project overview

what we’re doing (events)

we.grow.eco is a small, grassroots project. For our first undertaking, Chauncey Foster is walking across the country. He left Virginia Beach on March 20th, and is headed to San Francisco, CA, where he’ll arrive around early January 2022. Noah Mertz is driving the support vehicle in order to help out with program coordination and documentation.

Along the way, we are coordinating and facilitating community clean-up events in collaboration with local organizations (where we pick up trash together & document our haul using the One Piece A Day app), conducting food walks (where we make a bunch of burritos and deliver them to hungry folks and those experiencing houselessness), organizing arts & sustainability festivals, and engaging in conversations with anyone and everyone we encounter along the way with the aim of seeking mutual understanding and on-the-ground exposure to a wider slice of our nation.

why we’re doing it (purpose)

We promote sustainable and coalescent relationships within communities by encouraging and facilitating unifying actions that clean up our environments and strengthen our capacity to critically think about the way we interact with and within our ecosphere.

WE — build grassroots power-building to address root causes of problems: We, the global community, are facing an environmental crisis of all-encompassing scale and near-unfathomable complexity. An awareness of the countless climate change-related challenges facing communities around the world is growing, and with it, a common and understandable feeling powerless and hopeless, considering the sweeping changes needed in our shrinking window of opportunity. What we do know is that, not only are we in this together, but we have to fix it together. A key element to addressing the root causes of climate change (ongoing resource extraction and deforestation, outmoded energy and transit infrastructures, unsustainable agricultural practices) is the capacity to organize a critical mass of people to challenge entrenched powers, as well as habits and expectations, and mobilizing this mass through effective civic engagement.

GROW — actionable change: We encourage people we meet to pick up one piece of trash a day and put it in its rightful place. We are documenting the trash we pick up using the One Piece A Day app to build a global dataset that can be used to challenge the root causes of single-use plastic pollution in the future. The goal is to use the simple and accessible action of picking up a piece of trash as an invitation to consider the full life-cycle of a piece of litter — where it comes from (how it is produced, and what policies allow for this) and where it is headed (landfills, the ocean, and a long period of decomposition that can harm the environment).

ECO — questioning our habits of action and thought: We have not arrived at this precarious environmental state of affairs for no reason. Embedded in our ideology, and operating at the level of the pre-conscious psyche, is an assumed anthropocentrism which identifies the human as the primary subject of autonomy and authority, whose perspective and interests supersede all others. Our aim is to aid in the shifting from this anthropocentric to an ecocentric one — from “ego” to “eco.” When we approach our lives from an ecocentric perspective, we recognize the reality that humans are inextricably intertwined with our environments. We can then reframe our challenges — from the smallest to the largest — in a way that allows us to pursue solutions that benefit humanity through benefitting our environments, using sustainability, balance, diversity, and adaptability as guiding principles.

who we are

Chauncey and Noah met as experiential environmental education instructors and then program coordinators at Sierra Nevada Journeys, an outdoor school in northern California. 

Chauncey (he/him) is from Hampton, Virginia and has a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Biology from St. Andrews University in Laurinburg, NC. He has experience in applied ecology, curriculum development, conservation, outdoor and classroom education, and program coordination.

Noah (he/they) is from near Boston, Massachusetts, and has a bachelor's degree in English and French from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He has experience in outdoor and classroom education, program coordination, local political organizing, writing, and photography.

 previous coverage