The Lower Neponset River, flowing through Dorchester, Mattapan, Hyde Park, and Milton, was designated an EPA Superfund Site in 2022. Decades of industrial activity left toxic chemicals behind, affecting communities along its banks—yet the River often goes unseen.
Boston Latin School senior Lucy Zhang created Voices of the Lower Neponset River to change that. Using watercolor portraits and interviews, Lucy highlighted 14 local advocates working to protect the river and support their neighborhoods.
Lucy first learned about the River’s pollution three years ago and was shocked that, even living nearby, she hadn’t known about it — which made her wonder how anyone else in the country would learn and take action.
Through her portraits and interviews, Lucy captures the river’s complex history, the communities it touches, and the advocacy work protecting it.
The Voices of the Lower Neponset River is being exhibited at the Milton Public Library, 476 Canton Ave, Milton, MA 02186, from April through June 2026 in the lower level lobby. The exhibit is open to the public.
Explore the Stories and Portraits
Below you can view each advocate’s portrait and read their story—their work highlights both the challenges facing the river and the people working to ensure it remains a vital part of the community.
Bethany Czerny
Resident of Hyde Park
“Maybe I won’t see the kayak launch I hoped for in the next few years. But future generations might enjoy a clean river.”
Bethany Czerny is a long-time Boston local and had moved to Hyde Park just recently. Passionate about kayaking, Bethany naturally wondered why there is so little access to the Lower Neponset River. She soon discovered that the river carried a complicated history of industrial pollution.
With an interest in community advocacy and environmental issues, she began volunteering at local cleanup events and meeting neighbors who were already working to protect the river. Through connections, she became involved with the Lower Neponset River Community Advisory Group. Bethany’s role in meetings is to help connect people and bridge conversations, a powerful and indispensable task. She updates stakeholders on meetings and coordinates collaborations between advocates, community organizations, and residents. During the Environmental Protection Agency’s public comment period on cleanup plans, Bethany worked with others to submit over 100 comments supporting the highest possible cleanup level.
As a board member of Hyde Park historical society, Bethany has seen historical photos of kids swimming in the Neponset. Today, she works to restore residents’ sense of belonging to the river by removing barriers such as lack of accessibility, time constraints, and public awareness.
Bethany believes that everyone deserves to know the river exists and to benefit from the green space it could become. The cleanup may take decades, but she is hopeful that the group efforts now will benefit generations to come.
Q: Which neighborhood do you live in? For how long have you lived there?
A: I live in Hyde Park. I’ve lived in Boston for a long time and passed by the river every morning for over ten years. I was a renter nearby before we bought a home in Hyde Park about five minutes away.
I was excited to live near Neponset. I really love rivers and lakes. I originally just wanted access to the river so I could kayak. Then I started asking what was going on there and learned about the chemical contamination and that it’s a Superfund site.
Before that, I knew about efforts like saving Crane Ledge and wetland ordinances. However, I did not know much about the [pollution at] Lower Neponset River. I was mainly trying to find kayak access and trails like the Charles River has.
When I saw the site, it was interesting because it could potentially be remediated. At the same time, Boston is doing its Squares + Streets redevelopment program. So you have Boston Planning, the Parks Department, and the EPA all involved. It became an opportunity to see how these things would come together, especially environmental justice issues that haven’t received enough attention over the years.
Q: How did you become involved in advocacy for the river?
A: I’ve always liked community projects. I’m also on the board of the Hyde Park Historical Society. Everything overlaps in these kinds of issues.
I love cleanup projects: removing invasive species or helping maintain parks. I volunteered at an Urban Wild cleanup, removing trash and weeds, and that’s where I met Andrés from Neponset River Watershed Association (NepRWA). He invited me to a meeting.
At that meeting, I learned about efforts to improve access to the river. I thought it was exciting.
Their organization already had a mission, but I felt like this was a way to combine efforts. Volunteer organizations can become very siloed, so I try to help bridge groups when possible.
For example, the historical society was looking at land for housing projects, which overlaps with river land and environmental concerns. My role is often connecting people, telling one group what another group is discussing and helping them collaborate.
During the EPA public comment period, our goal was to submit over 100 comments supporting the highest possible cleanup level. We reached that goal. The EPA actually cited public comments when choosing the cleanup level.
That success came from community outreach, and how neighbors and organizations worked together.
Q: Has building a bridge between communities always been part of your life?
A: Yes. I’m not sure where it came from. Maybe reading about endangered species as a kid. I always felt that if something was wrong, we should try to fix it.
I grew up during a time when activism produced real change. There were environmental problems like the hole in the ozone layer, and legislation helped fix them. There were campaigns like dolphin-safe tuna. I also grew up during the HIV/AIDS epidemic and saw activism change stigma and save lives.
There’s a famous quote about how a small group of concerned citizens can change the world. I’ve always believed that.
Q: What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced while doing outreach and advocacy?
A: One challenge is that the river has been hidden for so long. It’s fenced off, and some people don’t even realize a river exists there. I’ve spoken to residents who lived on River Street their whole lives and didn’t know there was a river nearby. That’s sad, because everyone deserves access to green spaces. Green spaces improve mental health and help build community.
Another challenge is awareness. Some people have fought this issue for decades. Others don’t know about it at all. And when people hear the river is polluted, they assume it’s something simple like trash cleanup. They don’t realize how complex chemical contamination is. Even for me, it’s difficult to fully understand the science. I still wonder sometimes whether it’s safe to put a kayak in the water.
Time is also a barrier. Many residents work long hours and can’t attend public meetings during the day. That’s why environmental justice is such an important part of this issue. Neighborhoods with fewer resources often have less time to advocate for themselves.
Q: The Lower Neponset became a national Superfund site in 2022. How has that affected your experience living near the river?
When I first moved here, I was focused on improving access: removing fences and creating trails. Then I learned about the Superfund site and realized maybe putting a kayak in the water wasn’t safe. That changed my perspective. Suddenly you start thinking about other things, like whether contamination affects the watershed or even your backyard garden.
It was both exciting and scary. You finally buy a home and feel happy about your community, and then you learn about pollution hotspots nearby. It also shifts your priorities. Instead of pushing for a park in a few years, you realize remediation could take decades.
At the same time, there are hopeful moments. One day I was near Urban Wild and heard a noise in the river. I thought it was a stray cat, but it was a beaver. Seeing wildlife there reminded me that restoration isn’t just about us humans, it’s about helping the ecosystems.
Q: When you think far into the future, what impact do you hope your work will have?
There’s a book called The Cathedral Within about people who built Gothic cathedrals. One person might spend their whole life laying a single cornerstone and never see the finished building. I’m very impatient. I want things done quickly, but with a Superfund site, progress takes decades.
So maybe I won’t see the kayak launch I hoped for in the next few years. But future generations might enjoy a clean river. I’ve seen historical photos of kids swimming in the Neponset. I would love to help restore it so people can experience it again. Even if I never get to use it myself, I want to help fix something we damaged and leave it better for others.
Q: If someone doesn’t know about the Lower Neponset River, what do you hope they take away from learning about it?
I hope people realize they don’t have to accept things the way they are. Many people walk past the fenced river and assume that’s normal. Instead, I hope people join the process and help shape what the river could become. Nature is powerful. If we take care of it, it takes care of us. I hope more people get involved and volunteer.
Bill Forry
Resident of Dorchester, Executive Editor and Co-Publisher of the Dorchester Reporter
“Once you get a critical mass of people who see it and engage with it, they care about it. That’s where you see the needle move.”
Bill has lived in Dorchester his whole life. Growing up, he often played baseball on a field right next to the Neponset River. However, in the 1970s, much of the river was walled off from the community by junkyards, auto repair shops, and manufacturing plants. As Bill recounted, the river was present, but not part of anyone’s life.
Over the following decades, Bill witnessed the river change. As Executive Editor and Co-Publisher of the Dorchester Reporter, a newspaper his parents founded in 1983, he spent over 30 years covering the slow, hard-won transformation of the Lower Neponset River. He reported on watershed cleanups, attended community meetings, and pressed policymakers for actions. Over the years, Bill documented the Neponset Greenway taking shape and expanding to new communities. Through over 100 articles, he saw how the collective action of neighbors from Dorchester, Mattapan, Milton, and Hyde Park made measurable, meaningful progress.
For Bill, the story of the Neponset River is important to record in order to restore justice. The communities most affected and cut-off from the river are Mattapan and Dorchester, where many residents of color and lower-income families live.
Today, Bill walks and bikes the Greenway regularly with his family. As a journalist and historian, Bill works to highlight issues, bring awareness, and connect the community. He believes that once people can see and access the river, they begin to care. Once they care, change will follow.
Q: What do you do for work?
A: I’m the Executive Editor and Co-Publisher of the Dorchester Reporter, a community newspaper and media organization that started in September 1983. My parents founded the paper, so I’ve been involved since I was 10 years old. After graduating from Boston College, I became a reporter here and eventually an editor. For the last 30 years, I’ve worked as a journalist in Boston’s neighborhoods, with a specific focus on Dorchester and Mattapan.
That brings me frequently into contact with issues around the Neponset River and the restoration of public access. That’s my primary focus when it comes to the Neponset. I’m a journalist, an editor, and a commentator. As a neighbor who grew up close to the river, I do care about its health, sustainability, and public access. We’ve used the Dorchester Reporter as a tool to bring awareness and let people know how they can support important projects along the river. I see myself more as a journalist and historian, someone who highlights issues, brings awareness, and provides context from three decades of coverage.
Q: When did you first learn about the Lower Neponset River?
A: I grew up here, so I always knew of it. I used to play baseball on a field right next to the river in the Cedar Grove section of Dorchester, near Lower Mills. We’d walk along the river when we could.
But in the 1970s, a lot of the river was walled off from the community by industrial uses or private ownership. Junkyards, auto repair shops, and manufacturing plants literally fenced the river off from public view or access. As a kid, you really wouldn’t use it. You wouldn’t swim, kayak, or fish there.
That started to change in the 1980s, and really transformed in the 1990s, when successful advocacy and state involvement began reclaiming public access. People could finally walk and bike along what had been old railroad tracks, now the Neponset Greenway. That’s when I was really paying attention as a journalist.
Q: What have you covered in your reporting on the Lower Neponset?
A: I’ve covered everything from watershed cleanups and community meetings, to major decisions at the State House. Governor Patrick and others before him approved funding and projects to build the Greenway itself, the Harvest Bridge between Milton and Mattapan, and the new connection near the gas tank on Morrissey Boulevard that opened last summer. I’ve covered all of those from a policy perspective, asked questions of lawmakers about delays, and written editorials making the case for why these projects are worthwhile.
Q: What goes into reporting on this topic?
A: The most important thing is to accurately record the voices of the people in order to give the community a voice that might not be heard in other media. The priority is being in the rooms where conversations happen, capturing those voices, and putting them in context.
Covering this over many years is valuable because you can take people’s opinions and requests to a state senator, a governor, or the Speaker of the House and say, “This is what people in your district want. What are you going to do about it?” That’s a powerful way to move the needle. Having a news organization like Dorchester Reporter pursuing an issue aggressively over months or years and even decades can make a real difference when decision time comes. That was true back in the ’80s and ’90s before the internet. And it’s still very much the case through our various platforms, including our weekly print edition and DotNews.com and our various digital platforms.
Q: What have been some of the biggest challenges in the work that you do?
A: The biggest challenge to public investment has been building the political will and consensus that this matters and explaining why it’s a good use of public money. There are competing priorities, recessions that slow progress, and lawsuits where industry might challenge public land takings, which can delay projects and drive up costs significantly.
It’s a long road. It takes about 50 years to see truly meaningful change along a stretch like this. Just getting the Lower Neponset to the point where a Superfund designation was even in the discussion took five decades of work.
Q: What motivates you to keep doing it despite those challenges?
A: At this point in my career, the Neponset is one of the things I’ve written about where you can really see and measure meaningful progress. As someone who lives in the community, it’s deeply meaningful to see the collective work of neighbors from Dorchester, Mattapan, Milton, and Hyde Park make a real difference.
Governor Patrick is someone I want to highlight specifically. He lived in Milton, very close to the river, and understood that leaving it as it was wasn’t just a missed opportunity. It was also a matter of social justice. Many of the people cut off from the river were residents of Mattapan and Dorchester, many of them people of color, many lower-income. They didn’t have access to the kind of waterfront amenities that exist in the Back Bay. Unlocking the river’s potential and the pathways along it is a justice issue.
My wife, Linda Dorcena Forry, was a state representative and state senator during a critically important period in the river’s restoration in the 2000s. She was a key figure in advocating for and securing resources for several major projects, including the Harvest Bridge, the new connection near the gas tank, and Finnegan Park in Port Norfolk.
Q: Was there a particular article or story that stayed with you or changed how you think about the river?
A: One I remember fondly was when the new Greenway section near Granite Avenue was opening and a new park was being created. That area had been really rundown, fenced-off corrugated steel, a burned-out warehouse, complete urban decay right along the river near where I live. Today, there’s Pope John Paul II Park and all this beautiful green space with the Greenway running through it.
We sent reporters out on kayaks and canoes to paddle along the river and see it from a different vantage point, and ran the story prominently on our front cover. It was a reminder of why we do this work.
From the expressway or a bridge, the river looks nice. But it looks a lot better when you’re on the water or walking the paths close up. The wildlife along the Neponset estuary has also really sprung back. That’s one story that stood out, but there have been many. I’ve probably written over 100 articles over the years, and each one is a piece of a long, ongoing progression.
Q: Looking to the future, what impact do you hope your work has left on the river and the communities around it?
A: I hope that other stretches of the river that currently aren’t accessible become accessible, and that they’re all stitched together into one seamless, safe route. I’d like to see more stops along the way, places to grab coffee, to rest, to connect. More regional awareness that this is a place people can and should use.
Most importantly, I hope the Superfund work results in meaningfully cleaner water. There’s still a lot to be done in removing contaminants, particularly sediment that remains toxic to fish life. Down the line, there’s the question of dam removal: should the dams be removed to improve fish migration? That remains controversial. Many of our readers want the dams to stay, even while supporting other improvements. The Lower Mills area has nearly 400 years of industrial history, and the former Walter Baker Chocolate Factory site at the Boston-Milton border is iconic. Removing the dam there could dramatically change its appearance.
But the big picture is that the federal investment through the Superfund process can make the Neponset a much more vibrant place: for fish, for wildlife, and for the people who live and work nearby.
Cynthia Guise
Member of Blue Hills Bohemians, Resident of Milton
“With all the stress people are carrying in this world, if seeing a raccoon [on a public mural] while you’re riding your bike makes your day a little bit better, why not?”
Cynthia has lived in Milton for 26 years, and she often takes her bike along the Lower Neponset River trail to enjoy nature. However, she did not realize the river was one of the most polluted across the nation, until her husband told her about it. That moment of realization led her to stop and see the place she had lived beside from a completely different perspective.
A year ago, Cynthia joined the Blue Hills Bohemians, a small group of watercolorists and pastel painters who create art together. Through Karl Pastore, a member in the group who previously worked for the DCR, she learned that a series of murals painted along the river trail 30 years ago have been poorly maintained. The paint was peeling, and the art was barely legible for passersby to notice.
Cynthia and the Blue Hills Bohemians decided to do something about it. The group volunteered to restore the murals alongside Vincent Crotty, a local artist leading the effort. Together, they brought ladders and art supplies to repaint the murals section by section. Over eight weekends in the summer, they brought colors back. Occasionally, even passersby stopped by to join in.
Cynthia believes that art holds its unique power to bring the community together. By doing art, she hopes to bring people joy and inform them about the river. If the murals make someone pause on their ride and notice something new, then she believes her work is worthwhile.
Q: How long have you been a resident of Milton, and how close is your home to the Lower Neponset River?
A: I’ve lived in Milton for about 26 years. Before that I lived in JP. I’m maybe a mile and a half from Mattapan Square.
Q: How did you first get involved with the Lower Neponset River?
A: I’m part of a group that started about a year ago called the Blue Hills Bohemians. We’re all artists. Many of us are watercolorists, two of us work in pastels, and one does oils and acrylics. There are about seven or eight of us total.
One of our members, Karl Pastore, used to work for the DCR, so he’s very familiar with the river and everything going on there. I ride my e-bike along the trail regularly, and he was the one who first wanted to work on the murals. The murals were painted maybe 20 or 30 years ago by young people, and by the time we got involved, they were in very bad shape. You could hardly see some of them. The paint was peeling and chipping.
There’s a well-known local artist named Vincent Crotty who was hired to restore them. He’s just one person, so we Bohemians volunteered and joined forces with him. He brought most of the supplies, and we brought ladders and pitched in wherever we could. We ended up repainting a lot of the murals. Not all of them, there are quite a few, but we made them look much better than they were. Sometimes people would walk by and want to join in, and they’d come back the next day. People would just chime in as they wanted to.
Q: What was your role in the mural work as an artist?
A: We were essentially coloring in a coloring book. We didn’t design the murals. The original designs were created 20 or 30 years ago, probably by some conservation group. We were following and respecting what those earlier artists had done. Vincent would give us materials, point us in the right direction, and let us paint. We’re all artists, so we knew what we were doing.
It wasn’t a daily commitment. We worked on weekends, maybe six to eight of them over the course of the summer, depending on Vincent’s schedule. He goes away frequently and also teaches at Mass Art, so we’d work when he was available. We wrapped up around September. On any given day there might be three to six of us, sometimes joined by folks from DCR or the Neponset River group.
Q: Were you involved with the river in any way before the mural project?
A: That was my first real interaction with it, and it’s a little embarrassing to admit. I’ve lived here for so long and never knew the river was polluted. I would just drive over it or ride along it without really thinking about what was there.
My husband was the one who told me it was one of the most polluted rivers in the state. I had no idea. Once I started learning more, I found out the EPA has placed it on the National Priorities List for cleanup, and that PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, are the main concern. They’re an organic pollutant that causes cancer and they settle into the sediment in the river. It had never crossed my mind that the river I was casually biking past had that kind of history.
Q: What do you notice when you’re biking along the river?
A: I see the boats and the vegetation. People enjoying the path. There’s also a man I keep noticing who volunteers along the river almost every day, doing landscaping, cutting down weeds, clearing overgrown bushes. When we were working on the murals, he was out there getting rid of wasp nests. Apparently everybody knows him, though I can’t remember his name. Karen might be able to help with that. If you want to talk about someone truly committed, I think he’s the one. I was just painting murals. I wasn’t out there clearing brush every day.
Q: What do you feel when you’re painting the murals?
A: It feels good. I love color, and I love mixing colors. It feels good to refresh something that was once beautiful. What was interesting to me is that people would walk by and say how much they loved it, and in my head I’d think, it’s been here for 20 or 30 years. You just never saw it because it was so faded, or you were riding past too quickly to notice. But when people see others painting, they’re more likely to stop and look. So many people stopped to admire the work or leave a comment. It was a really positive experience.
Q: When you look years into the future, what impact do you hope the murals leave on the river and the community?
A: I would like to think they’ll continue to bring people joy and educate them about the river. The section with the animals tells you something about the ecosystem right there. It’s public art, and we need to be able to make space for that. There are areas where graffiti gets blacked out and becomes an eyesore, but everyone who uses the path has to pass through there. Making something more attractive is always worthwhile. And in this world, with all the stress people are carrying, if seeing a raccoon while you’re riding your bike makes your day a little bit better, why not?
Emyr T. Remy
Environmental Litigation attorney, NepRWA Board and CAG member. Resident of Hyde Park
“The Charles and the Mystic River have been cleaned up to the point where people use them every single day. There’s no reason we can’t have that same thing here.”
Emyr grew up in Hyde Park and currently lives in the neighborhood; after moving away in 2000, he returned in 2019. Even as a two-time resident in the neighborhood, Emyr did not realize the existence of the Lower Neponset River until 2022. When mapping out his commute, he noticed the river sitting just beside the Fairmount T stop. That moment launched his advocacy journey.
Emyr is an attorney with a background that gave him early insight into the nature and extent of PCB contamination—the same chemical contaminating the Lower Neponset River. His knowledge of the issue, his discovery of the river, and the start of the Superfund cleanup drew him into the Lower Neponset River Community Advisory Group. As a CAG member, he brings both legal knowledge and his experience as a long-time local resident. In one of his most recent projects, he collected comments from community members and organized them into a submission to the EPA during its remediation alternatives process.
Understanding environmental contamination from multiple angles has given Emyr insight into the complexity of this work. By advocating for the cleanup at the Lower Neponset River, he hopes to contribute to the community and make things right on his own time. Moreover, Emyr is driven by a personal desire to expand the Neponset Greenway along the river, so that more pedestrians and cyclists like him can access nature easily.
As someone who lived in Hyde Park twice before learning about the river, Emyr realizes firsthand how invisible the issue is, and how much work is needed to change that. However, he is hopeful that soon, they will see the fruits of the labor.
Q: Which neighborhood do you live in? How close is your home to Neponset River?
A: I live in Hyde Park. It’s about an 18-minute walk from my house to the Fairmount Line T stop, so I’d say that’s a fair approximation.
I grew up here in Hyde Park and I lived here until about 2000. Then, I came back in 2019, so I’m a two-time resident of Hyde Park. Even after living here again for about three years, from 2019 to 2022, I still didn’t know the river was here. It wasn’t until I started my job at my current law firm and was figuring out how I was going to get to work that I noticed the river was right next to the T stop. That was really an epiphany for me.
Q: Can you tell me more about how you became involved in advocacy work at the Lower Neponset River?
A: At my current job, I’m an attorney in my firm’s environmental and toxic tort practice group. Part of my work involves learning about polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) contamination across states and waterways. Then I realized that the river is here, but it isn’t a resource for people in the surrounding communities. It’s not visible and not usable for the most part. On top of that, nobody at the state or city level seems to have been motivated to change that for a very long time.The river is invisible and unusable to the neighborhood. That feels wrong to me, and that’s exactly what I want to change.
For my own recreational purposes, I like to bike. One of my routes is down Truman Parkway along the river toward the Neponset River Greenway. Once you get to Mattapan Square, it’s a beautiful resource for everyone in the area. But I don’t understand why the Greenway doesn’t extend past Mattapan Square, up Truman Parkway, along the Lower Neponset River Superfund site, and toward Milton. My ultimate vision is to help facilitate that connection, [to build the Greenway] from Mattapan Square through Truman Parkway to the Neponset Valley Parkway and ultimately to Blue Hills.
Q: Do you think the site actually becoming a Superfund site has helped facilitate that effort?
A: I would hope so, but I think it’s still too soon to tell. The Superfund process has been going on for some time now, and there’s still such a long way to go. It’s tough to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I think it’s heading in the right direction, and I think we have all the right people involved who know what the community wants to see out of this process.
Q: Could you describe what you do as an advocate at the river?
A: It’s mostly about being present and available. One example is the FS/ICA (Feasibility Study / Interim Cleanup Action) report process: where the EPA presents the community with alternatives for remediating the river and asks for comments on their proposals. As a CAG member, my role was to collect comments from the group, distill them in a way that the EPA could digest, and submit them. The group did all the hard work of sharing their thoughts and opinions. What I took pride in was organizing those comments into something useful for the EPA and making sure they were submitted by the deadline.
Q: What have been some of the biggest challenges in the work that you do?
A: The biggest challenges are recruiting and engaging people with the CAG and the whole Superfund process. Nobody really knows what’s going on, and our job is to change that. One of the hardest parts has been encouraging people to stay committed once they are involved. Once someone knows what’s going on and cares about it, you want them to remain engaged. Unfortunately, people have become less interested over time, discouraged, or for one reason or another, haven’t stayed as involved as they once were. It’s a long process, and it’s really tough to see someone who adds value leave the group.
There’s another layer to this too. The perception that some CAG members have about people not caring has also been a roadblock. One person who left the group did so partly because they felt that if people cared, they’d already be here. I understand the frustration, but I don’t agree with that sentiment. When someone believes that others don’t care, it becomes very hard to follow through on outreach and actually succeed.
Q: What motivates you to do this work?
A: I was actually at a career fair today and they were asking me about work-life balance. Part of my answer was that a lot of the community work I do feels like work, but it’s not work I’m getting paid for. So I’ve had to shift my mindset and view it as a labor of love. Pulling together those comments for the EPA, for example, it’s not just sitting back and sending something off. You have to think about it carefully, distill it, and make it useful.
What motivates me most is knowing that this work matters, and that maybe 20 years down the line I’ll be able to see the results. A greenway connection from Mattapan all the way to Neponset Valley Parkway and through to Blue Hills would make all of it worth it. This neighborhood desperately needs positive development, and that potential is my primary motivator.
In my day job, I represent companies that either produce PCBs or are involved with them in some way. This advocacy work is a way for me to be on the other side of that. If my professional life involves representing people who caused harm, I also want to try to make things right in my own way, on my own time.
Q: Has working on both sides given you any new insights into how complex the story is?
A: My firm is actually involved in this Superfund process by representing potentially responsible parties. On this project, I’m firmly on the community side. In other cases, I look at things from the industry perspective.
The Neponset is unique. It’s one of the oldest rivers in the country in terms of manufacturing history, and the pollution here is very old.There’s so much tied up with Mother Brook, and many companies that were along the river but no longer exist. That could change depending on what the EPA does and whether they’re able to recover money from the potentially responsible parties. Other states have tried wholesale litigation, and Massachusetts can pursue that as well.
Q: Has the pollution or limited access to the river impacted your daily life in any way?
A: The lack of access has affected me by reducing my desire to spend time outdoors. If the river were accessible and the surrounding areas were properly developed and inviting, I would definitely be outside more. So in that way, yes, it has had an impact.
Q:For someone who hasn’t heard much about the Neponset River before, what do you hope they will understand about the river, the community, and why this work matters?
A: I hope they’ll understand that most people who live in Hyde Park have never seen the river. They don’t even know it’s there. Yet, it’s one of Boston’s three major rivers. The Charles and the Mystic also had histories of industrial pollution, and they’ve been cleaned up to the point where people use them every single day. You cannot walk or bike along the Charles River without seeing joggers, walkers, pet owners, and cyclists. There’s no reason we can’t have that same thing here. We already have part of the Greenway path in Milton and Mattapan. We just need to bring it to Hyde Park. The river is the first step toward opening up the whole area for the kinds of uses people actually want to see.
We’re always looking for more people to get involved, simply by knowing the river exists and spreading the word. Opening people’s eyes and making them aware is the biggest thing we can do right now. We have a great group of dedicated people who will do the right thing for this community, and if anyone else wants to join in and push things forward, the more the merrier.
Q: Looking to the future, what impact do you hope your work has left on the river and the communities around it?
A: My primary goal is encouraging the development of green recreation space. The logical end result of this whole project is extending the Neponset River Greenway beyond Mattapan Square as far as possible. Cleaning up the river is the first step. Then comes convincing DCR that Truman Parkway is overbuilt and working to make space for a pedestrian and bike path. We’re at the very beginning of that process right now, and it takes time. It’s about setting these goals clearly and then acting on them.
Jennifer Gomez-Gallardo
Boston College Student, Neponset River Lab Research assistant
“Students who had no idea the river existed will come across our map and say, I live near there, I didn’t know that was happening. That kind of moment matters.”
Jennifer is a sophomore at Boston College double majoring in political science and history. Growing up minutes away from the Chesapeake Bay, she watched the country’s largest estuary change. When she took a class with Professor Conevery Valencius in freshman year, she learned about the Lower Neponset River in Boston. Curious to learn more about this local river, she applied to join Professor Valencius’s Neponset River Lab.
As a research assistant in the lab, Jennifer works alongside undergraduates, PhD, and graduate researchers on a public digital map of the river’s history. Each researcher chooses a topic, conducts comprehensive research, and publishes mini-histories on topics ranging from wildlife to flooding and industrial legacy. Jennifer’s first mini-history focuses on the river’s king tides, the highest tides that occur naturally every year. She argues that by 2050, those exceptionally-high water levels will become a daily phenomenon.
Outside of the lab, Jennifer is conducting independent research on the Lower Neponset. Through a grant at BC, Jennifer has been working on summarizing the entire Superfund process at the river for Spanish-speaking and Haitian Creole-speaking communities directly affected by the contamination. She works with EPA documents, lawyers, and community organizations such as NepRWA to provide accurate information digestible for everyone.
In her research, Jennifer often runs into roadblocks of missing documents and incomplete archives. However, she tracks down sources one by one through phone calls, site visits, and direct interviews. In the future, Jennifer hopes that the work of Neponset River Lab will remain a permanent, accessible resource for anyone who wants to understand the river flowing through their neighborhood.
Q: What are you studying at Boston College, and why did you choose that path?
A: I’m a political science and history double major, and I’m currently looking at picking up a minor in environmental studies. I’ve always been drawn to government and policy work. Right now I’m planning to go to law school and become an environmental lawyer. That path started to take shape through internships, including one with the Mayor’s Office Department of Resilience and Sustainability, where I worked on environmental policy and helped draft legislation in my hometown of Annapolis. That’s when I realized how much I genuinely enjoy that kind of work.
Q: How did you first get involved with the Neponset River Lab, and what drew you to the river?
A: I got involved my freshman year. I had Professor Valencius as a professor in my first semester, and she started talking about a lab she was building around the Neponset River. I had no idea what the Neponset River was, but I was curious. I started talking with her after class, she explained what the lab was doing, and I applied. I got in, which honestly surprised me, since I was a freshman working alongside PhD students and graduate researchers. I felt a little out of my depth at first, but the more I got involved, the more I realized how important local waterways are, and how easy it is to overlook them when we’re used to thinking about the environment in broad, global terms.
Q: What does the Neponset River Lab do, and what is your role in it?
A: The lab is a collective of undergrads, graduate students, and PhD candidates, all coming from different areas of expertise. Each of us chooses a topic, digs into it as deeply as we go through phone calls, archival research, site visits, and interviews, and then writes what we call a mini history for a public-facing digital map of the river. The goal is to make the history of the Neponset accessible to anyone who wants to understand it.
My first mini history was on king tides. A king tide is an exceptionally high tide that goes beyond even a spring tide, and it only happens a few times a year. What I argued in that piece is that what we’re seeing now during king tides is a preview of what daily water levels along the Neponset could look like by 2050 if sea levels continue to rise. There are photos of floodwater covering benches along the river. Nearby estuaries are already under pressure, and the salt marsh sparrow, an endangered species that nests in those marshes, could go completely extinct within 20 years. It took the team a long time to make all of that digestible for a general audience, but that’s exactly the goal: the public should be able to understand it.
Q: Tell me about the independent research you’ve been doing outside of the lab.
A: I applied for an Advanced Study Grant through Boston College to do my own research on the Superfund site process at the lower Neponset River. One of the things that struck me early on was that when I started this project, the EPA had no documents about the Superfund site in either Spanish or Haitian Creole, and yet those are two of the primary languages spoken by communities most directly affected by the contamination. I felt that was a serious gap. So my report aims to summarize the entire Superfund process in a way that’s accurate, concise, and accessible, including to non-English speakers. I analyzed EPA documents, spoke with lawyers involved in the process, and collaborated with organizations like NepRWA. The research itself is done and it’s currently going through final edits before being published on the Neponset River mapping website.
I’m also finishing a piece on a lesser-known event from 2016, when a warehouse fire in Hawsbrook sent a surge of industrial chemicals from an old tannery and soap factory downstream into the Neponset. For a full mile, the river turned red and all the fish died. It was very hard to find information about this. I ended up contacting Ian Cook from NepRWA because he was cited in a Boston Globe article about it, and I called him directly. He remembered the day clearly and shared photos with me that I couldn’t find anywhere else. The EPA had to get involved because of the volume of chemicals that entered the river, but the cleanup that followed addressed only what was immediately visible. The deeper contamination that washed into the riverbed was largely left in place.
Q: How does the river’s industrial history connect to the environmental justice issues we see today?
A: A lot of it traces back to the industrial activity that happened over centuries. Paper mills left so much waste in the river that at one point a journalist canoeing on it couldn’t get through because of the clumps of paper floating on the surface. There were textile mills, dams, and canals all along the river. The T&H (Tileston and Hollingsworth) Dam in particular now holds the highest concentration of PCBs in the entire stretch. The contamination there is so severe that walking on the mud around it can kick PCBs back into the air. And yet there is almost no signage.
That lack of signage, combined with the fact that this is a Superfund site running through predominantly low-income communities of color, reflects a much broader pattern. The EJ mapping tools that used to help document that disparity have now been taken down by the current federal administration, though researchers have preserved copies. It’s harder to point to the data officially now, but the underlying reality hasn’t changed.
Q: What has been the biggest challenge in researching and representing the river’s history?
A: Sometimes the information simply isn’t there, or it takes a lot of effort to find. Visual and artistic history is particularly difficult. We’ve been trying to research some of the murals along the river, and it’s surprisingly hard to find documentation about when they were made, who made them, or what the intent was behind them. People don’t always write that down.
The other challenge is making complex information accessible without losing accuracy. The latest reports about EPA are about 120 pages. No resident is going to read that on their own. Part of what I’m trying to do is bridge that gap, so that the people most affected by what’s in that document can actually understand what it says.
Q: How have community members responded to the lab’s work?
A: From what I can tell, the response has been positive. NepRWA is happy about what we’re doing, and the lab is becoming more visible at Boston College. Students who had no idea the river existed will come across the map and say, I live near there, I didn’t know that was happening. That kind of moment matters. Little by little, getting people interested and curious is what changes things.
Q: Has this work changed the way you see the river yourself?
A: Completely. When I first joined the lab, I knew almost nothing about the Neponset. The more I researched it, the more I came to understand how much a local waterway can mean to a community, and how easy it is to overlook that when we’re trained to think about the environment as a global problem. This work has also made me more reflective about the waterways near my own hometown in Maryland. I grew up five minutes from the Chesapeake Bay, and I’ve watched it change over the years without ever really paying close attention to why. Working on the Neponset has taught me to look more locally, and I think that’s a shift a lot of people need to make.
Q: When you think years into the future, what impact do you hope your work will leave on the river and the community?
A: I hope the Neponset River Lab continues, even after all of us who are currently in it have moved on. Professor Valencius’s vision is that the map will stay live and accessible so that people can keep engaging with the river’s history. Even if the whole team eventually changes, the work will still be there as a foundation for whoever comes next. In my own small way, I hope that what I’ve written will still be useful to someone years from now. As long as the internet is running, it’ll be there.
Jessica Metayer
Community Liaison, Neponset River Watershed Association, Resident of Milton
“Being in nature helped me unlock something in myself, to think more freely and feel more capable. My hope is that by helping people reconnect with the land, they too will feel more empowered, more capable, and more connected to each other.”
Jessica has lived in Milton for nearly 30 years. She walks the Lower Neponset trail almost every day with her two sons and her dog. Although she has always noticed the urban trash along the riverbank, Jess was unaware of the extent of contamination until last fall, when she met NepRWA’s engagement strategist Karen Groce-Horan at a community event.
After that meeting, Jess felt compelled to get involved. Just months earlier, she had returned from a graduate school practicum in Lyon, France. There, she worked with the city’s ecological transition team to protect vulnerable families in the worsening heatwaves. Coming home, she saw the same urgent environmental injustice: the Lower Neponset River runs through some of the most disadvantaged communities in the area, affecting residents’ wellbeing in ways most of them do not know.
Now, as a community liaison with the NepRWA, Jess wants to help people reclaim their connection to the river. As a healing practitioner, she leads monthly healing circles where community members come together to reconnect with nature and each other. She believes that inner healing and environmental justice are inseparable topics. When people feel more connected to the land they live on, they are more empowered to care for it. Jess hopes that one day, her efforts will create healthier, happier people and stronger communities.
Q: How long have you been a resident of Milton, and how close is your home to the lower Neponset River?
A: I’ve been a resident of Milton for about 30 years. I’m only a couple of blocks from Mattapan Square. I walk the bike trail very often. I used to walk my dog there daily, and I also go with my kids. I have a toddler and a teenager. So, I’m very familiar with the space.
Q: How did you become involved in advocacy work at the Lower Neponset River?
A: I’m a grad student studying organizational development. This past October I had a practicum in Lyon, France, where I was working with the city’s ecological transition team. During the practicum, they presented on the environmental justice work they were doing to raise awareness within the city. They’re facing serious environmental issues and are taking remarkable coordinated action, things like identifying cool spaces across the city during heat waves, partnering with museums and large buildings to house families overnight, and running escape room style drills in schools to teach kids about environmental practices. It was inspiring, and it touched me deeply. It made me aware of all the changes I could make in my own life and in spreading awareness.
Coming back home, I met Karen at an event with the Partnership for Healthy Milton. I should also mention that I’m a healing practitioner. The core of my work is helping people connect with themselves and find alignment in mind, body, and spirit, and then helping them align their values with how they live. What the Lyon practicum helped me see was how deeply interconnected healing and environmental justice are. In inner cities, people are often disconnected from the land they live on, even though our ancestors all had very strong relationships with the earth. My aim in joining the Neponset River Watershed Association is to bridge holistic wellness with environmental justice, to help people fall in love with the land they live on, so they feel more empowered and more responsible for maintaining it.
Q: What will your role with the Neponset River Watershed Association look like in practice?
A: My role is a community liaison. I’ve been attending meetings to learn about the work and hear people’s experiences, things like the flooding that’s been happening and the health risks that come with it. Going forward, I want to put on events that center community and connection while bridging those conversations with the environment and the land. For about five years now, I’ve been leading healing circles, community gatherings held in accordance with the full moon where people come together to share, meditate, and connect with each other. We also do nature walks through places like the Blue Hills, where I guide people through a meditation before the walk. We hug trees. We talk to the plants. That kind of intentional reconnection with nature is what I want to bring into the work with the watershed association.
Q: Did you know about the river’s contamination before joining the association?
A: I did not know until I met with Karen that the Neponset River is a Superfund site. I had no idea about the contamination. You could see that it was polluted, and it was heartbreaking to see how it was being treated. But I had been going to the river for about 25 years, sitting at spots along it, playing there, without ever knowing it was such a hazardous site. I only learned that last fall.
Q: What specific project in Lyon inspired you most?
A: The project we were working on was addressing the heat waves. Lyon has been experiencing longer and more frequent heat waves, and because most of the city’s buildings are very old architecture with no central air, the people most at risk are the most disadvantaged, those without the means to go elsewhere when their homes become dangerously hot. There have been deaths. What moved me was the collective response. The city mapped all the cool spaces across Lyon, established water stations, partnered with museums to let families stay overnight during the worst heat. And in schools, they were running games with young children to help them learn environmentally friendly practices, so that kids would go home and teach their parents. Seeing that level of coordination and proactiveness was inspiring, and I saw an immediate connection to the work that still needs to be done here.
Q: What are the biggest challenges in the work you do?
A: The biggest challenge is that people are stuck in their ways, and understandably so. Many of our people have been living in survival mode for generations. When you’re focused on making it to the end of the week, it’s very hard to conceptualize the future or the long-term consequences of climate change. And even beyond that, asking people to change deeply habitual behaviors takes a tremendous amount of cognitive effort. Habits are well-worn paths that our energy naturally follows. Some of these patterns have passed down from generation to generation. Breaking them requires real intention and effort, and I think that’s one of the most significant challenges we face.
Q: Have you had any successes so far?
A: Not yet with the environmental side specifically, but I have had a lot of success helping people examine the way they live and recognize what is and isn’t serving them. Even within my own household, which is a multigenerational family home, building awareness is genuinely difficult when everyone has their own challenges to focus on. But I believe we are making strides. It’s a step at a time, a day at a time.
Q: When you think years into the future, what impact do you hope your work will have on the river and the community?
A: The impact I hope to have is in helping people return to ancestral practices that kept us more interconnected with the world, with the earth, and with each other. For me, going out in nature helped me tremendously as I navigated several life changes. I took walks along the Neponset River trail, the Blue Hills, and Franklin Park. I don’t know if I was fully aware of it at the time, but looking back, I think it created a spaciousness in my mind and body that helped me begin to recalibrate. Little by little, being in nature helped me unlock something in myself, to think more freely and feel more capable. My hope is that by helping people reconnect with the land, they too will feel more empowered, more capable, and more connected to each other. I pray that those efforts help create healthier, happier people and stronger communities.
Q: What would you want someone who has never heard of the Lower Neponset River to understand about it and the community around it?
A: I would want them to understand that the Lower Neponset River runs through some of the most disadvantaged communities in the area, and that it is affecting people’s health and well-being in ways most people don’t even know about. This river could be a source of joy and connection to the earth, but right now it is heavily polluted and dangerous, to our children and to the animals living there. With concerted effort and people working together, we can change that. We can make it a place that enhances our health and well-being rather than threatening it.
Karen Groce-Horan
Community Engagement Strategist, Neponset River Watershed Association, Resident of Dorchester
“Community advocacy takes breaking down walls, inviting people in, and showing up time and again.”
Karen is the Community Engagement Strategist with the Neponset River Watershed Association and resident of Dorchester, but her advocacy for her community began long before her current position with the nonprofit.
Growing up in the late 1960s, she watched her parents stand up for civil rights firsthand. This early exposure shaped her belief that if something important does not exist, you build it and speak up for what you feel is right.
Over the years, Karen has founded a community organization focusing on conversations on race and justice, advocated for the Resilient Neponset initiative, and worked to connect Milton and Mattapan through the Harvest River Bridge. Her experience working in this decade-long project drove her towards environmental justice.
Today, in her work with the Neponset River Watershed Association, Karen focuses on outreach and community engagement across the Watershed. She firmly believes in the power and importance of trust and public knowledge in community outreach, and works to build it through consistent presence, multilingual outreach, and partnerships with long-standing community leaders. For Karen, environmental justice means helping residents to understand climate impacts and what is happening in their neighborhoods. Every resident, she believes, should have a voice in decisions that affect their health and future.
Once, Karen’s daughter reminded her that without a livable planet, all other justice work loses meaning. Now, Karen is committed to bridging social and environmental justice and to bringing tangible solutions that protect both people and place.
Q: Can you share about your early experiences and what led you to social and environmental justice work?
A: I grew up in the late 60s and saw my parents involved firsthand. [I read] the newspaper articles that they’d be featured in, and it made a mark on me.
The first civil and human rights issue that got me thinking beyond race was the disability movement and everything that took place to bring the Americans with Disabilities Act to fruition. I observed that as a young person and thought it was so important. I didn’t really do much until I went to college. I’ve always been a person who, if something didn’t exist, would say, “Why not create it?” There wasn’t a Parents Weekend at my college, so [I asked], why isn’t there one? That was my freshman year. By my junior year, with the help of my advisor, I got funding, formed a committee, and thousands of people came to the first Parents Weekend. It always inspired me: if something doesn’t exist and you think it’s important, then stand up for what you feel is right.
That led me to founding a community organization in 2016. I couldn’t believe the blatant racism that was present and so commonplace, so I came together with community members to form a group that held ongoing monthly conversations about race, justice, culture, and systemic racism. I felt that in order to build community, we needed to talk about these things and come together around them.
At the time, I lived along the Neponset and advocated for the Neponset Greenway and a bridge between Milton and Mattapan to be built (Note: Karen was referring to the Harvest River Bridge). It took no less than 11 years because of racism: people in Milton saying they didn’t need to be connected to Mattapan, that’s where all the crime and “those people” live. It was blatantly racist. That’s what started getting me involved in environmental justice and access to green space. When the bridge was finally built along the Greenway, it felt like an important hurdle.
Then my daughter once said to me, “You do so much community work around equity and justice, but if you’re not doing environmental work, what’s the point? If we don’t have a planet or a safe place to live — even for your grandchildren — what’s the sense in doing the work?” I thought, that makes so much sense, and it’s all related.
Around the time of the Superfund recognition, I saw how connected it all was. The river runs through environmental justice communities, and the pollution is some of the worst in the country for this section. The responsible parties didn’t care because of the communities that live there — they thought they had no power or voice.
So I kept learning and became more of an advocate. Let’s get the community involved. The more they learn and understand, the more they’ll have a voice and see the importance of being at the table when decisions and actions take place that directly impact them.
Q: Talking about environmental injustice, how do you think the Lower Neponset River becoming a Superfund site in 2022 made an impact on the community surrounding it? Or has it made an impact at all?
I think it’s starting to make an impact. It’s important to me, especially living close to it. But it’s incredible when we’re out in the community trying to get people to sign on, make comments on the report, or give insights on the actions to be taken, and they say, “Superfund site? I didn’t know this was a Superfund site.” And I’m like, it’s been three years.
There’s still a lot of engagement to do so people understand what it means, what the implications are, what the dangers are, and how it impacts all of us. It’s important for us to have a voice in what takes place. There’s so much more that needs to be done.
Q: When you’re doing our community outreach initiatives, is there any particular memory or conversation that made you realize your work was impactful?
I’m sure there are. What comes to mind is realizing we should be doing this in the languages of our stakeholders and constituents. We should have presentations in Spanish. We should go to the Haitian Creole church near the river. Even if some don’t live there, they spend time there, and some probably do live in the area. We should have discussions in their language.
We’ve become so Anglo-centered in how we communicate that we miss whole communities, especially environmental justice communities, because of that narrowness. That was an awakening for me. We need to do this in the languages people need to hear, have conversations in their language, ask questions in their language, and center it as a priority for them.
Q: Could you tell us more about a project that you’re working on right now?
The one that I am putting most of my time into is the Resilient Neponset municipal vulnerability grant. It brings together flood modeling, heat impact studies, and building community resilience across the region. It brings together 30 to 40 people across the watershed to talk about what climate resilience looks like in their communities and how we can work together to build impactful initiatives across the region. Flooding doesn’t stop at town or municipal borders. What happens upstream impacts downstream. Anything that happens in one town impacts the whole watershed. So it’s about building that sense of community and connection between the different regions of the watershed.
[NepRWA] brought me in to build trusting relationships so we have better representation. I’m excited about the breadth of race, culture, language, and generations represented in this group. We also have an elder from the Massachusetts tribe, a historian, who speaks about Indigenous wisdom and knowledge and how they’ve been navigating climate change for thousands of years. There’s so much learning that they possess that we’re not often afforded.
I look forward to working across these unique perspectives [of] stakeholders to build important projects that impact communities in new ways.
Q: What are some major challenges in engaging environmental justice communities and bringing them into decision-making?
It’s the challenge of working with any new community. Even if you look like them, they don’t trust you. It’s hard to get involved and invested if you don’t have that trust. We say this work moves at the speed of trust, and that’s true.
[Community advocacy] takes breaking down walls, inviting people in, and showing up time and again. I’ve been at this about a year and a half now, and it’s great to see outreach and canvassing turn into real engagement. People understand that having a voice in environmental work is important.
At the Mattapan meeting last week, it was powerful to see representation across generations, race, and culture. It felt affirming to see that outreach builds energy and investment in the process.
Q: And how in the past, have you been able to build that trust with the community?
Keeping people informed. Continuing to follow up. Doing what I say I’m going to do. Working with trusted organizations in Mattapan and Hyde Park that already have relationships.
It has to be multifaceted, but there are strategies that are starting to work and to hold consistently. It didn’t start when I joined NepRWA. It started years before, including work on the Heritage Bridge. It’s about building on earlier partnerships and connections.
Q: What challenges has the community experienced beyond PCB pollution that we know of as part of the Superfund designation?
In Hyde Park, residents don’t have a health center, so people have to drive further to get to a hospital or appointments.
But one of the biggest challenges I see in the Boston region is the lack of attention to public health in a community like Hyde Park. When you look at the statistics, cancer rates are high there. Asthma rates are high there. Does it have anything to do with pollution? Does it have anything to do with being near this severely contaminated stretch of river?
Lucy Zhang
Senior, Boston Latin School & Capstone Researcher
“Lichen gave me a tool to uncover what was hiding in the air of our community. I want to make pollution visible for others.”
Lucy is a high school senior at Boston Latin School. She grew up in a heavily polluted city in northern China, where school would often be canceled because of dangerous smog. When she moved to Boston in middle school, she fell in love with taking walks in nature while enjoying the fresh air. On these walks, she began noticing lichen, the green and yellow patches growing on sidewalk trees. They looked different downtown than in the suburbs, and she wondered why.
She later discovered through science fair that lichen indicates air pollution. Her early curiosity transformed into five years of science research to understand Boston’s air quality using lichen. In tenth grade, she came across a local news article about the Lower Neponset River becoming a Superfund. She was shocked: the river was only minutes from her home, yet she had never heard about it. For two years, she studied air pollution at the Lower Neponset using lichen, and found that lead levels in samples greatly exceeded controls. She is now revising the work for publication.
However, Lucy felt that science was not enough. She wanted to help others understand the significance of the river, so the community could act for change together. She joined meetings and cleanups, and enrolled in her school’s Senior Capstone, a full-year independent research course. She set out to create the “Voices of the Lower Neponset River” exhibit, documenting the stories of 14 advocates which you now read. She drew on years of artistic training to paint each of them a watercolor portrait, which will be exhibited in the Milton Public Library from April to June of 2026.
Through her research and advocacy work, Lucy wants to make pollution visible for others.
Q: Where do you live, and how close is your home to the Lower Neponset River?
A: I live in Roslindale, about a seven minute drive from the Lower Neponset River. Even though I’m not a resident of the neighborhoods directly affected by the pollution, I drive past the river all the time. And since I’ve been doing advocacy work in the area and getting to know the residents and advocates here, I feel like I belong to this community the most. I have been more involved in the Lower Neponset River community than anywhere else in the past 4 years.
Q: How are you involved in advocacy work at the Lower Neponset River, and how did you become involved?
A: I grew up in a heavily polluted city in northern China. When I was little, we would have days off from school because it was too dangerous to go outside when the smog hit the city. I had to wear a mask to school every single day, and even then, I could taste soot on the tip of my tongue. I still go back to China every year, and each time the air feels heavier. I feel like I’m choking on the dirt in it.
In middle school, I moved to Boston, and the first thing I noticed was how different the air felt. It felt fresher. I fell in love with the smell of lilacs and the smell of dirt after rain, and I started taking neighborhood walks. That’s when I began noticing lichen, the green and yellow patches growing on surfaces throughout the city. I noticed they looked different downtown than in the suburbs, and that sparked a question: why?
In eighth grade, I started doing science fair research and learned that lichen is a bioindicator of air quality. For the next four years in high school, I collected thousands of lichen samples across six different neighborhoods in Boston to investigate how lichen reflects air pollution across the city.
My connection to the Lower Neponset River started in tenth grade, when I came across a local news article about the river becoming a national Superfund site. At the time, I had no idea what Superfund meant, or that a river so close to where I lived was polluted. That was shocking to me. If I, someone living nearby, didn’t know about it, how would anyone else in this country know and act on it?
That’s what led me to two years of science research looking specifically at air pollution at the Lower Neponset River using lichen. There is a lot of existing research on soil and water contamination, but not enough on how sediment pollution transfers into air quality. Through my research, I found higher levels of lead in the lichen near the river compared to control samples from other parts of the city and to national research benchmarks. That finding alarmed me, and I wanted to do more for the community. That’s when I got more involved with the Neponset River Watershed Association, joined cleanups, and eventually started my capstone project.
Q: Can you describe what you do as an advocate for the river, and what motivates you?
A: I do science research at the Lower Neponset River, focused on the Hyde Park side. For my research, I surveyed every single street within one kilometer of the EPA site coordinates, going tree by tree. I am now very familiar with that space. I can recognize the streets, the corner stores, the cafes. I’m working this year to revise my manuscript and submit it to a journal.
Alongside that, I enrolled in a full year independent research course at school called Senior Capstone, because I wanted to call more people to action. This year, I’m working toward a multimedia public exhibit celebrating 14 advocates and residents at the Lower Neponset River who are each working for the river in different ways, through journalism, science, community involvement, outreach, and art. I wanted to emphasize how much can be done when people come together, and that behind every Superfund site are resilient communities who are fighting to be heard, recognized, and remembered. I hope that by doing this project, which is the one you are now reading, I will raise public awareness about the challenges environmental justice communities face in Boston and inspire more people to join the initiatives.
I am interviewing 14 residents and community advocates to document their lived experiences and hopes for the river, and putting their stories on a website under NepRWA so that as many people as possible can read them and so that it can stay as a permanent resource for the community. I am also creating watercolor portraits for each participant. The exhibit will be displayed at the Moses Public Library from April to June, and I am partnering with NepRWA to host an opening reception in April.
This year I joined a new NepRWA initiative called the Resilient Neponset Community Action Team, which brings together over 30 diverse residents to help build community resilience to climate impacts across the Neponset watershed. We’ve only had one meeting so far, but I got to meet people across generations, backgrounds, races, and immigration statuses, all gathered under the same goal: to help create a better future for our community. It has been incredibly inspiring.
What motivates me most is the people themselves. Every time I sat down with a resident or an advocate, I learned something I didn’t know before. Each conversation opened my eyes a little wider to the complex history, the diverse community, and the depth of advocacy that surrounds this river. It is not simply a river. There are real people with real lived experiences behind it. I can see their eyes light up when they talk about the Lower Neponset River the same way mine do when I talk about it to my friends. That is what keeps me going.
Q: What have been some of the biggest challenges in the work that you do?
A: During the two years of science research, the toughest part was collecting the samples themselves. When my family was at home for Christmas movies, I was walking every corner of Hyde Park, probably 15,000 steps a day, collecting lichen samples in Boston winter. Winter here is brutal. The wind cuts through your bones, and sometimes there is snow. My pencil would slip from my numb fingers as I tried to jot down notes in 20 ºF wind. But I kept going, because I knew that lichen gave me a tool to uncover what was hiding in the air of our community. I wanted to make pollution visible for others.
This year, one of the challenges with the capstone has been finding an exhibit space and doing the artwork itself. Although I have had artistic training since middle school and have won awards for it, this time felt different. I had a purpose going into every portrait. I wanted each one to be as authentic and realistic as I could make it, because I know every single person I am drawing, and I know the incredible work they do. I want to be able to reflect that through my art and celebrate them through it. That added weight made it harder, but also more meaningful.
Q: In your neighborhood, how do people talk about the Neponset, or do people talk about it at all?
Over the past three years, I’ve been talking to friends, family, teachers, and neighbors about my work, and I keep realizing how few people know what the Lower Neponset River is, or that it is polluted. I have friends living in Hyde Park who did not know about the contamination until I told them. The Neponset is one of three major watersheds in Boston, but many residents are completely unaware of its history or the environmental challenges it faces today. If people don’t know about the issue in their own city, how can we ever address the pollution and make the river a true community resource? That question drives everything I do.
Q: Is there a particular interaction or story with a resident that deeply impacted you?
A: After realizing how widespread the lack of awareness was, I wanted to get more involved in bridging the gap between scientific knowledge and the public. So I contacted NepRWA’s community organizer and told her I was interested in volunteering. She invited me to the fall cleanup, the organization’s biggest river cleanup of the year.
On a misty Saturday morning at the start of the school year, I arrived at the riverbank with my dad’s oversized gardening gloves. At first I felt out of place. I was the only teenager among 20 adults. But that uneasiness faded quickly once we got into the rhythm of the work. We slid down muddy slopes, held onto each other and leaned on tree roots for balance. I dodged poison ivy, and came back up with whatever we had found. At one point we found a soiled stuffed animal and made it our mascot for the day.
I knew the river was polluted, but I had never grasped the sheer volume of what people had carelessly thrown away until that day. We found whole shopping carts, car parts, and tires. I was pulling beer bottles and wine bottles out of the soil. Plastic was the hardest to deal with because so much of it had already disintegrated beneath the surface, and it would fall apart the moment I touched it. There was so much that I simply couldn’t bring myself to leave. I was the second to last person up the bank, and our cleanup leader was starting to wonder where I was. We kept going until we could barely see in the fading light.
During the cleanup, I heard the stories that brought everyone there. Our leader, a grandfather, pointed to the spot where he used to fish and said he hoped future generations would one day experience that same joy. A local business owner had come to improve the surroundings of his newly opened restaurant. A real estate manager wanted to do something for the environment. We came together across age, background, and profession because we all believed that community action can reverse pollution.
That day is also how I connected with Karen Groce-Horan, NepRWA’s community engagement strategist. I stayed in touch with her afterward, and she later invited me to the Resilient Neponset Community Action Team. She has also been a huge supporter of my capstone project, helping me find residents willing to share their experiences, and helping me plan the exhibit reception and website.
Q: When you think years into the future, what impact do you hope your work has left on the river, the ecosystem, and the communities that live beside it?
A: Through all of this work, whether science research or community engagement, I hope to call more people to action. I hope to create a permanent resource where people can learn about the vibrancy, the diversity, and the resilience of this community, and be inspired to join in on this environmental justice initiative.
Even though the Lower Neponset River is now receiving national EPA funding for cleanup, I don’t believe that is enough. Through my conversations with advocates, I’ve learned that there aren’t enough young people involved, and that many worry about parts of the river and community that are still not being addressed. I hope that what we see right now is not the end of it. The cleanup is a great first step, but it should not be the last. Being able to fish in the river may still be a distant dream, but I am sure that the legacy of community action will carry on for generations.
Q: To someone who has never heard of the Lower Neponset River, what do you hope they understand about it and why this work matters?
A: The river is incredibly beautiful, and it can be a resource for all of us if we work together to make it that way. During the pandemic, my family would spend entire days biking along the Charles River. Why can’t we have the same thing here? Why can’t the Lower Neponset be that kind of sanctuary for the neighbors who live right beside it? People shouldn’t have to travel far to access nature. It should be right there.
And the river already has so much life in it. Striped bass glides through the currents. Frogs rest between lily pads. People have spotted otters and great blue herons in the shallows. I want us to be able to see that life flourish, and to see the river become what it has always had the potential to be: a place that belongs to everyone.
Moala K. Bannavti
Environmental Engineer
“Knowledge is power. Before you can make a decision, you have to know that a decision needs to be made and what your choices are.”
Dr. Moala Bannavti did not expect herself to become an environmental engineer, but one high school class changed everything. When her high school offered AP Environmental Science for the first time in 2013, she signed up out of curiosity and to take a break from physics. She was immediately drawn into the class. Her teacher, Dr. Sarah O’Donnell, opened her eyes to not only environmental science, but also environmental injustice. She learned why communities in valleys had worse asthma, and how living near a quarry negatively impacted their air and water quality.
Later, Dr. Bannavti went on to earn her PhD studying airborne PCBs in low-income, predominantly minority schools in Iowa City. In 2023, she arrived in Boston as a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. The Lower Neponset River had just been declared a Superfund site, and Dr. Bannavti asked a question that no one knew yet: were the heavily contaminated sediments releasing pollutants into the air? During her work, she worked closely with residents and the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation to access the dams for sampling.
The research is currently in the analysis phase, but Dr. Bannavti is hopeful. She is inspired to continue her research and one day share her findings with the community. Despite transitioning into a teaching career as an algebra teacher, she is still carrying her research forward and analyzing the samples in her free time.
Q: Can you describe what you do for work right now?
A: Right now, I’m an algebra teacher. Very recently, I was a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. My research was focused on airborne PCBs, specifically airborne PCBs coming off the Neponset River. The sediment pollution in the river is well-known. Because of sediment pollution, there is water pollution. Because of the exchange between sediment and water, we would also typically expect to see some air pollution at the water-air boundary. That’s not necessarily guaranteed, and for the sake of the community, we’re hoping the air is clean. However, my job was to ask: given the heavy sediment pollution we already know about, is the water and air along the Lower Neponset also heavily polluted? I specifically focused on the Milton and Hyde Park areas, making sure that the predominantly people of color and lower-income communities had clean air and water, regardless of the sediment contamination.
Q: What made you decide to become a scientist and specifically study environmental engineering?
A: I took an AP Environmental Science class in high school. I was originally supposed to take physics. I’d had a bad experience with it, so I was running away from it. It was the first year my school offered AP Environmental Science, back in 2013. They said, “You have great grades in bio and good grades in chem, would you like to try it?” Because it wasn’t physics, I was on board. I thought it would be easier. I was wrong.
My teacher was Dr. Sarah O’Donnell, a former Rutgers professor who had retired and came to teach high school. She taught me not just environmental science, but environmental justice. Why communities in valleys have worse asthma rates. Why do people in industrial areas have worse air and water quality? We lived downstream from a quarry that hadn’t been sealed properly, and she walked us through that trickle-down effect.
I have a lot of people in my family in the medical field, nurses and doctors. Health is always a topic of conversation, especially as it relates to the Black community. Nobody (that I know of) was talking about our environmental predisposition and how it connects to our health. Nobody was talking about how your zip code predisposes you to certain diseases. I found it fascinating and infuriating. I told myself this was going to be part of my life’s work, and it has been.
Q: What motivated you specifically to work at the Lower Neponset River?
A: My Principal Investigator had done extensive work on airborne PCBs over contaminated sediment waterways, including the Duwamish Waterway in Seattle. So it was a natural fit.
Beyond that, postdoctoral fellowships are meant to expand your skill set from your doctorate. During my PhD, I had done mostly indoor PCB measurements. I wanted to develop expertise in outdoor fluid dynamics and air transport modeling. Those were skills I knew would be important as a professor. I wanted to continue environmental justice work, in a new context.
The Lower Neponset River was the newest Superfund site at the time. I finished my PhD in November 2022, and the Neponset had been declared a Superfund site in March 2022. No air measurements had been taken there before. A strong research project requires novelty. It requires doing something nobody else has done. Several things converged: I wanted outdoor field experience, the site was nearby, and it was an environmental justice community I could genuinely see myself helping. I ended up living in Roxbury, close to Dorchester. In some ways, I was living among that community.
Even if I walked away without a publication, I would still have made a tangible difference. Either way, residents would know the truth about their air. That information, in real time, was more valuable to me than any paper or publication I could gain from the project.
Q: Was there a moment in the field when you realized your work isn’t just about science?
A: Given my background, I went in already knowing it wasn’t just about the science. What reinforced that was working closely with the DCR, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation. They gave us access to the dams to place our air samplers. Many of them are also longtime members of the community. Hearing how invested they are in the results was meaningful. I’m very excited to share results with the community when we get there.
Q: What do you think is your responsibility to the community as an environmental engineer?
A: To tell the truth, as quickly, efficiently, and honestly as possible. I’m committed to not manufacturing a problem if one doesn’t exist. If the air is fine, I want to shout that from the rooftops. This is a field where you pray for the best and prepare for the worst. If the air is clean, that’s the news. If it isn’t, my responsibility shifts to communicating that and strategizing next steps. As an environmental engineer, I value being the bearer of honest news. What most people care about is whether results meet the EPA standard. When they do, that’s good news worth celebrating.
Q: Could you elaborate on your work in Iowa?
A: In Iowa City, I measured airborne PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, across a broad range of congeners. The Neponset project is focused on Aroclor-related contamination from a known source. In Iowa, I measured both Aroclor and non-Aroclor PCBs. I did this in a low-income, predominantly minority school, with the goal of developing more cost-effective remediation strategies.
PCB removal from schools is currently extremely expensive. I developed a theory called Targeted Materials Remediation. If you take air samples and use statistics to identify which sources are contributing to the air signal, you can remove just those sources without more invasive and costly testing. The goal is always to keep children in healthy classrooms. That was the core of my PhD.
Q: When you think years into the future, what impact do you hope your work has left on the river, the ecosystem, or the community around it?
A: I hope my work leaves behind awareness. Knowledge is power. Before you can make a decision, you have to know that a decision needs to be made and what your choices are.
Pat Alvarez
“A lot of people don’t even know the river is there. It’s hidden. A river runs through Hyde Park, and we need to be able to enjoy that river, safely, together.”
Pat has lived in Hyde Park for 30 years, just up hill from the Neponset River. She co-founded the Southwest Boston Community Development Corporation (SWBCDC), a nonprofit that today owns 92 affordable housing projects and runs a range of community programs across Hyde Park and Roslindale. With SWBCDC, she has spent two decades organizing neighbors and fighting for social and environmental justice.
Despite living close to the river, Pat was unaware of its contamination until she started organizing a restoration project at Doyle Park, a long abandoned playground close by. After learning about the pollution putting nearby residents at risk, Pat joined the Lower Neponset River Community Advisory Group (CAG) to raise awareness about the issue. Today, she serves on the Outreach Committee, organizing public meetings and informing residents about the EPA-led cleanup.
Through the SWBCDC, Pat also initiated the Green Team, a program that hires high school students to restore and protect vegetation along the river and urban wilds. Together, they remove invasive plants and plant trees to mitigate polluted runoff. The Green Team also partners with the Neponset River Watershed Association to take students canoeing on the river, where they learn about the river’s history and study macroinvertebrates to understand water quality.
Above all, Pat shares a vision with many residents and advocates: that one day the Neponset will be a clean, accessible resource that families can safely enjoy.
Q: Which neighborhood do you live in? How close is your home to Neponset River?
A: I’ve been living in Hyde Park for 30 years, and I live just up the hill from the Neponset river.
Q: How did you become involved in advocacy for the river?
A: I didn’t know about it in the initial years I lived here. When I came to live here, I helped to start the Southwest Boston Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit that started out mostly focusing on affordable housing, and over the years expanded to other community needs, including environmental work.
We started a youth jobs and environmental stewardship program where we hired high school students from all over the city to do restoration of our conservation land in Hyde Park. In the process of doing that initiative work, I began learning about the Neponset River. We started by focusing on Doyle Park, a playground that had been dismantled by the Department of Conservation and Recreation and left full of weeds and deteriorating pavement. We engaged The Mission Continues, a veteran’s group, to help remove invasive plants which inspired the DCR to remove the concrete.We organized and formed a committee to advocate for it to be rebuilt for community use. We had charrettes where we invited neighbors to talk about what they’d like it to be: a park for adults or children or both, a playground or a music stage.
As time went on, NepRWA got more involved on this side of the river, and they formed the Hyde Park Neponset River Access Committee, which has been focusing on restoration. We had a sculptor who had designed a sculpture that could also be used as a play structure, and we were getting ready to break ground. However, the EPA then came in and began to evaluate the Neponset River. That’s when we found out that the Hye Park section of the Neponset is one of the most polluted rivers in the nation. They asked us to pause on the Doyle Park project. In the process, the EPA asked us to join the CAG, the Community Advisory Group, to help guide their evaluation of the riverbank and river conditions. A bunch of us from the community joined the CAG and formed different committees. I’m on the Outreach Committee, so we work on organizing public meetings and doing outreach to get people interested in coming.
Q: What was your reaction to learning that the river was polluted?
A: I wasn’t surprised, because I was aware that in the late 1800s and early 1900s there was industry along the river. We can still see the remnants of that, with one old factory that still stands behind the Shops at Riverwood. I’d heard stories for years. One of our community leaders, who was very instrumental in getting that last acre of Sherrin Woods into conservation, grew up right across from the river. She told me the river was always “iridescent green”, and several of her family members got cancer.
I remember when Mayor Menino was still in office, and I walked the Lewis Chemical site with him and some other people from the community. We were talking about how we’d like to see an art center, a theater, an outdoor restaurant on the site. Little did we know how polluted it was.
Q: Can you describe what you do on a daily basis as an advocate for the river, and what motivates you?
A: On a day-to-day level, I go to the general CAG meetings once a month, and then the Outreach Committee meetings, and whatever activities they need help with, I do as much as I can. I keep our board of directors of the Southwest Boston CDC updated on what’s happening. When they need help reaching the wider community, my agency sends out email blasts, puts it on our social media, and so on.
What motivates me is that we all deserve to be healthy. That means having a clean river and riverbanks that aren’t putting contaminants into the atmosphere, that aren’t dangerous to people who want to go canoeing, or to people who fish there and don’t know the fish aren’t safe to eat.
Q: What have been some of the biggest challenges along the way?
A: It’s taken way too long. And there are still a lot of people in the community who either don’t know about the river or don’t realize how dangerous it is, or who are simply too busy to come to meetings. Hyde Park is such an active community. We have so many projects going on that people have to pick and choose. I have one to three meetings scheduled most evenings. However, I’m not the only one. A lot of us are in that situation, whether we’re working on saving tree canopy and woodlands, working on the river, or other projects. We have over ten neighborhood associations in Hyde Park.
Q: Why do you want to work in public advocacy and community work?
A: I was raised on a small family farm with my whole extended family. I spent every waking moment of my childhood in the woods with my siblings and cousins. We came to love the woods. When I was upset or stressed out, I would talk to the trees. They would comfort me, give me advice. We grabbed frogs from the vernal pools, fed them worms, and let them go. I was so connected to nature from such a young age.
As a Latina student in a town where we were one of the only Latino families, I got a lot of meanness and discrimination from others. I would come home crying and ask my mother, “Mom, what are we?”. From that, I developed a deep sense of social injustice. I remember a family friend with Down Syndrome. None of the other kids would play with him, so I would invite him into my house and have tea parties with him.
When I went to college, I discovered social work and fell in love. I became active in the community. I was active in welfare rights and worked at a community center teaching teenagers about Youth in Government. When working for the United Farm Workers Union in California, I worked on a local initiative to get legal protections for farm workers, who were being sprayed with pesticides, living in terrible conditions, and watching their babies be born with birth defects.
Then I worked for the Office of Urban Affairs on prisoners’ rights and prison reform. We also started a community mediation program so that when young people got into trouble, instead of entering the criminal justice system, the community mediation board would talk with them about what they had done and how they could make restitution. We also got through the Connecticut legislature a pilot grievance process for prisoners who were being abused.
Then I moved to Boston for graduate school. Under the advice of my mentor, I started to work for the Committee for Boston Public Housing. I worked there for 11 years. We organized tenant associations, started youth programming, and fought for better conditions. I learned so much about organizing and loved every bit of it.
Later, a friend told me that some neighbors were getting together to start a community development corporation, since Hyde Park and Roslindale didn’t have one. I was at the point where I was ready to do some volunteer work, and I thought: no contest, I want to go back to organizing. So I joined, and we created Southwest Boston CDC.
We now own about 94 affordable housing properties, with plans to build and buy more, and we have many committees working on a range of issues. I joined the staff and now work 20 hours a week.
Q: From your personal experience, in what ways has the pollution impacted your daily life or that of your neighbors?
A: Before I knew how bad it was, I had taken some risks: getting my feet in that water, getting in a canoe, taking walks along the river, doing cleanup work along the riverbanks.
One area along the river that is safe is the West St Urban Wild, where the Green Team* worked with the Parks Department for several years. We even hired goats for two years to eat the invasive plants growing there. But we’ve had to stop doing work there because the EPA has taken it over as a staging area for work they are doing downstream.
Recently the Green Team was awarded funding from the Attorney General’s office to buy plants, materials and equipment to do plantings along safe sections of the river to help prevent future runoff. The plants and trees will help capture polluted water before it reaches the river. So now we’re going to work with the Parks Department at Reservation Road, which is a little bit upstream near Mother Brook.
*[Note from Pat about the Green Team: Our agency runs the Green Team, where we hire 12-15 high school students to do conservation restoration work. They work at Sherrin Woods and other sites. Sometimes, NepRWA takes them on canoe trips on a section of the river that’s safer, where they learn to canoe and learn about the history of the river. They then take water samples and look for macroinvertebrates that indicate river water quality. Every generation of people is learning about this river, its significance and current risks.]
Q: For someone who hasn’t heard much about the Neponset River before, what do you hope they will understand about the river, the community, and why this work matters?
A: First and foremost, people need to understand the history of the river: how badly polluted it became, and how critical it is to our health and safety. [It is important] not only for people who live right along the river, but for people who live a little further away, breathing the air and coming into contact with chemicals they don’t even know are there.
And then beyond safety, it’s about awareness. A lot of people don’t even know the river is there. It’s kind of hidden. Part of the CAG’s advocacy is informing people about the cleanup that’s happening and why it’s so critical, but also simply letting people know that a river runs through Hyde Park. We need to be able to enjoy that river, safely, together.
Q: When you think years into the future, what impact do you hope your work will leave on the river, its ecosystems, and the communities around it?
A: I hope the river is safe, so families can enjoy walking with their children and their pets along the river safely. I wish I could say people will be able to fish and eat the fish. I don’t know if it’ll ever be that clean, but at least fish for enjoyment and do catch-and-release.
I also hope that, with the city’s Squares and Streets program focusing on redevelopment in Hyde Park, particularly around Logan Square, we can make sure the history of Hyde Park is preserved. We want to make sure small business owners aren’t displaced, and renters aren’t displaced, and that tree canopy is added and retained. Most importantly, we want to make sure that the riverbanks remain accessible to the public. Those aren’t just my goals. They’re the goals of many people in this community.
Robert McKinnon
“I want the river to become a resource for the community, [where] people can enjoy having a riverside park, […] sit by the water with their children or their pet dog, and relax for the afternoon.”
Rob has always lived near the Lower Neponset River, growing up first in Dorchester and later moving to Milton. Today, he lives less than a quarter mile away from the river in Hyde Park.
His connection to rivers began long before he was involved with the Lower Neponset. As a child, he spent summers in the White Mountains, where he fell in love with the outdoors. Now a trip leader with the Appalachian Mountain Club, Rob organizes paddling trips and helps others experience the outdoors safely.
As an avid paddler who values clean water and outdoor recreation, the condition of the Lower Neponset River immediately caught his attention. Twenty years ago in Milton, Rob read a local newspaper notice about a community meeting to discuss cleaning up the river. Concerned about the pollution, he attended. Since then, Rob has been an active advocate and is now a member of the Lower Neponset River Community Advisory Group.
After paddling on the river with his sons and joining local cleanups, he witnessed the danger of the river’s pollution firsthand and was determined to help restore it. Yet, to most residents, much of the pollution is invisible, hidden behind fences and industrial buildings. Thus, Rob helps to bridge the information gap by distributing flyers, organizing meetings, and translating scientific findings into straightforward explanations for everyone in the community. In the future, Rob envisions turning the river into an accessible resource for young people and local residents to enjoy.
Q: Which neighborhood do you live in? For how long have you lived there?
A: I currently live in Hyde Park. About twenty years ago, I was living in Milton. As a kid I grew up in Boston and Dorchester, so I’ve lived all around the river. Now, I live less than a quarter mile away [from the river] on Fairmount Hill.
Q: When you were a child or teenager, did you interact with the river? Have you seen any differences in the river over the past years or decades?
Not a whole lot of difference, because it’s really been off limits. The part that’s most polluted has been fenced off. Only recently—relatively speaking—has that begun to change. When the Neponset Greenway was built and the parkland, walking paths, hiking trails, and bicycle paths were added, that was the biggest change. It brought more people closer to the river and made the area more useful.
Before that, the river was basically unknown. My mother worked for years near the trolley line in Central Village when she was a teenager in the 1950s. She didn’t even know the river was there. At that time, a hurricane came through. A number of dams were destroyed, and a lot of mud and debris washed downstream. Even so, people were mostly unaware of the river because it wasn’t used as a community resource.
Something similar is happening now. The T&H Dam had about 10 or 11 feet of contaminated mud upstream of it. In the last five years or so, it has lost around four feet of that sediment, which has washed downstream during heavy rains. The mud keeps moving farther down the river.
Even though no new PCBs or dioxins are being dumped into the water, that contaminated sediment continues spreading pollution farther down the watershed. About 40 percent of that contaminated material has already moved downstream. Once it reaches the marshes, it will be much harder to clean up because it spreads across large wetland areas. That’s dangerous and one of the reasons we want to see the entire area cleaned up.
Q: How did you become involved in advocacy for the river?
Twenty years ago, I was living in Milton and saw a note in the community newspaper about a meeting regarding cleaning up the Neponset River. This was before the EPA got involved.
Since I’m passionate about paddling and clean water for youth activities and outdoor recreation, I was very interested. I went to the meeting. After that, the effort fell apart for a while. There was a long quiet period while other people worked to get the EPA involved.
Eventually the issue came around again. I saw another notice about joining a community group and got involved. I’m now a member of the Community Advisory Group and also a member of the Neponset River Watershed Association.
Because I live close by and the river is very polluted, it matters to me. The water was horrible. You see a lot of urban trash and things you wouldn’t see if the river were farther away from development. I’ve participated in a few river cleanups. At the time, I didn’t realize how contaminated the mud actually was. When I paddled there with my kids when they were teenagers, I realized it was too dirty to continue using. So we go to other places now: Ponkapoag Pond or other waterways. I have a vehicle and my own canoes, so I can take my kids and grandkids to those places.
But many people in the neighborhood don’t have that option. So I got involved because I want to turn the river into a resource for people your age and younger, and for my grandchildren.
Q: You mentioned there was a quiet period between cleanup efforts. What caused that?
From what I understand, the first cleanup effort was going to be handled by the state of Massachusetts. But when they began investigating the site, they found extremely high levels of pollution, more than the state could handle safely. The scope of the problem was much larger than they anticipated.
Because of that, they needed more resources and approached the EPA. It took time for the EPA to get engaged, but now they have been studying the river for several years.
Q: How has the river’s pollution affected your personal life?
For me it’s mostly a safety issue. I’m an active paddler, so I know what clean water looks like and where it’s safe to paddle. I paddle sea kayaks and other types of boats. I’m also a trip leader with the Appalachian Mountain Club, which runs outdoor activities for people who want to get outside. My job as a trip leader is to choose places that are safe and make sure the level of activity is appropriate for the participants.
Because the Lower Neponset River is so polluted, I go paddling in other places. For example, we often go to Ponkapoag Pond. It’s a few miles from here, and the water is clean. But if you were taking the T, you couldn’t get there easily, so that puts it out of reach for many urban residents. But this river could be a valuable resource for the community if it were clean.
When I was a kid, my mom would send us to summer camp in places like the White Mountains. Over the years, I’ve seen rivers turn around after dams were removed—old paper mill dams, for example. Once the dams were removed, the rivers became cleaner and safe to use again. I’ve seen several rivers that were successfully restored like that, so I know it’s possible.
Q: What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced while doing outreach and advocacy?
I think the biggest challenge is spreading the word and getting more participants involved with what we do. As a Community Advisory Group, we act as an intermediary between the EPA and the community. We create flyers and pass them out door to door. The flyers explain the types of pollution in the river, what the EPA plans to do, and how the cleanup might affect the neighborhood. For example, if they remove contaminated mud, there will be trucks moving through neighborhoods and noise from excavation equipment.
We convene meetings and gather information from stakeholders, such as the Department of Conservation and Recreation, which owns a lot of the parkland along the river and some of the dams. They provide input. We also gather information from scientists and engineers working with the EPA. We collect that information and try to share it with the community. It may seem boring to some people, but it’s very informative to us. The more we learn, the more we realize how important it is to let people know how polluted and unsafe the river is.
Another challenge is getting people interested. The cleanup has many parts. There’s the litter and trash: potato chip bags, cans, bottles, automobile parts, even entire cars. They recently found about seven cars in the river. Beyond that, there are different layers of contamination: urban trash, industrial debris, and chemical pollution from improper disposal. Cleaning through all of that would be a major accomplishment, but it might take ten years to clean up the river.
I think it would be great to get students involved. For example, there are several schools along River Street, high schools and middle schools. However, it’s hard to convince educators to include it in classes and difficult for people to understand the science [of the pollution]. The chemical names of the long list of pollutants can be confusing. I can follow some of it because I went to Boston Latin School and received a good education, even though I’m not a scientist. But for many people walking down the street—someone working in a store or a plumber—it doesn’t always resonate.
Q: In your neighborhood, how do people talk about the Neponset, or do people talk about it at all?
Many people don’t even know the river exists because it’s fenced off. Industrial buildings line the river, and the bridges have fences, so it’s not very accessible. Usually only people who live very close to it or pay attention to it know it’s there. It’s difficult to convince people to care about cleaning something they don’t even know exists.
When we distribute flyers, we explain where the river is, why it’s important, what we’re doing, and how people can contact us if they want more information.
Q: When you think far into the future, what impact do you hope your work will have?
I hope the river becomes clean enough to be a resource for young people in the area.
Kids growing up in the city often don’t have access to outdoor activities like mountains or clean rivers. If the river becomes clean enough, it could provide a nearby place where people can connect with nature. That would create a healthier environment and a better place to live.
Q: If someone doesn’t know about the Lower Neponset River, what do you hope they take away from learning about it?
I would like people to know that the river can become a resource for the benefit of the community. If people care about it, the river could become a resource for them to enjoy. The average person would enjoy having a riverside park where they could walk along a path, sit on a bench with their children or grandchildren or their pet dog, and relax for the afternoon.
Sean McCanty
River Restoration Director, Neponset River Watershed Association
“I’d love for [the Neponset] to become a center point of the community, rather than something hidden in the backyard.”
Sean McCanty is an aquatic ecologist and River Restoration Director of the Neponset River Watershed Association. He grew up in the Chesapeake Bay watershed in Maryland and learned the importance of rivers to ecosystems and communities at a young age. His interest in ecology deepened through a water research internship in high school, and he later came to Boston for graduate school on freshwater ecosystem restoration. Through seven years of studying the restoration of a former cranberry bog, he realized that he not only wants to report on ecological damages, but also help plan restoration projects to minimize harm.
Thus, he joined the Neponset River Watershed Association as the River Restoration Director. Now, he works at the intersection of science and community engagement, working on dam removals, habitat restorations, biodiversity monitoring, and stakeholder engagement. For Sean, his science work is as much about listening and communicating as it is about ecology. He collaborates with government officials, conservation planners, residents, and construction teams to build a solution that addresses everyone’s concerns and needs.
Sean is motivated by the gradual changes he sees: trout returning to streams, vegetation slowly growing back, and the prospect that migratory fish species may again thrive in the watershed. He envisions a future where the Neponset becomes a thriving urban river, a vibrant community center with wildlife and recreation, rather than a shadow hidden behind fences.
Q: What made you want to become a scientist and specifically study environmental science and river ecology?
I’ve always been interested in the outdoors. I grew up in Maryland in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and there was a stronger emphasis on ecology and interconnected waterways in school. Science always interested me: being able to piece things together, ask questions, test methods, and get answers. In high school, I leaned into ecology and did a water research internship with the county government. We looked at fish communities and macroinvertebrates that live in the stream and studied how [human] development impacts waterways. In more developed areas, you see fewer species and less richness. That’s where I started focusing on macroinvertebrates. They’re diverse and sensitive to small changes, so they give you a better sense of how the system responds than fish communities sometimes can.
Q: Do you see parallels between the Chesapeake Bay and the Lower Neponset?
I didn’t do specific research on the Bay itself, but everything drains into it, so in a way, yes. There are parallels. The Lower Neponset receives all the water from the rest of the watershed. The likely source of PCBs there is from factories along Mother Brook. Contamination doesn’t stay where it’s dumped. It continues downstream. Even though the Lower Neponset is a Superfund site, we know contamination extends into the estuary. Everything washes out to sea, and unfortunately the people furthest downstream deal with what happened upstream.
Q: How has climate change impacted the river?
We’re getting more intense rainstorms that cause flooding, but fewer soaking rains that recharge groundwater. The river has experienced drought conditions in recent years, drying out in the summers, which stresses aquatic life. Periodically, heavy storms send large volumes of water downstream.
Much of the river infrastructure, including bridges and culverts, was designed decades ago for different flow conditions. We’re seeing culverts clogging or overtopping in the middle watershed. The Lower Neponset has been widened, so flooding isn’t as severe there, but we can see where this is heading and want to address issues before they become bigger problems downstream.
Q: You could have worked at any watershed across the country, why did you choose the Neponset River and NepRWA?
I came to Boston for grad school because I wanted to work in restoration. Restoration is still a relatively young field in freshwater systems. There’s a lot of research on how ecosystems degrade, but less focused on how we can make things better again.
During my PhD at University of Massachusetts Boston, I studied the restoration of a former cranberry bog in Plymouth. We monitored changes to the fish community, macroinvertebrates, water quality, and habitat changes. The seven years of looking at this restoration was rewarding, but I realized I wanted to be more involved in planning projects, not just reporting outcomes.
When the River Restoration Director position at NepRWA opened, it felt like exactly what I wanted to do. I want to guide restoration projects, work with engineers and other stakeholders, and make decisions thoughtfully.
Q: When did you realize your work wasn’t just about science?
Very early on in the process. The first project I worked on was a small dam removal in Norwood. The people who lived in the neighborhood remember the pond fondly as the place where children swam and played hockey. Restoration projects involve a big leap of faith. It [takes] talking to people, understanding where they’re coming from and what they want, and sometimes what they fear.
Active restoration is an important process, but it’s disruptive. When draining down a lake, you’re first left with what looks like barren wasteland. People worry about property values and aesthetics. You have to communicate honestly: it may look bad at first, but there’s a plan. The grasses come back in five years, and when the trees come back in ten years, it will look like a forest.
We try to get everyone’s perspective and make the best decision, because we don’t want anyone to end up with something we don’t like. To do that, we worked with the town conservation agent and planner and the whole construction team. Also, we listened to people’s concerns and communicated the plan clearly.
Q: River restoration can take years. What keeps you motivated?
Seeing incremental change and other success stories. It is a great way to keep the hope alive. I can visit my grad school restoration site and see how it’s improved. The dam removal site now has flowing water and trout where there weren’t before. Monitoring helps you see progress early. If your goal is something that takes decades, you need intermediate signs of success to stay motivated: for example, a bald eagle or a tall tree.
Q: What impact do you hope your work will have in the future?
I hope the Neponset becomes an urban river that balances wildlife and recreation. Removing dams could allow migratory fish like alewife, American shad, and rainbow smelt to return. We can restore salt marsh and river habitat.
I also hope people reconnect with the river. In a lot of areas, especially the Lower Neponset, the river is tucked behind houses and fences. It doesn’t need to be. It’s already a nice river to look at, and it could be much better. I’d love for it to become a center point of the community rather than something hidden in the backyard.
Vivian Ortiz
Resident of Mattapan, People’s Bike Mayor of Boston
“If we don’t have conversations with young people about infrastructure, streets, trails, transportation, and environmental justice, how are they ever going to imagine something different?”
Vivian Ortiz has been a Mattapan resident since 2012. With the Neponset Greenway trail right behind her house, Vivian walks and bikes by the river every week.
When Vivian first moved to the neighborhood, she joined a community walk organized by the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) along a natural trail where the greenway would eventually be built in 2017. That walk drew her to the river and introduced her to a group of neighbors from Dorchester, Hyde Park, Mattapan, Milton, and Quincy. The neighbors make up the Neponset River Greenway Council, who build relationships between residents and public agencies, advocate for better infrastructure, and organize community events. As the only board member raised outside of Boston, Vivian often brings a different perspective and stimulates discussions by asking questions that others might not.
Aside from her involvement in the Council, Vivian is also the inaugural People’s Bike Mayor of Boston. In an effort to introduce Black and Brown neighbors to the Neponset Greenway, she organizes bike rides to share the river’s history, and our role in helping to restore the habitat of the Neponset. She believes that through daily activities, people can start to appreciate the space and develop a sense of belonging to the river.
To Vivian, building connections is the priority of her advocacy work. She describes herself as a bridge-builder, welcoming community members, government agencies, environmental organizations, and students into the same community.
Q: Which neighborhood do you live in?
A: I live in Mattapan. I grew up in El Paso and moved to the East Coast eighteen years ago. I went to graduate school in New York City, then moved to Boston in 2009 for a job in Wellesley. When I moved to Mattapan in 2012, I had no idea that I’d have a trail less than a five-minute walk from my house.. The [Harvest River] bridge is right behind my house, so the Neponset trail and the river are very close to me. I actually just came off the trail with a friend before this call. We went for a walk and then had brunch in Milton. Because I live so close, I see the trail and the river every day. That’s part of why I’ve gotten so involved with it.
Q: How did you first start getting involved with the trail and the community around it?
When I first moved to Mattapan, the section of the Neponset Greenway from Mattapan Square to Central Avenue did not exist. At the time, if I wanted to go for a walk, I had to walk on River Street toward Central Avenue and enter the trail along the trolley stop. In around 2012, I joined a neighborhood walk organized by DCR. We followed a natural trail between Central Avenue and Mattapan Square, and I thought it was amazing. That’s when people told me I should talk to Vivien Morris, the founder of the Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition, because she was the most active neighbor from Mattapan with the group that later became known as the Neponset River Greenway Council.
When the trail first opened, there weren’t many people that looked like me using it. It still continues to be that way. You don’t see a lot of families using the trail. Sometimes you’ll see older women walking in the morning, or a man walking by himself, but it’s not yet the kind of shared community space where lots of people gather.
One of the reasons is that many of my neighbors don’t really have a relationship with the river or the trail yet. We have to do a better job of inviting people to connect with it. I want more of my neighbors to feel that the river belongs to them.
Q: What have been some of the biggest challenges in the work you do right now?
A: Trying to connect Mattapan residents to the trail has been one of the hardest parts.
Many of the people in my immediate neighborhood are not originally from this country. They’re from the West Indies and the Caribbean. They don’t really spend time on the trail. After Hurricane Maria and all the other hurricanes in the Caribbean, I started wondering whether my neighbors’ lack of connection to the river had something to do with the devastation rivers and storms caused in their home communities.
While on the bus, I shared my thoughts with a neighbor. She said yes, adding that the river does not interest her because she has too many jobs. Going for a walk on a Saturday morning is not something people do in the Caribbean. That was a huge insight for me.
I did not grow up in Boston, so I ask many questions related to the Neponset River or the habitat. I also encourage newer attendees to ask questions as well.
Another challenge is for younger people to get excited about the River. Most of the young people I see are working on a project or helping during our river clean ups. I don’t see enough Boston Public School students or younger residents involved. Right now, a lot of the meetings about the river are attended by older residents and advocates. They care deeply, and they’ve been working on these issues for years. But if young people never come to these meetings or hear about the work being done, then the next generation will not carry that work forward.
There are kids in Mattapan who don’t know the trail exists. Other children in the neighborhood have never been on the trolley and do not know that “River Street” was named after the Neponset River.
If we don’t have conversations with young people about infrastructure, streets, trails, transportation, and environmental justice, how are they ever going to imagine something different?
Q: In your neighborhood, how do people talk about the Neponset, or do people talk about it at all?
A: I was incredibly excited when the Mattapan-to-Milton portion of the Neponset Greenway finally opened in May 2017, because it was right behind my house. A neighbor and I worked with DCR to help tell others what was happening, putting up signs, and sharing meeting information.
However, I was struck by how few people from my own neighborhood seemed interested. When the trail opened, most of the people using it were white people from Milton. That really bothered me.
That’s when I started thinking more deeply about how people identify—or don’t identify—with activities like kayaking, canoeing, biking, and walking. My role in the Council is to remind us that everyone has a different level of experience with biking, and not everybody grew up seeing rivers as recreational spaces. So when someone suggests that people should simply “enjoy the river,” that suggestion might not resonate with them. Understanding that cultural context is important.
At the same time, I think there are opportunities to build new relationships with the river. Activities like walking, biking, or simply spending time outdoors can help people see the river in a different way. However, that takes time.
Q: What motivates you to continue advocating?
For me, it’s about community and about making sure people feel that public spaces belong to them. The river, the trail, the parks are public resources, but if people don’t feel welcome in those spaces, they won’t use them.
Part of my work is making those spaces feel accessible. I love inviting others for a walk or on bikes for a ride on the trail, sharing how better infrastructure benefits everyone, and encouraging people to attend events on or about the Greenway.Even small things can make a difference. I like to be a bridge-builder: connecting community members, government agencies, environmental organizations, and sometimes students like you. I’m not a scientist, but if someone asks me a question, I’ll point them in the right direction. My family has always believed in ensuring people are connected to the information they need.
If someone who has never been on the trail before joins one of our rides and realizes that it’s safe and enjoyable, that can change how they think about their neighborhood.
Q: How does your role as Boston’s Bike Mayor connect to the river and trail in Mattapan?
A: Biking is one of the ways people can start building a relationship with the trail. As the People’s Bike Mayor of Boston, I encourage walking and biking and inform neighbors about projects/ideas related to road safety and the health of the river. I plan on starting my Monday night rides along the Neponset Greenway. We start in Mattapan Square toward Dorchester, extending the distance of the ride every week. We ride in a gentle space, and if you don’t have a bike, I’ll introduce you to Bluebikes, and lend you a helmet. The first ride might just be from Mattapan Square to the bridge and back. I tell them the history of the trail, the pollution, the environment, everything.
That’s how people start appreciating the space.
Q: When you think years into the future, what impact do you hope your work has left on the river, the ecosystem, or the communities that live beside it?
A: Again, I really want more people, especially younger people and more people from communities like mine, to feel that the river and trail belong to them.
I want meetings and opportunities to be welcoming enough that people don’t come once, feel lost, and never come back.
I want more people on bikes, more people walking, more people understanding the environmental issues, and more people seeing themselves in this work.
Because if we don’t share this information, if we don’t make these spaces feel accessible, then the same small circle of people will keep having the same conversations and nothing really changes.
Q: If someone doesn’t know about the Lower Neponset River, what do you hope they take away from learning about it?
People should understand that environmental advocacy is a long process. Many of the advocates who started this work decades ago are still involved today. Some have passed away, and others are getting older.
It’s not just about the historical pollution. The work that people are doing now, from raising awareness to encouraging community involvement, is just as important as the technical cleanup itself. The bigger question we should ask is: What are we doing today?
Vivien Morris
Resident of Mattapan-Hyde Park; Founder, Edgewater Neighborhood Association & Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition
“A river running through your community should be an asset, for mental health, physical activity, connection to nature. It shouldn’t be something people don’t even know exists. That’s why we advocated so hard for access.”
Vivien Morris is a true changemaker building community wherever she is. Raised in a small southern town, she became an activist as a teenager to fight for school desegregation. After graduating from Harvard University, she became a dietitian, treating patients and organizing health workers to confront the deeper causes of illnesses: food insecurity, environmental injustice, and healthcare access inequality.
When she and her husband moved to Mattapan, Vivien continued to mobilize her neighbors for advocacy. She founded the Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition and the Edgewater Neighborhood Association to fight for food access and active living. Environmental advocacy along the Neponset River has always been central to her work: she advocated for nearly a decade before DCR agreed to invest in the Mattapan section of the Greenway.
When the river was designated a Superfund in 2022, Vivien worried for the community’s health. She reached out to community members to inform them, and she is working with neighbors to build air quality monitors and get soil assessments at the Kennedy Community Garden, where people grow food right next to the river. She pushes for the best cleanup plan, so that children can safely play on nearby playgrounds and neighbors may enjoy the riverbank everyday.
Vivien is driven by the prospect of connecting her neighbors, through nature and advocacy work. Her children grew up here, and she wants generations to come to inherit a clean river.
Q: Can you describe what you do and your background in social and environmental justice?
A: I’ve been active around social justice my entire life. I grew up in a small southern town and became active as a teenager around school discrimination and the desegregation of our schools. I came up to Harvard thinking I was leaving those issues behind, only to find so many of them here as well.
I became a dietitian largely because I was trying to do more organizing of health workers. Through that work, I developed a deeper understanding of food insecurity, limited access to healthy foods, and mistreatment in healthcare settings. Those things became centers of my life.
About 36 or 37 years ago, my husband and I bought a house in what was then the Mattapan community. Our address was later changed to Hyde Park, but we haven’t moved. I founded the Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition 20 years ago to bring the community’s voice to issues of food access and active living, as a way to address health conditions like diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Through that work, I became more deeply connected to the Mattapan community and increasingly active on environmental issues. Ten years ago, we created the Edgewater Neighborhood Association to do deeper organizing in the local community, and environmental advocacy along the Neponset River has always been central to that work.
Q: What drew you specifically to the Neponset River and advocacy around it?
A: We live along the river. It’s called Edgewater because we’re on the edge of the water. From the very beginning of the organization, we were advocating with DCR for greater investment in our stretch of the river. There was a wall that had always been there. Most people who live in our neighborhood don’t even know there’s a river down the street, or that River Street is named for the Neponset, or that Edgewater sits right on its edge. You couldn’t see it, and residents were never encouraged to use that space.
We wanted it to be a place for people to engage with nature, to be more physically active, to have access to the greenery and the water. We also coordinate the Kennedy Community Garden, which sits on the edge of the river. We’ve had longstanding concerns about whether growing food right next to the river is safe. So there have always been multiple ways our community has been engaged with this space.
Q: What was your experience advocating with DCR for improvements along the river?
A: It was a long road. The Neponset Greenway walking and biking path runs for a couple of miles, but when they were developing it, DCR selected only a small five or six block section adjacent to a community of color. Everything else they built was largely connected to predominantly white communities.
That one section abutting the Black community in Mattapan was put off for almost eight years. There was pushback from the Milton community, from residents who did not want to be connected to Mattapan, a lower-income community of color. That’s a long history of racism made concrete in infrastructure decisions. And even once it was built, they chose a very limited area.
As the Edgewater Neighborhood Association, we kept pushing: what more can you do for our part of the community? After roughly six or seven years of advocacy, DCR finally agreed to invest in the space along our stretch of the river. We’ve been working with them on that project, at the same time that we’ve been learning more about the actual quality of the water.
Q: Was your advocacy around river access happening before or after the Superfund designation?
A: We were already advocating for the walking and biking path well before the Superfund designation. We had learned a few things about the water quality before that, but after the designation in 2022, we learned so much more about how serious the contamination really is. We didn’t fully know that before. Now we’re working to make sure more neighbors understand it, while also pushing for the best possible cleanup.
Q: What did it feel like to learn about the pollution and the Superfund designation?
A: It was a mixture of feelings. On one hand, we’re glad that a cleanup can now happen. On the other hand, we don’t know what it means that we’ve been living alongside this river for so long without clear signage or warnings. We worry that people have been fishing in the river and eating that fish without knowing they shouldn’t.
We run the Kennedy Community Garden with about 20 community members, each with their own plot, growing food right next to the river. When we’ve asked for air quality testing and soil assessments in that area, it hasn’t happened yet. Luckily, one of our neighbors recently wrote a grant, and we are going to install air quality monitors this year, so we’ll know more after that.
The playground for children in our community is also adjacent to the river. When we asked about safety there, we were told, “We checked, and it’s not that bad.” What does that mean? That kind of vague reassurance isn’t good enough.
When I tell more neighbors about the contamination, the first reaction is discomfort and worry. There hasn’t been any study looking at whether health conditions in our community are connected to the river, and our neighborhood already has higher rates of poor health than others in Boston. We don’t know yet whether there’s a connection. So we’re still waiting, and advocating for more information.
Q: In what ways has the community near the river been systemically marginalized?
A: In many ways, the river has simply been hidden. Most people in our neighborhood, even those who live right next to it, don’t know it’s there. That invisibility was intentional. Residents were never encouraged to use that space. The wall kept people out. There were no openings, no paths, no invitation.
That’s why we advocated so hard for access. A river running through your community should be an asset, for mental health, physical activity, connection to nature. It shouldn’t be something people don’t even know exists. Openings have since been added to the wall, and the path now encourages people to walk behind it and be close to the river. But the years of exclusion, the delayed infrastructure investment, and the lack of environmental monitoring in a community of color all reflect a broader pattern.
Q: What motivates you to keep doing this work, given how challenging it can be logistically and emotionally?
A: My neighbors are my motivation. My children grew up here. I grew up in a place where you knew everyone in your community and were connected to them, and I’ve been working to build those same deep relationships here from the day we arrived, especially through the Edgewater Neighborhood Association.
The more we see each other, the more we do things together, the more connected we are across generations, the stronger we become. When we have spaces to run into each other, whether it’s along the pathway, in the garden, at the children’s playground, all of that strengthens the community and makes us stronger as people. That’s what keeps us going.
Q: Can you describe a project or initiative that has been particularly meaningful to you?
A: The Edgewater Food Forest has been one of the most wonderful things we’ve ever helped build. The City of Boston offered us a space in the neighborhood, and instead of creating another community garden, we decided to build a food forest, a place where healthy food would be free and accessible to everyone at any time, and also a space for community gatherings.
We hold Halloween gatherings there, summer celebrations, and we tap both the black walnut trees and the maple trees to collect syrup. A couple of months after the tapping, once we’ve boiled it down, we have a waffle party and the whole community comes. It has become a real asset. We reached out to the Boston Food Forest Coalition to help us build it, and it’s been a genuine community treasure. We never accomplish anything alone.
Q: When you think years into the future, what impact do you hope your work has left on the river and the community around it?
A: We’re looking forward to this being a healthier community. We want people to spend more time along the river, and that can be healthy both mentally and physically. And when the water is finally safe, we would love for people to be able to fish there, to take small boats out, to use it the way a river running through a neighborhood should be used.
We expect all of that to have a very positive impact on the generations coming forward. It may take a while. We’re not telling anyone to do any of that yet. But once the river is fully cleaned, it will be another wonderful asset for this community.
Q: What would you want someone who has never heard of the Lower Neponset River to understand about it and the community around it?
A: The Lower Neponset River runs through Hyde Park, Mattapan, Dorchester, and Milton on the other side of the river. The Neponset is much longer than that stretch, but that section is what’s considered the Lower Neponset. It runs through communities that have long been overlooked. Understanding the river means understanding the people who live alongside it, and understanding that they deserve clean water, safe air, and access to the natural space that has always been right there.
