Across the planet, Sidwell Friends alumni are tackling environmental crises. Here is how some of them are making a difference. 

From the eroding shores of the Chesapeake Bay to the misty forests of the Pacific Northwest to the rural communities of sub- Saharan Africa, determined Sidwell Friends alumni across generations are carving out their own niches in the fight against climate change. Some are tracking the vibrancy of wildlife in Costa Rica, or teaching students how pollution is muddying the waters of their local estuary, or making environmental financing more accessible. All are making a difference. Here are a few of their stories. 

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The Sounds of Biodiversity

During days when he hiked through one of Costa Rica’s mountainous cloud forests at sunrise, where vast blankets of fog rolled through the thin air, Giacomo Delgado ’15 sometimes came across just the spot where he might catch a glimpse of the sun’s rays breaking through the clouds to illuminate sections of the valley below. Or, after painstakingly making his way through the country’s dense forests, he would happen upon a pack of foraging wild pigs, called peccaries, who would pause, look at him momentarily, and then return to their meal.

“Those kinds of unpredictable, magical, natural moments really kept me going in what was a pretty long and excruciating field season,” recalls Delgado.

As a doctoral student at the Swiss university ETH Zurich, Delgado spent several months in Costa Rica in 2022 and 2024 placing, tracking, and retrieving microphones in 600 locations throughout five of the country’s many microclimates. With the collected recordings, Delgado was able to analyze the quantity and diversity of wildlife in Costa Rica to determine that a government program fighting deforestation has largely succeeded.

“By empowering local communities, redistributing wealth, and lowering inequality, we can achieve the restoration and conservation of ecosystems that have traditionally suffered,” Delgado says.

Today, Delgado’s research in ETH Zurich’s Crowther Lab traces the impact of Costa Rica’s Payment for Environmental Services program (PES), which launched in 1996 and pays private citizens who own forested land to conserve their property using sustainable management techniques. The initiative is an effort to combat both deforestation—which ran rampant in Costa Rica during the 1970s and ’80s—and the poverty that many people living in rural areas experience.

Delgado decided to find out whether the payments are working by using the tools of an emerging field known as ecoacoustics. Listening to the natural world can reveal how vibrant any given area might be: Is the soundscape full of varied noises, or are there only a few scarce sounds? How loud are the surroundings? Is the sound frequency changing often, or hardly ever? 

The answers to these questions—and more—can tell researchers whether an area’s wildlife is thriving or struggling. A busy soundscape with lots of frequency changes is likely inhabited by a range of animals making all sorts of noises, whereas a recording that lacks diversity of pitch is probably not home to a jumble of species living side by side. 

Throughout 2022 and 2023, Delgado hiked more than 500 miles across Costa Rica, placing microphones in the country’s microclimates, which include moist and dry tropical forests as well as high mountain cloud forests. Each microphone remained in a site for roughly a week, recording at least 120 hours to capture the full variability of a setting. Delgado estimates he has collected 12 years’ worth of audio, which he runs through software that analyzes its acoustic properties. 

The results, says Delgado, show that Costa Rica’s PES program has succeeded, helping wildlife rebound to pre-deforestation levels. 

“When you allow local stewards of biodiversity to have livelihoods that are not based on destruction and extraction but rather on traditional modes of harmony and coexistence, what we see is that nature is unstoppable,” Delgado says. “It comes back, it flourishes, and it spreads everywhere.” 

The Perfect Classroom for Chesapeake Bay Ecology 

From the bluff overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, Jim Stone ’75 would ask his students to imagine they were in the same spot hundreds of years earlier. Back then, he’d say, the water was so clear that a person could see clams, oysters, and crabs 20 feet below the surface. The trees were so plentiful that a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground— just scurrying from tree branch to tree branch. 

Since Stone started coming to Echo Hill Outdoor School (EHOS) on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the 1960s, he’s seen plenty of changes. As a captain at EHOS, Stone, who retired in January, led students on expeditions that combined ecology, history, and nautical know-how. 

“It’s the perfect classroom,” he says. “It’s got a mile of private sandy beach, and there’s no development around it.” 

Echo Hill is deeply connected to Sidwell Friends. It was officially founded in 1972 by Peter Rice Jr. ’63 and his father, former Lower School Principal Peter Rice Sr. Stone first visited the site as a 3rd grader, when Rice Sr. “came and squeezed me on the shoulder in class and said, ‘James, you should go to camp.’ ” 

At Echo Hill, Stone learned to swim, sail, and water ski. He returned every summer throughout high school and interned there while a senior at Sidwell Friends. After majoring in environmental studies 

at Springfield College, Stone worked in Sidwell’s environmental and outdoor education program before returning to Echo Hill.

“Echo Hill is so fortunate to have a 200-acre freshwater swamp that we use as a lab as well as the bay,” says Stone. “There are plenty of woods. It was a great environment to get you interested in the environment.”

In his class on bay studies, Stone, who holds a U.S. Coast Guard captain’s license, would take groups of students out on the Chesapeake, where they’d discuss the challenges facing America’s largest estuary. “We’d talk about runoff from farms and how the water’s salinity is changing what life can live in the bay,” he says. The groups caught eels and crabs, and Stone taught his students how to identify males and females.

Stone has watched the Chesapeake as its health has ebbed and flowed over the decades. When he was young, Stone remembers, seaweed growing on the bay’s floor would reach six feet tall. As pollutants and farm runoff clogged the Chesapeake, sunlight struggled to permeate the water’s surface, killing off the underwater vegetation—and endangering the aquatic animals that feed on it.

Now, Stone says, there are signs of improvement in the bay’s overall health. An increase in oyster farming has boosted the population of the mollusks, which naturally filter the bay’s water. Plus, state regulation has reduced agricultural runoff, clearing up the Chesapeake’s waters.

Though he’s retired from Echo Hill, Stone stays connected to his beloved Eastern Shore through the Inn at Mitchell House, the bed and breakfast he’s owned with his wife for 38 years. “We’re probably the oldest innkeepers in the U.S.,” says Stone.

A Science Translator for Conservation and Planetary Health 

In her work as a communications specialist at the Planetary Health Alliance based at Johns Hopkins University, Yasmina Ahdab ’15 aims to bring together a range of communities—policymakers, researchers, private citizens, and scientists—to collaborate on solutions that address the spectrum of factors that contribute to the well-being of Earth's natural systems and the human world. 

“Our main goal is to understand how human activity is affecting the environment, what changes are emerging from that, and how that’s affecting human health and the health of other living beings on the planet,” she says. 

Ahdab says her interest in the environment stems from her time at Sidwell Friends, remembering lessons from the Middle School’s wetlands. “We would look for salamanders or vulnerable species and understand why they were important to ecosystems, and how human behavior was impacting these species,” she says. 

In college at New York University, Ahdab developed her own major: wildlife biology, conservation, and visual media. Then, in 2018, she went into the field. 

Ahdab was riding in the back of a pickup truck through the nature reserves of South Africa’s rural Zululand region, when she spotted a pride of at least 10 lions nearby. An amateur wildlife photographer, Ahdab lifted her camera to capture the moment. 

A juvenile male member of the pride took a special interest in Ahdab. “He was sitting there calmly, and he and I were just staring at each other,” she says. The cat let Ahdab take a few photos before he decided he was sick of the paparazzi. “All of a sudden, he started walking toward me, and then running,” says Ahdab—who remained safe as the pickup truck sped away.

Ahdab was in South Africa studying conservation and wildlife biology, and she knew that this was odd behavior for a lion. “I was very confused by this,” she says. “I wanted to understand why this had happened.” Ahdab soon learned that a tuberculosis flareup among wildlife, due to the overpopulation of diseased cattle on farms, infected many of the lions, leaving the predator weak and desperate for prey—and leading to increased attacks on humans in the local reserves.

The experience proved to be a formative moment for Ahdab, spurring her interest in understanding how disparate environmental patterns converge. She went on to earn a master’s degree in ecology, evolution, and conservation research at Imperial College London, studying how human-created environmental patterns were affecting mating and breeding behavior among seabird species in Portugal and Cape Verde in West Africa.

After earning her master’s degree, Ahdab decided that she wanted to pursue science communication. “We have so many solutions to a lot of the issues we talk about, but we’re not collaborating, or people are not aware of the research that’s going on,” she says. She earned a second master’s degree in communications at Hopkins, where she first connected with the Planetary Health Alliance.

“We want to take on the most holistic approach possible,” Ahdab says. “The way the climate is shifting is going to affect how many natural disasters there are. It might induce drought in places. We’re trying to think as holistically as possible about how all of these planetary systems are playing with each other and the role of human action within that.”

Sustainable Infrastructure in Pierce County 

Growing up, Ryan Dicks ’94 would spend summers escaping from the soggy humidity of Washington, DC, in Washington state, visiting family members who lived there. He’d fish and crab along the banks of the Olympic Peninsula’s Hood Canal, wander through lush forests, and generally learn to love the natural world around him. 

Today, as the sustainable resources administrator for Washington’s Pierce County, he’s giving back to the state that turned him into an environmentalist. 

“I was the first sustainability manager in the county at a time when a lot of folks in Pierce County didn’t really understand what the word meant,” he says. “A lot of it was us making it up as we went, but as we’ve gotten further into it, it’s much clearer today what changes need to be made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” 

After graduating from Georgetown University, Dicks worked in land conservation, arranging the purchase of more than 100,000 acres of forest land in Washington state for preservation. At the same time, he was growing more interested in sustainability practices, installing solar panels for his house and converting his home’s reliance on natural gas to electricity. 

“I’m passionate about the subject,” Dicks says, “so people could always tell that I cared in my own life.” 

In 2009, his passion crossed into his professional life as well: He became the first sustainability manager ever in Pierce County, which is home to Tacoma and is the state’s second-most populous county. In his role, he advocates for policies that encourage sustainability practices, oversees green building construction, and pushes to get more electric vehicle chargers installed throughout the county. He also handles the county’s solid-waste division and natural resource issues like agriculture, community gardens, and water quality. 

“I used to staff a one-person shop, and now we have 22 employees,” Dicks says. “It shows that priorities have changed.” 

Dicks also stays connected to nature through his near-daily boating trips on Tacoma’s waterways, where he pursues his primary hobby: wildlife photography. In 2019, Dicks started taking photos, mostly of seals and birds. The next year, just a mile from his home, he spotted a family of orca whales in Puget Sound and started clicking away. “I wanted to show my community that these amazing apex predators live in and around the city of Tacoma,” Dicks says. 

Since then, he has shot orcas breaching in front of Tacoma Dome, a major sports and entertainment venue, as well as Seattle’s Space Needle. His photos have been featured in news outlets and on the city of Tacoma’s Instagram account, and he has started a small photography business called AirWaterLand. (Dicks also photographed the cover image of this issue of the magazine.) 

“It’s been great to see the response and the uptick in whale watching from public parks in Tacoma and Puget Sound over the last couple of years,” Dicks says. “The public awareness is helping to push state and local governments to do more to protect the whales that live in Puget Sound.” 

Electricity for Communities Left in the Dark

For the 15 years that Willie Brent ’83 lived in Beijing and Shanghai, he watched as China became a major economic player on the international stage. As a foreign correspondent for Agence France-Presse and later an entrepreneur in China’s entertainment and media industry, he had a front-row seat to the country’s exponential growth.

“I wanted to be part of that boom,” he says, “but it was also really sobering because it was pretty clear that a billion-plus people industrializing and using the same development model that had been used in the West was not going to be a good recipe for the planet.”

So, when Brent decided he was ready to leave the media industry behind for good, he knew that he wanted to transition into the world of sustainability. He joined the global communications and public relations firm Weber Shandwick to focus on entertainment technology, but when that client fell through, Brent thought, “Well, I’m an entrepreneur—I’ll pitch my chairman and CEO to start a cleantech practice under the firm.”

Though he had no background in cleantech—that is, advancements related to renewable energy, recycling, green transportation, or any other reduction to the environmental harm of an existing technology—Brent “always had a mind-set that anything was possible,” he says. “As a former journalist, I’m a pretty good researcher and gatherer of information, and I networked like crazy before I left China, and when I got back to the U.S., with people who are in that space.”

Brent did eventually develop the climate solutions, energy innovation, and cleantech practice at Weber Shandwick, which he ran for nearly 10 years. He then co-founded a nongovernmental organization called Power for All, which campaigns to end energy poverty in sub-Saharan Africa through access to distributed renewable electricity. 

Now, Brent is chief marketing officer of Husk Power Systems, a company that builds mini-grids that run on solar energy and batteries. “We put up distribution poles and wires, we smart-meter and connect households and businesses in these communities that are off-grid,” says Brent. “They’ve never had electricity.” In fact, the people Husk serves have contributed the least to global emissions and yet are among the world’s most climate-vulnerable populations. So far, Brent estimates, Husk has built roughly 300 mini-grids with 20,000 electrical connections, bringing power to some 500,000 people, primarily across Africa and South Asia. What’s more, Husk has signed a UN compact to build 5,000 more mini-grids by the end of the decade. 

Brent, who lives in Spain, is frequently in Husk’s countries of operations, like Nigeria, India, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to ensure maximum impact from access to electricity. In towns without power, doctors work in darkness, food spoils from sitting in the heat, and ear-splitting diesel generators spew out noxious emissions. “Fast forward to after you’ve installed this mini-grid—it really is night and day,” says Brent. “You’ve got students who are studying with lighting. You’ve got health clinics that are able to deliver a baby in the middle of the night. The impact that you’re making on people’s lives is the most rewarding part for me.” 

How to Finance Renewable Fuels 

While working at the World Bank during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Alethea Dopart ’07 began to feel overwhelmed by the scale of the problem she and her colleagues were facing: trying to make changes in health and education policies in the middle of a global pandemic. 

“I wanted to take a step back and do something different,” she says. 

So, naturally, she turned to a much smaller-scale issue: climate change. 

The challenge may still be vast, but Dopart has focused on a small but essential corner of it—the environmental commodities market. Through her role as senior director of strategic initiatives at Anew Climate, she works mainly in the transportation sector, helping clients meet the criterion for the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program through a combination of lower-carbon fuels, such as renewable natural gas, and credits that displace nonrenewable fuel. 

“These government programs are quite complex, so we have an extensive implementation and operations team who support our clients in making sure they’re meeting the requirements of the program,” Dopart says. (The RFS mandates that transportation fuel sold in the United States contain a specific minimum volume of renewable fuels.) 

Dopart’s work, she says, gets her into the nitty-gritty of climate change policy, requiring her to bring a range of skills to bear to get to a practical solution. “It’s a little bit of solving puzzles, it’s some strategy work, and it’s a lot of advocacy work and working with government regulators,” she says. “Then there’s the commercial aspect. Having that mixed bag, there’s never a dull moment. It feels very tangible and impactful.”

Her drive to solve real-world problems started at Sidwell Friends. “Sidwell really imparted the belief and understanding that each of us as individuals is part of a community,” Dopart says, “and it’s our responsibility and privilege to give back to that community.”

Dopart has seen growing interest in the world of environmental commodity markets, driven by new laws such as the Inflation Reduction Act as well as by ever-more ambitious corporate goals for mitigating climate risks. Increased attention to these markets will eventually translate to increased trust in their effectiveness, she says.

“When you have markets that are new and developing, there are always going to be different iterations,” she says. “I see it as an opportunity to keep refining them.”

Dopart is also optimistic that business schools and other educational institutions will continue to strengthen their offerings in the field of environmental finance. “There isn’t really a robust academic tradition for any of this work,” she says. “I think there’s interest and appetite from students to have these programs, and also demand from companies like mine to have graduates who have an understanding academically of environmental commodities markets.”