Ever since she started picking up trash along the Maine shoreline, Sandra Wachholz has been seeing that tell-tale shine – washed up on the sand, in the grass or between rocks.
Another hypodermic needle.
Wachholz, a?professor of criminology at USM, is not just an environmentalist, though friends and colleagues say they can’t imagine a more motivated one. She’s also a self-proclaimed neat freak.
“Some people call me Dr. Too-Tidy,” she says. “When I first came across one of these needles, I was just dumbfounded.”
Back then, she brought one of the syringes to Mercy Hospital, where they told her the most likely culprit was diabetics flushing them down toilets; and she could blame Portland’s antiquated, oft-overflowing sewer system for dumping untreated waste into the ocean.
Now she brings these “sharps” to the home of friend and cleanup companion Fred Pedula, where they save them in a half-gallon jug on his front porch.? The two have vague plans to haul the needles up to the Statehouse if say, budget issues threaten a proposed renovation of the city’s sewers.
But if her brief time as an active environmentalist has taught her anything, it’s that more private remedies are just as important. So once again, Wachholz finds herself looking to Sweden, something she has been doing consciously and unconsciously for most of her life. ?
She was 17 and living in rural Minnesota thirty years ago when she filled out forms to become a foreign?exchange student. Her mother’s approval was of little importance, she says, having had much freedom and self-direction up to that point;?but?the single mother and poor factory worker was quick to offer her blessings; she saw the exchange program as a great opportunity to broaden Sandy’s horizons.
Sandy had other motivations.
“There was a really cute guy at my High School who was an exchange student from Sweden,” she recalls. “And I thought ‘My,’ in my little 16 year old mind, ‘if that’s how all the young men there look…”
But when she got to Sweden, Wachholz didn’t date – she didn’t even pick up the language for several months. Yet as she pieced together her vocabulary from frustrated teachers, her exchange family took her in as one of their own; in Juhlin-Dannfelts’ home, she saw a microcosm of the way Swedes seemed to internalize the environmentalism of the 1970s.
Like her own mother, who turned to re-use and gardening out of sheer poverty, her Swedish parents were environmentalists without all of the slogans and campaigns -? they felt a?connection to their land that made sustainability second-nature.
Wachholz can’t help smiling as she remembers her “Swedish mother” combing her hair in their sunny living room, and rather than cleaning the brush out into a trash can, she would always take care toss it out the window, where birds came by to snatch them up for a nest. “For the birds,” she would say, in words Sandra would slowly grow to understand.
Over the years, she has kept in close touch with her exchange family; they visit her in Maine, and she will often take students to Sweden on field trips to observe some of the innovations there. Several years ago, they found themselves riding in buses powered by human waste. ?The same buses were plastered with an aggressive ad campaign aimed at preventing Swedes from treating their toilets like trash cans.
Wachholz brought the campaign home, revamped by and for USM students. A graphic designing major in one of her classes cooked up a sticker that currently sits above most toilets on campus. “The garbage you flush,” it warns, “could end up in the ocean.”
It’s just one of many ways her experiences abroad, decades ago, have come home to roost over her time in Maine. Prior to this, she was a sociology professor in Canada, a “typical hippie” who felt fine just recycling some of her own garbage here and there.
“Now the environment is my midlife crisis,” she says. “I was hoping it would be something people could gossip about.”