YSE Alumni Association Award Winners
Meet the accomplished alumni who were recognized at YSE Reunion 2024 for their outstanding environmental work — including using AI to help remove river plastics, protecting Indigenous land in Virginia, and building coalitions in Colombia.
Restoring Waterways for Communities
“For years, I was troubled by the plastic pollution in our coastline and oceans, something I witnessed every time I went for a walk around my community,” she says. “After leaving my most recent government position as minister of the environment in 2017, I decided to do something about it.”
Her work earned her YSE’s Distinguished Alumni Award, which honors the achievements of graduates who have made significant contributions to conservation, environmental science, and management.
Marea Verde is now looking to scale a project on the Juan Díaz River that installed a trash wheel, Wanda, that prevents floating trash from reaching the oceans. Wanda has collected more than 245,000 kilos (539,000 pounds) of waste since September 2022.
Reclaiming and Protecting Indigenous Land in Virginia
When he was young, Luke Swampdog Tyree ’14 MESc would hunt with his family on the Virginia land where his ancestors, of the Monacan Indian Nation, are buried and dream of reclaiming it.
“When I was 14, I wrote a paper that stated my only goal in life was to get that land back,” Tyree says.
He has never deviated from that plan.
Tyree’s non-profit foundation, NDPonics, works to reclaim, restore, and protect the natural habitat of the Indigenous people of the hills in Virginia. In honor of his efforts, Tyree received the Prospect Street Award, which recognizes a recent YSE graduate who has made significant contributions in the environmental field and exemplifies the spirit of the school.
The nonprofit has already helped return to the Tribe about 1,000 acres, including a tract that was slated for clearing.
“I had an 800-acre piece of land that was really culturally important. The state of Virginia was going to buy it, and then they were going to clear-cut big swaths of it because they needed to pay for it but couldn’t get funding after the pandemic,” Tyree says.
Tyree was able to rally funders and secure a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to purchase and protect the land.
Building Coalitions in Colombia
As its economy grows, Colombia is at a crossroads between development and conservation.
Claudia Martínez Zuleta ’89 MES is forging a coalition across sectors, disciplines, and locales to meet the challenge. With more than three decades of experience in sustainable development, finance, and climate change, she is working to foster regenerative food systems, increase access to local and global markets, reduce inequality between urban and rural areas, create better jobs, and fuel economic growth in Colombia. For this work, she received YSE’s Distinguished Alumni Award, which has been awarded annually since 1972.
After earning her master’s degree at YSE, Martínez joined the Latin American Bureau of the United Nations Development Programme in New York. In 1994, Martínez returned to Colombia and led the Office for Sustainable Development at the Latin American Development Bank. She later served as Colombia’s deputy minister of environment, where she brought together 33 regional environmental corporations and five research institutions to work toward a unified vision to protect ecosystems, water, and biodiversity and promote climate resilience.
Now, Martínez’s advisory firm, E3 — Ecology, Economics and Ethics — is managing the Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) in Colombia to transform food systems into engines of growth and development that can foster conservation and restoration.
