Saving The Gulf Of Maine
The Gulf of Maine stretches from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, and is home to one of the world's richest ecosystems.
Retired teacher John Terry has dedicated himself to preserving it for future generations.
As Mary Calvi of WCBS-TV in New York reported on The Early Show Tuesday, Terry also tries, along the way, to encourage in young people the same passion he feels for protecting the environment.
Terry founded the Gulf of Maine Institute seven years ago to further his goal of inspiring student environmental leaders at summer workshops, and throughout the year.
"These young people who go through this program are going to be citizen stewards the rest of their lives," Terry said.
"He's always telling us to get out there, and to talk to adults and he always reassures us that the adults will listen to us and we do have a voice," institute volunteer Emma Rosenbaum told Calvi.
On a recent cold, windy day, Calvi accompanied Terry to Massachusetts' magnificent Great Marsh.
Later, she observed, "You could have chosen to pick up the golf clubs, go out and play golf every day, relax. Not work."
"How dull is that?" Terry asked with a laugh.
"You decided to take over the Gulf of Maine watershed" instead, Calvi remarked.
One project the institute is involved in is based just north of Boston, in Chelsea, an environmentally overburdened community with high asthma rates. It's part of the Gulf of Maine watershed.
Terry is working with student activists from a non-profit group named Chelsea Green Space to reclaim the polluted community.
One volunteer there, Lauren Doucette, lives across the street from Mill Creek, a once-abandoned salt marsh clogged with garbage that Lauren and Green Space helped bring back to life.
"I look back on Chelsea," she said, "When I first thought of it, like, 'Wow, this is just a dirty city, and nobody can do anything about it.' But then, as I grew into Green Space, I realized that, wow, you really can do something if you put your mind to it."
Fellow Chelsea Green Space volunteer Dounte Ruelas says, "I'm proud. I tell people … when they ask me what I am, 'An environmental activist, man! ' "
In nearby Newburyport High School, students from Terry's institute are working with Mass Audubon and the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, trying to stop the spread of an invasive plant, pepper weed, which chokes out native species.
"It's our community and we want to see that the marsh is preserved," volunteer Rosenbaum explains.
She helped pull out truckloads of pepper weed last summer. Sites have been carefully mapped in winter so permits can be filed for pulling in protected wetlands again this year.
"What we need to do," Terry points out, "is do what these young people are doing. We need to get out and start doing things about the world that we live in."
A grateful Terry says people approaching retirement should rethink what they're doing: "Rethink and start up again, because it isn't over."
He is already recruiting student volunteers for the institute's projects this summer.