A Water Filled Puzzle Piece
STORY By abby audenino
When Emma Butzler first came to Marist College, she had no idea that by her senior year, she’d be knee deep in a stream filled with trash and fecal matter.
While it’s not the most glamorous, Butzler is doing work that is crucial for the Hudson Valley environment. Butzler, an Environmental Science major, developed an independent research project that allowed her to spend the summer between her junior and senior year submerged in the Fall Kill Stream.
Butzler has been surrounded by water for nearly as long as she can remember. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, she recalls spending lots of time outside kayaking, canoeing and swimming — anything so her childhood wasn’t “stuck to a TV screen.”
She spent much of her summers as a kid searching for good swimming spots in creeks, streams and lakes – any body of water that she could find really – so it’s no surprise that she’s now the captain of the Marist Women’s Swim Team.
“I kind of realized after I came to college, how I grew up was very, very different from a lot of my friends,” Butzler laughed. She recalled that her nearest mall growing up was 30 minutes away, and that she never had the luxury of being able to walk out her front door and down the road to a Dunkin’ Donuts. But because of the environment that she grew up in, she believes that she values water in a unique way.
“I had this appreciation for nature and water, especially water resources, because it was really tied to my childhood and a lot of my memories as a kid involved streams and rivers,” Butzler said.
Her love of water led her to walk 12 miles through the Fall Kill stream during the summer, collecting water samples and interacting with local residents.
“I realized the stream has a lot of water quality issues, but it’s an underutilized resource,” Butzler said. “I started thinking about how this could be a resource for the community if we could figure out a way to make the stream healthier.”
Throughout her research, Butzler collected nitrates that indicated fecal bacteria in the water, both in the densely populated areas and not-so densely populated areas. This was especially concerning when factoring in the amount of trash strewn throughout the stream as well. These samples provided invaluable data to kickstart Butzler’s end-goal of addressing the water quality issue.
Butzler describes the Fall Kill stream as a class C stream, which means that people shouldn’t swim in or touch the water. For reference, water in a class A stream is so healthy that it is safe to drink.
Additionally, the Fall Kill stream runs through countless backyards – so naturally, Emma had to do a lot of knocking on doors to ask for permission to walk through the stream. “I really needed that perspective from the people who live right next to the stream to realize what the issue is and how complex it is,” Butzler said.
What began as an independent research project soon transformed into something much bigger. “Walking through the stream made me realize that this resource is so much more than just this gross stream. It goes through people’s backyards and it’s part of people’s lives,” Butzler said.
Illustration by Amanda Nessel
With the help of the City of Poughkeepsie and the Environmental Science faculty at Marist, Butzler helped to develop a capstone project proposal that allows her and her classmates to address current waste management policies with the goal of keeping trash out of the stream and the streets.
The three-part project includes a trash assessment of the stream and the streets, a sanitation survey to determine where the trash is entering the water and a community cleanup. Additionally, Butzler and her class collaborate with an environmental education program, which allows local high school students to experience the environmental work first-hand.
“Allowing these high schoolers to be involved in their community environmental issues is really important because when you get them exposed at a young age, it opens up doors and ideas to solve some of these issues,” Butzler said. “It creates passion, brings in different perspectives and creates an appreciation for the area as well.”
Butzler explained that one of the project’s main priorities is educating the community and presenting the data in a way that is easy to understand. Butzler and her classmates are working to create a clean, comprehensive map that will allow residents to see the trash problem in relation to where they live. She believes this will be beneficial for residents to see how their actions are impacting the stream and the streets in Poughkeepsie.
Perhaps most importantly, Butzler’s work with her fellow students and other environmentalists in the Hudson Valley Community have helped her to realize that it often takes a village to make a change. “People cannot solve environmental issues alone. You need support from all different directions, and you need different perspectives because environmental issues are so complex and interdisciplinary.”
While Butzler’s capstone project may be coming to a close, her work with the Fall Kill stream will continue to impact the environment and the City of Poughkeepsie far into the future. “This can be a resource for the community and so much more – my work was just one piece of a bigger puzzle.”
Photography by Nick Spina