the green light: Meet ECO's president and VP, Gina and Becca

A few posts ago, I introduced you to ECO, Moravian’s Environmental Coalition. Now I want you to meet some of the people behind it!

Gina Seier, ECO president, advertising Earth Hour in the HUB.

Gina Seier, ECO president

When I first met Gina Seier, president of ECO, she was a spunky, carefree freshman in a Red Hot Chili Peppers shirt. She and I were part of the 16 freshmen to participate in Moravian’s first ever Living and Learning Community in the brand new HILL on south campus.

Almost three years later, she’s still spunky, but she’s grown up. Now, she’s president of ECO. I asked her why.

“I felt that we could effectively change the club in good ways,” she said. “We wanted to liven it up because it has so much potential to have a big impact on campus.”

And how did the carefree freshman get here? Gina, like other environmental majors, was dunked into the stories, facts, the reality of environmental issues.

In the summer of 2010 she went to Jamaica with Moravian’s missionary trip. That fall, she went to Louisiana to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina.

Gina in the mountains of Ecuador.
Can you imagine farming on slopes like that??

But the pieces really came together last summer, when she spent a month in Ecuador to work with Tierra Viva, a project associated with the non-profit Mountains of Hope.

She worked with different communities in the Andes Mountains, using biointensive techniques to make each community’s garden more sustainable and the communities themselves more self-sufficient.

“Sustainable agriculture,” Gina said, “is a good way to address a lot of social and environmental problems.”

When asked if the experience gave her perspective to bring back to ECO, she said, “Absolutely. It was an application of things that I’ve learned so far, being an Environmental Studies Major.”

Becca Mitchell, ECO Vice President

Becca working on her SOAR project
She had to get over her dislike of fish.

Becca Mitchell, is a Pennsylvania native who—lucky her—moved to Burlington, VT just before entering high school. Now she’s back in PA for college and, like Gina, is also looking to make positive change.

We call Trash on the Patio, last spring’s waste audit event that I featured in one of my recent posts, Becca’s baby. It’s not that she likes trash or anything. Her progressive high school had done waste audits in the past, so Becca was a big champion of bringing an event like that to Moravian.

Becca also had a busy summer. She stayed on campus to work with Dr. Frank Kuserk on a SOAR (Student Opportunities for Academic Research) project. Becca was part of a team that used fish and macro invertebrates as indicators of an ecosystem’s integrity and biotic potential (how healthy the stream is and could be).

Like Gina, Becca took on a leadership role in ECO because she wanted to, “breathe new life into the club.”