Sarah De Falco is a junior majoring in the University of Michigan's Program in the Environment (PitE), a jointly managed program between U-M’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA) and the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). She currently is a social media intern with the Environmental Media Association (EMA), a nonprofit organization whose entertainment industry influencers, business entrepreneurs, and green icons are dedicated to the mission of promoting environmental progress. De Falco, who hails from New Jersey, is interested in land use policy and zoning and wants to pursue an environmental law degree after graduating from U-M. 

Why did you choose PitE?

I wanted a major that included environmental social sciences, so not purely environmental science and not purely political science. And I couldn’t really find a lot of schools that had a program that catered to that, except for PitE. You can choose whichever avenue of environmental studies you want to go down while also getting a great background in environmental science. So, it’s the perfect program, I think.

What are some of your favorite PitE classes?

Some of my favorite classes have been Environment 408: Land Use Policy, Law and the Environment, Introduction to Urban and Environmental Planning, and Environmental Law.

Tell us how PitE connected you with EMA and what your internship entails.

I learned about the Environmental Media Association internship from the PitE newsletter. I’ve been working for EMA for about two years now, and I do a mix of things, including making videos. Sometimes we hop on trends and do short videos related to them; other times we’ll do educational videos where we’ll talk about specific environmental topics. One of the videos I made focused on coral bleaching, while others have been about environmental justice and environmental policy.

The other part of the internship involves interviews. EMA partners with environmental activists and celebrities who are involved in the environmental movement, so I will do live interviews on Instagram with some of those activists and celebrities. Last year, EMA had an awards summit in Los Angeles to honor celebrities and media who have promoted environmental messaging, and I went there to do interviews with the award recipients, which was awesome. I’ve had the opportunity to interview Bill Nye, which I was pretty geeked out about because he's taught me everything I know about science since I was in kindergarten. I also got to interview Leah Thomas, the author of “The Intersectional Environmentalist,” which was really cool because I had been following her for a long time. 

What advice would you give prospective PitE students?

When I was deciding where to go for undergrad, I looked at PitE classes and what kind of requirements they had. I saw that there were a lot of classes that were focused on environmental law, which was interesting and not very common for undergrad classes. A lot of classes also seemed to be about topics I had never thought about before. For instance, there are tons of classes about food access and food justice. So that’s what drew me to PitE—there are aspects of environmental social science that I hadn’t even thought of and it’s a much bigger field than I even knew. The further you go in the PitE program, the less you’ll think you know about anything, so just be ready for that. Finally, if you have the opportunity to do field-based learning at Camp Davis or the Biological Station, I would recommend that. Almost every person I know in PitE did those opportunities, and that’s how they made a lot of their friends and connections and became part of the PitE community.

Tell us about your interest in land use policy and zoning, and why you find these topics so interesting.

People underestimate the amount of impact that local and state legislation have on environmental factors in a community. So when something is going wrong in your community environmentally or when you’re facing an environmental issue, a lot of people want to go straight to the top, to the federal government. What laws can we pass in Congress to fix this for everybody across the nation? I think environmental issues are very difficult to address on a national scale because we have such a diverse environment in the U.S. Zoning is very specific and very tailored to a community. It’s also very powerful. So, if you live in a residential community and you don’t want an industrial plant next to your community, you need to keep up with your planning commission and your zoning ordinances to make sure that the town isn’t going to rezone an area and all of a sudden have an industrial plant next year. Those are all things that can happen with zoning, and knowing how land is used in your community is, I think, very powerful. 

Read more: Five things you might not know about PitE