MCC’s Sustainability Club Leads the Way in Ramping Up Efforts

Middlesex Community College is doing its part to build and maintain sustainability efforts in the community. Led by Middlesex science faculty member Lisa Lobel, the main purpose of MCC’s Sustainability Club is to create engagement and awareness around learning about sustainability.

“Sustainability is for everybody,” Lobel said. “It’s important to consider, regardless of your chosen profession or path. Our planet is our life support system. For us to live on it, we have to take care of it.”

Lobel wants club and community members to think more about how they can support sustainability in their own lives and on campus. This includes growing food, learning about resources found in the forest, and understanding what conservation is.

One of the major projects the club worked on in the winter was tapping trees on MCC’s Bedford campus for maple syrup. “We learned about which trees to tap, tapped them, collected the sap, boiled it down, and then had a pancake dinner,” Lobel said. “That was really fun and the students were into it.”

This spring and summer, the club has been working in the Community Garden. Club members meet to do some wedding and “keep the momentum of the club going,” according to Lobel. There are also two student workers who will be leading the way in maintaining the garden, including Mike Frye, a Biology Transfer student from Tyngsborough.

“Working in a community garden is a new experience for me, so I am excited to learn about all the parts that make the garden run successfully,” Frye said. “The Sustainability Club is an important place for members to access information from each other on issues and potential solutions to issues in their own communities as well as on each of the campuses. It is one way to show our interconnectedness as we deal with various problems under the umbrella of sustainability. By sharing our concerns and strategies, we are able to share the weight of these larger issues, hopefully making them lighter and more actionable.”

In the Fall, Lobel plans for the club to work with agencies in Lowell on a habitat restoration project for the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. MCC students will help with clean-up, removing invasive species, park visioning, planting and maintaining native species, and social media.

While the club is full of students from her science classes, Lobel wants other majors to get engaged too. Not only is it important on a personal level, but many industries and companies are also looking to be more sustainable, Lobel believes. MCC’s club is helping to provide the knowledge and experience students need to gain a competitive edge upon entering the workforce.

“Businesses are really thinking about how they can promote sustainability,” Lobel said. “If Middlesex students go into the corporate world, they’ll learn it’s an important tenet that businesses want people to think about. Whatever major you are, I want to try to include everybody in the club.”