how he could get involved. Lee won his case and is still fighting for his life with the debilitating disease, but he now serves as an Advisory Board member and continues to join us in our public advocacy work. His story reminds us how important it is to work hand-in-hand with groundskeepers like Lee, because at the end of the day, they are most exposed to the harms of synthetic pesticides and herbicides.
Bridget: It’s really cool that we have Lee as a friend, ally, and advisor on our board. He is one of the many reasons why we keep doing this work. Groundskeepers, like Lee, are often invisible to those who just have eyes for maintaining lawns and green spaces to a certain standard and don’t think about the people behind their upkeep. Unfortunately, Lee is just one of many hundreds of thousands of people who have experienced adverse health effects from close contact with these harmful chemicals, and all of those people have friends and families who care about them and want them to live long, healthy lives. So we also remain grounded in that, remembering that this large-scale issue is always rooted in individuals at the end of the day.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson or take away you learned from that?
Mackenzie: When we first started reaching out to UC Berkeley groundskeeper, we aggressively bombarded him with emails and were ignored each time. Bridget suggested we alter our approach and shift the conversation toward what we could do for him and express our gratitude for all the work he was already doing, which is a very Bridget suggestion. Lo and behold, he responded in just ten minutes! This was a very important lesson for us- to remember to meet the groundskeepers where they are. Now we teach all our student fellows how to approach and work in tandem with the groundskeepers and landscapers on campus.
Bridget: Being in the advocacy space, we often feel like we always have to be ready to fight- fight Big Ag, fight herbicide manufacturers and anyone else who disagrees with an organic approach. When we started we just knew that these groundskeepers were doing something we didn’t like, and we felt like we needed to come in with guns blazing to get them to stop spraying pesticides and herbicides. But what’s really happening is that these groundskeepers are in a Catch-22 situation- they need to get a specific job done in very large spaces with little resources, and they’re taught the most efficient (although not the safest) way to maintain these green spaces free of weeds and pests, so they spray chemicals to do that. It’s not really the groundskeeper as an individual deciding to spray Round-Up because it’s their favorite method, it’s that this is often their only option. We had to remember to focus on the commonalities between us- wanting safer green spaces.
None of us can be successful without some help along the way. Did you have mentors or cheerleaders who helped you to succeed? Can you tell us a story about their influence?
There are so many mentors and supporters who guided us in our campaign to go completely organic, starting with Lee Johnson, of course.
But before meeting Lee and after the day on the beach volleyball court when we decided to advocate against pesticides, I wrote an op-ed in the school paper that was read by a woman named Susan Junfish from Parents for a Safer Environment. She encouraged us to apply for a grant to bring in a professional horticulturist, Chip Osborne, to train UC Berkeley’s Ground Manager and his crew in organic land care. He agreed, and we were able to choose the two largest green spaces on campus to go organic. Chip taught the groundskeepers how to do soil testing and use the results to conduct practices like over-seeding, aeration, and compost tea to balance the soil and allow the grass to outcompete the weeds. Theron, the Grounds Manager, has been excited about it ever since, and now nearly all of Berkeley’s campus is organic. Philip Stark, the Associate Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at UC Berkeley and an avid forager, was also an early supporter of ours. He had actually been working to ban herbicides on campus but hadn’t yet thought of working with a student group. He’s now on our Advisory Board and takes students on on-campus walks to learn about the medicinal and herbal properties of weeds.
Without saying specific names, can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
Bridget: I’ve held this story close to my heart since the day that it happened. During one of our student workdays, I was chatting with one of the Berkeley groundskeepers, and he stopped for a moment and got serious. He told me, I’m grateful that we are doing these student workdays and we’re working alongside one another. It makes me hopeful that these students will learn that it is me and my crew that takes care of this campus, and hopefully that will make them less likely to throw a piece of trash on the ground knowing that we’ll be the ones picking it up.
What was being said in that moment was that he was grateful to be seen, as we all are. It reminds me that the ripples of our organic lawn care advocacy go beyond the physical health of groundskeepers and students, it’s also about forging human relationships and breaking down the social structures that can separate us from the maintenance staff. It’s reminding our students that the campus that they love so much is only made possible by these groundskeepers, landscapers, janitorial staff and other maintenance workers.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
1.Call on your school board and school administration to eliminate the spraying of synthetic herbicides on school grounds and advocate for a transition to organic land care. There are examples all over the world where this has been done, so you won’t be the first! See this list for examples of where this has been successful.
2. Call on governments and corporations to phase-out and ban HHPs (highly hazardous pesticides), to be replaced with safe, sustainable and ecological methods of pest control.
3. Start with your own home garden. On a per acre basis, American homeowners use 10 times more pesticides than what is used on U.S. farms. Here are some tools for healthy gardening and lawn care. Once you make this change in your own backyard and are ready to advocate for more, check out this page to help inspire your neighbors and your HOA (Homeowners Association).
Fantastic. Here is the main question of the interview. What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each).
1. Talk to anyone and everyone. When we first began, we scheduled meetings or phone calls with just about everyone we could think of, whether they were directly related to this issue or not. Funnily enough, we found one of our greatest allies (who is still on the HFC Advisory Board to this day) in the Haas Business School at UC Berkeley, a school that many environmentally-focused students and faculty are in conflict with. You really never know who could be your ally… so why not open every door?
2. Effective communication, network building, and “across the aisle” organizing happens when you see and treat others the way you’d like to be treated, no matter what side of the issue you perceive them to be on. This sounds simple, but it really revolutionized our campaign. The people we originally viewed as our “opposition” were groundskeepers (aka the folks who sprayed herbicides) and now collaboration and teamwork with groundskeepers is one of the most vital pieces of our organizing strategy.
3. Don’t be afraid to not know something. One of the best ways you can connect with someone or more wholly understand an issue is by hearing how someone else sees and processes it. We would’ve never achieved herbicide-free campus grounds if we pretended like we had all the answers from the start.
4. It is crucial to constantly bring others into your work. You might think you need to wait until your campaign is officially “established” until you are ready to host large meetings and assign people roles, but it is never too early to invite others to brainstorm with you. Your campaign will only go so far until you bring new energy into the fold!
5. Don’t take no for an answer. If you ever get discouraged (and trust us, you will), just remember that there are so many people supporting you from afar. You are on the right side of history, and anything that changes the world takes a lot of time, patience, and grit. When you hit a wall, you just need to find a way around it. And trust us, there always is a way. You got this!
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
If you see a problem around you, and you think you have ANY chance of eliminating that problem or offering a solution to improve it, you shouldn’t ignore that call. There’s a reason you are in that moment in time and place, and you shouldn’t shy away from that. It’s our responsibility to protect people and the planet for the generations that come after us.
It can be as simple as picking up trash on the side of the road. There is so much theorizing in academia and we tend to get in our heads, but there is incredible power in the actual doing.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Mackenzie: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez!!!!
Bridget: Jesmyn Ward. Her writing has both made a home for me and shown me worlds and lives that have expanded my understanding of this country. I live in a small, rural town very similar to the one she describes growing up in and would love to get to talk to her about that.
How can our readers follow you online?
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/herbicidefreecampus/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/herbicidefreecampus
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
Young Change Makers: Why and How Mackenzie Feldman and Bridget Gustafson of Herbicide-Free Campus… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.