Marcus Rosten Is Helping Others Reconnect with Nature
Culture
Meet the environmental educator who wants to create change by sharing knowledge of the beauty waiting to be discovered in our own backyards.
“My Backyard” is a series about everyday athletes finding connection and balance in the natural world.
It’s not easy to appreciate organisms that muck up the natural ecosystem, but someone has to. “I’m an invasive species nerd,” says Marcus Rosten, an aquatic ecology high school teacher in upstate New York.
It’s early afternoon on Ellicott Creek, a tributary to the Niagara River, north of Buffalo, N.Y., as Marcus paddles his 17-foot sea kayak gently along a relaxed 11-mile loop while hobby kayakers splash by.
Marcus scans the shoreline and logs wildlife, as he always does when he’s on this loop. Most of the animals are familiar to him, but today there’s a surprise. He spots a type of turtle he can’t identify. When he returns home and uploads a photo to iNaturalist, a citizen science social network, he discovers it’s a non-native yellow-bellied slider, a popular pet store breed that was likely cast off by its owners. He’s the first on the app to document the turtle in the waters of western New York — a unique and rare achievement on the expansive and popular platform.
Spotting unexpected creatures is just one piece of the puzzle for the 27-year-old who studied at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The bigger picture, according to Marcus, is that people are more detached than ever from their life-giving waterways. He’s working to reverse that. “I definitely have an affinity for those most severely disconnected, for those suffering from environmental injustices,” he says.
“We are the ones that cause most of these environmental problems,” says Marcus, who believes that change can come from teaching people about their surroundings. “Education is what opens people’s minds. You have all this beauty, all this wonder around you, but you just don’t know it’s there.”
The lessons Marcus teaches others are ones he learned himself at an early age, when living in an apartment with his siblings and single mother often meant space was limited. “Being outside…was the place to go to escape, explore,” recalls Marcus. “I would literally spend any waking hour I could outside just in my neighborhood. I was the type of kid that would be outside until I heard my mother screaming that it was time to come back and eat.”
His mother encouraged his love of nature, taking Marcus and his siblings on camping trips each summer to a state park nearby. “Any state park is still my favorite place in the world,” he says. On one of those childhood trips, he joined a nature tour that ended up influencing his pursuit of biological sciences in his studies and career. “That was the first time that somebody took me off trail into the middle of the woods,” he says. “[The tour guide] blew my mind because suddenly she was able to put a name and a history to all the plants and animals around me.”