This college student is using her science degree to help clean up the Baltimore harbor
Alexandra Grayson is using her degree in environmental science to help clean up and transform the Baltimore harbor with the hope that future generations can also enjoy the waterway's ecosystem.Alexandra Grayson is using her degree in environmental science to help clean up and transform the Baltimore harbor with the hope that future generations can also enjoy the waterway's ecosystem.
Video Transcript
ALEXANDRA GRAYSON: Environmental justice scholar, Robert Bullard, described the environment as the places where we live, work, and play. The Baltimore Harbor is a place where everyone in Baltimore has been. We want future generations to be able to enjoy Baltimore's Inner Harbor the same way that we have.
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I'm Alexandra Grayson, I'm an interdisciplinary climate scholar and activist. For college, I ended up going to Howard University studying environmental science with minors in economics and biology. The summer before I got to Howard I worked at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology. I've been drawn to research, because of the ability for it to affect change. I helped out with the floating wetlands project that you can see behind us right now.
CHARMAINE BAHLENBURG: And if you look around, the entire landscape it's actually [INAUDIBLE] and there is no way for us to convert that back to a living shoreline. So we kind of miss out on the natural ecosystem services that wetlands provide. And Alexandra did a lot of the science, the hard science related to the DNA barcoding of the life in the Harbor.
ALEXANDRA GRAYSON: We studied how much these wetlands are contributing to increasing biodiversity and increasing water quality in the Harbor. More projects like this need to go up, because we'll be facing more extreme weather and climate threats as climate change progresses. All of the research that I've done, it's rooted in what can be most useful for policymakers and environmental justice communities. As much as we can lean on fact in our decision and policy making, I think we'll be better off.
