Adam Poch, a lifelong nature enthusiast and recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin Master of Science in Sustainable Management program, started taking the initiative to better his community back in college.
Adam got his bachelor’s degree in Sault Saint Marie, Michigan, a community of less than 50,000. He rented a home a few streets off campus and noticed a small lot he thought was supposed to be a park that had accumulated garbage.
“It was largely kind of trashed,” he says. “There were a lot of plastic bags and trash along the periphery of it. I found underbodies of cars, milk cartons, and other items like that tossed into the shrubs.”
He talked to city workers, who said they didn’t have resources to adequately address it, so Adam asked if he could start cleaning up the area.
“I put up little flyers like, ‘Hey, we’re going to do a park cleanup at this park on this day from 9 a.m. to noon or so.’ For a while, it was only me. Passersby would come by and say, ‘Hey, what are you doing? Why are you doing that?’ That kind of thing. I think that’s where a lot of it started. And eventually, that park was clean.”
More people began getting involved with the cleanup efforts, and eventually the group moved to other parks within the city. The city then offered Adam a part-time job.
“It was kind of a mix of interpreter ranger duties and some enforcement,” he says.
He worked for Sault Saint Marie for two years but got laid off when the city budget was cut. He moved to Corvallis, Oregon, with a friend who was going to graduate school there.
“Oddly enough, I found a job in a zoo,” he says. “I was a zookeeper and basically responsible for managing a lot of the grounds, some of the enclosures. I started learning a lot of the plants were non-native and some of them were invasive.”
A few of the plants were also toxic for the animals, which motivated him to learn more about them.
After leaving the zoo, he moved to Portland, Oregon, and began working as a recruiter.
“It was good money, but my heart wasn’t in it,” he says. “I started working with this place called Tualatin Hills Parks and Rec Department and SOLVE Oregon.”
He worked as a volunteer stream restoration captain where he underwent training to learn how to restore the natural flow to rivers and creeks in the area. Then, he took a restoration tech job in Ohio with the Nature Conservancy.
“I got this position out of Ohio, in the Oaks Opening region, which is a unique stretch of land. It kind of goes from Southeast Detroit down along Lake Erie and inland, about probably 50 miles or so. There’s a lot of rare species in there, some federally listed orchid species and some rare butterflies.”
His job, which was funded by a grant, eventually came to an end. He moved to Michigan and worked for a land conservancy doing development and coordination.
“It was a really cool experience,” he says. “I learned a lot about how to engage the community, how to inspire people, how to collaborate and work with different stakeholders and try to do good work in the community. We had a really cool project with the hospital there where basically I approached them and said, ‘Hey, you guys have all this land around your hospital. Would you be interested in putting some mulch down and some mile markers for the hospital staff and some of the people that are visiting patients and the patients themselves?’ So that they get a little bit of fresh air, walk these areas, and keep track of how much they’re walking. And they were all about it. They were like, ‘Yeah, we’d love to see that. We’ll split 50/50 for the cost of resources and labor.’”
Afterward, he got a job as a park ranger in Madison, Wisconsin. While he was in Madison, he met his current partner, and the two spent a lot of time traveling the state. During one trip, they realized they had found their future home–Eau Claire.
“It’s a really cool little city,” he says. “We liked the vibe of it. We liked the feel of it. And people seemed friendly. It seemed like it was safe. We found a nice piece of property south of Eau Claire that was surprisingly affordable. It’s under 10 acres, but it’s a fixer upper home.”
Once he got to Eau Claire, he tried finding work with the city, but ended up working as a recruiter again. He was also working to improve his own property.
“I don’t even know what spurred me to take on a master’s. But while I was doing land management on the property, I was like, you know what? I want to have a much deeper knowledge of what I’m doing here. So much of what I’ve learned is piecemeal through individual roles and mentors that have come in and out of my life and from my own research. But I want to have more credibility. I want to have a greater sense of confidence in what I know and what I do. So I started looking.”
Initially, he sought out the UW-Eau Claire biology department. They gave him some resources and program suggestions, including the Master of Science in Sustainable Management program. He found Julia Chapman, Sustainable Management program director at UW-Stout, and realized much of her background aligned with some of his interests. He connected with her, and ended up applying to the program.
Julia told Adam not to be surprised that the capstone course may be more work than he might expect. The capstone project provides students with the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned and gain hands-on experience in the real world. Each student will help a real organization solve an existing sustainability problem by implementing practical knowledge to achieve a triple bottom line solution.
“I was like, I don’t have any fear of that. I’m going to dive headfirst into it. I’m doing this because I really want to learn a lot. And I did. I felt really good about my capstone. From the lens of someone who has experience in the industry but also is doing it as a citizen research project, it was really interesting to go through some of the trials and tribulations of how you monitor these things. How do you acquire the data and analyze it?”
The courses leading up to the capstone, including SMGT 790: Pre-Capstone, taught him that.
“They taught me statistics. They taught me how to analyze and do literature reviews and build on what has already been done for a better understanding of what I’m going into. It really helped flesh out what I wanted to do for my capstone and gave me the means to really carry it out in a way that I felt was satisfactory.”
When it comes to the capstone project, Adam advises prospective students to use the courses in the program to refine what they want to research.
“The more passionate that I became about what I was doing, the easier it was to research and write about it. I think it really was a boon for me, because every source that I found interesting also had three to five other sources that were highly interesting to me and that I could draw from, that I could pull from, that I could reference, that I could include. And before you know it, you have a chapter done.”
He did experience some writer’s block early on, but Julia and his professors encouraged him to keep writing.
“You can go back and edit it,” he says. “Just write. Get into the routine of devoting an hour a day to writing and research. Look at new sources. Look at some of the old sources that inspired you. See if there’s any new or different information in them. Reflect on them, write about them. Even if it’s not in a purely technical sense, get your mind active on it and write whatever comes to mind, and then revisit it later.”
For his capstone, Adam roped off sections of land in transition zones to study how species thrive in marginal spaces. The goal of his project is to get others to take up citizen science research.
“I roped one section off between forest and early succession prairie. Then I did another one between established prairie and turf grass, lawn space that was being converted. I had done some of that lawn conversion the season prior to studying it. So it was in its infancy. thought it’d be a really cool time to look at what is happening in this little area.”
He got permission from a neighbor, who manages his lawn traditionally with fertilizer and pesticide, to analyze his land, too.
“I looked at the divide between their lawn and the road ditch to see what was going on in that area. I documented what plant species were in each of these 15 by 15 roped off sections. Then I would go out there with a camera and I would wait for insects to kind of move around or fly around or land or whatever it was and try and get a snap out of it real quick and see if I could identify it.
“If I couldn’t, then I sent it over to our extension, our county extension, to see if they could help verify what the species was. Sometimes they could, sometimes they couldn’t. But it really helped give me good data.
“What was the most surprising to me was I was expecting the forest and early succession prairie to be the most active. And it wasn’t. It was close, but I observed more species and more activity at the prairie and early conversion of turf grass by I think 10 different species and probably 20 or so more observations, which I was really surprised by.”
Adam also started his own business, Ecosystem Solutions.
“I wanted to be able to start a sustainable landscape company and do ecosystem restoration, be able to teach people about it, and have them view me as an expert in the field. We take a research-based approach and seek to revitalize marginal spaces, reconnect people to nature, and reduce maintenance costs while improving ecological function.”
“This is kind of the curse of an ecologist, but when I drive around, I see tons of degraded landscapes and marking sites, and in my head, I’m constantly thinking, ‘Well, if we give it a couple of nudges here and there, diverted some of the water flow, removed some of these invasives, did x, y, z, this could be a very ecologically functional site. People could enjoy it. People can walk by it and get some sense of appreciation for the natural world and its beauty.’”
Adam wants to develop those spaces in his community while helping others who are actively trying to remove invasive species.
“I want to get people to communicate with each other and share some of these success stories of,’Hey, we removed a bunch of Dame’s rocket over here. Now this rare orchid has come into the site. And that’s awesome.’ I would love to facilitate more like that.”
He also started the seedling chapter of Wild Ones, a group dedicated to native naturalized landscapes that works to educate and transform spaces into more plant friendly sites. He’s working to get board members in position to charter it, but hopes the group will be active in Eau Claire in the next five years.
“I want more people to understand what it means to have an anthropocentric viewpoint versus an ecocentric viewpoint and how we can complete the shift from anthropocentric to ecocentric. We are seeing this shift from anthropocentrism towards more ecocentrism, where people are seeing their place within nature, the ethics of its management, and the system of values created for its preservation. With local champions and concerned citizens encouraging more citizen research projects in urban settings, local datasets become more detailed for policy considerations, public exposure to changing land management practices increases, education efforts on the value of these projects can build consensus, and the local environment stands to benefit greatly.”
Adam’s viewpoint on nature stems from childhood experiences with his aunt and uncle, who were devoted naturalists, he says. On camping trips, he remembers them bird watching.
“I have a tremendous respect and value for the natural world, and I want to share that and get other people to view it similarly,” he says. “There are so many people who don’t even have access to natural spaces. So if we can convert some marginal spaces, especially in urban and suburban areas, where people can walk around the corner and be in a park that has a naturalized prairie, that’s huge. There’s so much potential there outside of the ecological benefit of it, for people to be in and learn from and interact with.”
“I’m a huge proponent of revegetating marginal spaces like that wherever and whenever we can and get as many people involved as we can and try and do some good work for the community and for the region for all life to have a chance to thrive. So that’s my mission. That’s pretty much it. So five years, 10 years, 20 years, that’s what I’m going to be doing.”
“There are so many specialists in the world, and if we can all specialize in doing good things in as many different industries as we can, that’s great. In my view, that pushes humanity forward in a good direction, and I love to see it. Humans have a unique and profound ability to shape the world around them, and the consequences of this shaping can be beneficial or detrimental to us and many of the species in our local environments. Let us work together so that future generations may enjoy and protect that which we are all connected to.”
Interested in learning more about the 100 percent online UW Sustainable Management master’s program? Take a look at the curriculum page or reach out to an enrollment adviser with any questions about the program. For more information, call 608-800-6762 or email learn@uwex.wisconsin.edu.