An Activist for Protecting the Environment - Collen Boland '01
By the time Collen Boland ’01 arrived in Ithaca, she had traveled to more than 20 countries with the U.S. military and served in the White House’s National Space Council.
“Whether I was looking at images of Earth from outer space or noting how water contamination was fueling conflict and making children sick in places like Sri Lanka or the Philippines, I became sensitized to environmental issues and the ways they impact the human condition, specifically our sense of security and belonging,” says Boland, a retired veteran of the Army and Air Force. “These are fundamental issues of human development.”
Since graduating, Boland has dedicated herself to advocating for environmental protection. As part of the civil disobedience movement We Are Seneca Lake, she protested plans by a Houston-based gas company to store natural gas collected from hydraulic fracking in salt caverns along the shoreline of Seneca Lake.
“This gas storage project puts at risk a source of drinking water for 100,000 people,” she says. “In fall 2014, I served nine days in jail for my efforts to defend Seneca lake, and I was honored to speak about that experience at the Paris Climate Change Conference a year later.”
Boland also traveled in December 2016 with fellow veterans to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, a 1,172-mile oil pipeline that was cleared for construction by President Donald Trump after many months of protest. The pipeline passes through land considered sacred by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and under a section of the Missouri River known as Lake Oahe.
“Along the way, it has become clear to me that climate instability —and the consequent harms done to our water and air through the extraction and burning of fossil fuels —is a serious threat both to human development and to our national security,” Boland says. “By becoming a climate activist, I see myself as serving in a new way.”