Student Spotlight: Bridget Gustafson

Spotlights are The Leaflet’s way of recognizing UC Berkeley alumni, professors, and students who are environmental changemakers.

Bridget Gustafson and Herbicide-Free Cal cofounder, Mackenzie Feldman, on the beach volleyball courts. (Source: Bridget Gustafson)

If you haven’t heard of fourth-year Bridget Gustafson through her endeavors with the Cal Beach Volleyball team, then you’ve probably heard of her through Herbicide-Free Cal, an organization she helped found in 2017. 

The genesis of the Herbicide-Free Cal campaign was during the spring of her freshman year during a beach volleyball team practice at the Clark Kerr beach courts. After she and fellow teammate Mackenzie Feldman (‘18) were told not to chase after a ball if it rolled into the area surrounding the courts, they learned of the herbicides that had just been sprayed. This led them to investigate what chemicals were sprayed and the effects they would have on the students and groundskeepers. The two teammates then discovered that glyphosate, an IARC-classified “probable carcinogen”, is used on the Clark Kerr beach courts and various athletic fields, as well as portions of the UC Berkeley campus.

Being cognizant of the burdensome work that hand-weeding could be, Gustafson and Feldman approached the athletic facilities director and asked how the Cal Beach Volleyball team might help his crew maintain the space without the use of herbicides. He jokingly replied, “Well, your team can weed it!” - and the rest is history. 

Members of Herbicide-Free Cal work with UC Berkeley’s groundkeepers to weed and maintain the campus without the use of herbicides. (Source: Bridget Gustafson)

(Source: Bridget Gustafson)

Herbicide-Free Cal has now expanded across different campuses in the University of California system, working against herbicides used at UC Davis, UCLA, and UC Riverside. In May 2019, the determination of both Gustafson and Feldman was exhibited when the University of California issued a temporary ban on the use of glyphosate-based herbicides at all University of California locations. In a public letter, UC President Janet Napolitano noted the ban had been instituted "due to concerns about possible human health and ecological hazards”, with the decision being effective June 1, 2019. 

When asked about the most important thing for students to know when trying to start their own organization or movement, Gustafson reflects that the biggest lesson she and Feldman have learned is that change must begin with open dialogue, specifically dialogue with the folks you’re requesting change from.

“We emailed and called different contacts in facility management positions for months without a single reply. You know why? Because we came into those emails swinging, barraging them with statistics and demands that their practices must be changed. Quite literally the instant we changed the wording in our emails and in our approach to ask how student hands might be used in order to facilitate a transition away from herbicides, we got a reply within minutes with a request to meet for coffee to discuss this further.”

I cannot stress the importance of recognizing your positionality when advocating for change. In our experience, this looked like recognizing the privilege of our position as students, the gift of our able bodies, and the education that allowed us to learn about the dangers of herbicides. This allowed us to approach the grounds crew in a way that did not put any of the blame of using these herbicides on them, and instead, recognized that they were and are incredibly understaffed and overburdened. This perspective led us to offering student labor, so that we could work elbow-to-elbow with them to diminish the health risk to students, groundskeepers, and all else that utilize our campus.

Apart from her involvement in Cal Athletics and her work for Herbicide-Free Cal, Gustafson is a member of Epsilon Eta, a professional environmental service fraternity on campus. The fourth-year student, who is a Molecular Environmental Biology major with minors in Forestry and Natural Resource Management, has done independent studies with faculty members for the last three years, learning how to quantify herbicide use on campus, comparing the efficacy of non-chemical herbicide alternatives, and developing effective community organizing strategies to gain support for the Herbicide-Free Cal campaign.