Christopher Peak Photo
As punishment for his Yale Bowl climate-change arrest, Daniel Blokh helps Devante Williams sweep up trash.
With a flick of his broom, a Yale freshman Monday swept the city’s litter into his yellow dustpan: a grapefruit Tropicana bottle by Elm City Market, a dented Busch Light can by Christy’s Irish Pub, a shoestring knotted in a State Street snowpack.
That student, Daniel Blokh, joined a downtown ambassador’s Monday morning street-sweeping rounds as recompense for disrupting the annual Harvard-Yale football game in November with an hour-long climate-change protest demanding that the university divest its $30 billion endowment of fossil fuels.
Back in class after winter break, those Yalies are now completing five hours of community service through Project Green Thumb, a restorative-justice program for low-level offenders, to get their misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges dismissed.
Two of them, at Superior Court Judge Phillip Scarpellino’s recommendation, have spent their time cleaning up the New Haven Green with the downtown ambassadors.
“It’s a chance to give back to the community, especially on the cleanup,” said Lt. Sean Maher, downtown’s top cop. “They feel so passionately about our global environment; now they have the opportunity to give back to our local environment.”
Blokh, an 18-year-old poet from Alabama, showed up at the downtown ambassadors’ headquarters at 9 a.m. on Monday, where he was handed a reflective vest, a pair of gloves, a broom and a dustpan.
“We’ll walk around, pick up big trash, remove any full trash cans we own, try to make the downtown setting look a little cleaner,” said Devante Williams, the downtown ambassador to whom Blokh had been assigned.
Over an hour, the pair circled downtown. They caught windborne plastic bags and fluttering Post-It notes, toppled coffee cups and soda cans into their bins, swept up countless cigarette butts and pried an anarchist collective’s sticker off a lamppost.
Despite the below-freezing temperatures that numbed their faces, Williams said the job was easier with half the sidewalk buried in snow.
Along the way, Blokh asked Williams about the day-to-day job.
What was the weirdest thing he’d ever found?
A disfigured mannequin in a bus stop shelter that looked like a crime scene.
Did he ever find clothes he could donate to thrift stores? Usually not ones that were sanitary enough. Did he find wasted food? All the time.
How had the job changed him? Wiliams said he finds himself cleaning obsessively at home, dusting everything, even in his parents’ room.
As he swept up a beef jerky wrapper, Blokh said he considers Judge Scarpellino’s sentence “smartly chosen,” because of its consistency with the protest’s aims. (Other students have worked at Sunrise Cafe in Wooster Square.) His classmate who did street-sweeping two weeks ago told him it hadn’t even felt like punishment to her.
Blokh, who’s thinking of majoring in humanities, said that, about a week before the game, some other freshman texted him an invite to a planning meeting for the protest. A couple dozen students showed up. He figured it would be a small demonstration at the Bowl, just by those who were willing to get arrested.
Blokh was a little scared when hundreds more stormed the field with them, wondering if they knew what they were getting into. After nearly an hour, security gave the crowd a final order to clear out. Most went back to their seats. Blokh stayed with about 50 others, clasping hands in a chain.
Blokh said he wanted to get arrested to show university administrators how seriously he takes the issue of divesting from fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. The arrestees sought to prove how much they were willing to give up.
“It seemed more meaningful,” Blokh said. “It seemed like a more effective way to spread the message. The fact they had to arrest us forces attention to it, in a way that otherwise it could be more easily avoided,” so much that high school friends from Alabama heard about it.
“This is such a massively rich but also influential school. Applying pressure to it seems like it really is succeeding in drawing attention to this,” signaling to other colleges that they should change their investment strategy, Blokh added. “We’re definitely at a point of crisis. It seems like we’re really not slowing down.”
Yale’s endowment managers say, in an ethical investment policy, that they believe “consumption of fossil fuels, not production, is the root of the problem of climate change,” which leads them to invest in businesses with smaller carbon footprints. A university spokesperson called the protest “regrettable,” saying it was ill-timed “when thousands gather from around the world to enjoy and celebrate the storied traditions” of the Game.
Ambassador Williams said he respected the students for standing up for what they believed in for “a good cause.”
“I thought it was kind of cool,” Williams said. “Ever since working here, now I’m aware of how many times people litter, to the point where it kind of sickens me. Seeing what you guys protested, I understand. It’s nice to know that people do care about the world. We should be taking care of it.”
As the hour of street-sweeping ended and the supervisor told them to take a lunch break, Blokh and Williams said they’d been changed by cleaning up what others leave behind.
Blokh said he regretted all the times he’d slipped up, leaving a can that missed the trash can.
Williams said he never realized how much work the ambassadors had to do until decided to take the job.
“I didn’t realize how much went into it,” he said. “I’d see the ambassadors downtown cleaning up and say, ‘It’s so simple, they get paid for cleaning up.’ But it’s a habit. It’s nice to clean up and give back to the city, to make it a better place, you know? It definitely humbled me.”
Blokh and Williams dumped out their last load of food wrappers, cigarette butts and other garbage into the Big Belly trash across from the Green. Then they went off to lunch, sure to be careful about where they put their waste.