The Work of 1000

Friday, April 20, 2:00 p.m.

Yale Peabbody Museum, 170 Whiney Ave., New Haven (map)

In the 1960s the Nashua River was declared one of the 10 most polluted rivers in the United States. Years of industrial waste, local dumping, and neglect threatened to remove this river from our lives forever.

Around that time, housewife Marion Stoddart moved to the area with her family, so close to the river they could smell its noxious fumes. At a low point in her life, she decided to fight her own emptiness by taking on the biggest challenge she could find—cleaning up the Nashua.

Marion Stoddart, "that lady from Groton, that little lady from Groton," organized a massive citizen effort to rescue the river. She lobbied successfully for legislation, including the landmark Massachusetts Clean Waters Act. She petitioned the Federal government for millions of dollars of promised funds to fight the pollution—and won.

Her dramatic success in mobilizing the community showed people that change was possible, even though they’d lost hope.

The Nashua River is now an internationally recognized ecological success story and a locally celebrated natural resource.

And Marion has been heralded as a hero.

The Work of 1000 tells that story.

The work that Marion began in the 1960s continues today through the Nashua River Watershed Association, the nonprofit Marion launched in 1969, a regional leader in natural resource protection and environmental education.

In recognition of her work, Stoddart has received many awards including the United Nations Environmental Programme’s Global 500 Award (1987). She was profiled in National Geographic (1995) and in an award-winning children’s book A River Ran Wild by Lynne Cherry; she was a National Women’s History Project Honoree as “One of the Women Taking the Lead to Save our Planet” (2009); and has just published an essay in Written In Water by the National Geographic Society (2010). She is featured as a case study in the college environmental science textbook, Living in the Environment: Principles, Connections, and Solutions by G. Tyler Miller.

This film is one facet of an social change project that combines a community building web site, educational resources, and live audience programs whose purpose is twofold: to reveal how a determined woman with vision and commitment succeeded against seemingly impossible odds to restore a dead river; and to inspire and enable others to make a difference. Visit the project web site: www.workof1000.org.

This film screening is part of the Quinnipiac River Watershed project.