Environmental science and finance major Davey Mazur ’28 argues that environmental protection begins not with persuasion, but with exposure. His proposal to build a permanent outdoor classroom echoes this sentiment, fostering student connection to nature simply by making the environment an everyday part of academic life.
The idea came to Mazur during his ecotherapy class last spring, where he learned about how humans evolved in tandem with the natural world, creating a close bond between the two. However, as the distance between humans and nature grows, so do the issues humans face.
“With modernization and technology, we’re thrust into this context which we’re not evolved to deal with,” Mazur said. “And that’s where we’re getting a lot of mental health issues. The stress and the anxiety our generation is dealing with is because our brains physically aren’t designed to handle all these new inputs.”
Ecotherapy focuses on curing these ailments through reinserting humans back into their natural context: the outdoors. Thus, the class was taught exclusively outside, a concept that appealed to Mazur.
“We were sitting on the grass behind DuPont [Hall], and I remember thinking that with such a beautiful campus, we should have a designated outdoor classroom space,” Mazur said.
An outdoor classroom would not only help students reconnect with nature, but it could also help their education by combating mental health issues. The College of William and Mary’s Parks and Ecotherapy Research Lab, led by teaching professor Dorothy C. Ibes, found that outdoor classrooms can bolster student engagement and retention.
While Mazur believed in the benefits of an outdoor classroom, his goal seemed out of reach until he explained it in an interview rushing the business fraternity Alpha Kappa Psi.
“They asked me what project I would do to better the campus,” Mazur said. “And this is what I was talking about. It was just a crazy idea in my head, but then talking through it, I realized this could actually work.”
Mazur quickly went to work planning the project. He decided that the woods by the Crim Dell Meadow would be an ideal spot for the classroom because of its proximity to the Sunken Garden, which professors already use as an outdoor learning space. The preliminary classroom design would host up to about 30 students for any class in any department.
“The whole idea is that it’s just another classroom that teachers can reserve and schedule their class to meet there,” Mazur said. “There’s already a demand for outdoor classrooms. We just need to give them the appropriate space.”
More specifics regarding the classroom construction plan unraveled as Mazur worked on the grounds crew for Associate Director of Grounds and Gardens Tony Orband.
“He has this cool program he’s starting up, where every tree that they take down on campus, they then mill up and use as lumber towards other projects on campus,” Mazur said. “This keeps the carbon sequestered and creates a renewable source of building materials. I was explaining to him that it would be really cool if we could use all the wood from the campus to build an outdoor classroom here.”
Mazur hopes to finance the project through the College’s Green Fee initiative, where students apply to receive grants for sustainability projects. He is applying for the spring round of funding.
“I’m just trying to put together the best proposal that I can to show that I’ve done my homework,” Mazur said. “I’ve already talked to a couple people on the Green Fee team that administer the proposals. They’re loving it so far, so we’ll see how many details I can hit.”
This is not Mazur’s first time taking advantage of the Green Fee program. Last year, he worked with Madeleine Fernandez ’27 to remove invasive Japanese privet from the College’s woods, replacing it with over 40 native species.
“I’m looking to do a similar thing around the outdoor classroom, because the whole point is for it to be a place where students can connect with nature,” Mazur said. “But it helps if nature is in its ideal form. If it’s all native species, then all the pollinators will come back. If all the pollinators come back, then the birds will come back.”
As students spend more time outside in the classroom, Mazur hopes they care more about environmental conservation.
“The whole idea is to make a really beautiful little sanctuary space back there where you can see what the world was like and what the world could be like,” Mazur said. “You just have to put them there, out in nature, and then you don’t have to do anything. Nature’s gonna do the work.”
He explained that environmental action is accomplished through three primary methods: policy, financial means and promoting human connection to nature. During his time at the College, he is focusing on the last one.
“People don’t want to conserve and protect what they don’t know and love,” Mazur said. “So that’s the route that I feel like I can kind of take as a student here. I can try to help other people see the benefit in nature and the outdoors, and the outdoor classroom is one way of trying to do that.”
Mazur — who grew up playing outside and working on a farm in Massachusetts — said it is difficult to imagine other students not having a special relationship with nature.
“I’ve always just loved being outside,” he said. “As a kid, the go-to activity was just going and playing in the woods for a while.”
Since Mazur’s parents are teachers, his family would go on road trips during summer breaks and explore national parks in the West.
“We would just load up in our 2006 Chrysler Town and Country,” Mazur said. “It was just the best. That’s really what made me have a connection to nature.”
Aside from his outdoor classroom initiative, Mazur tries to encourage student connection to the outdoors through his roles as a Tribe Adventure Program trip leader and an EcoRep. In the future, he hopes to use finance to encourage positive environmental action.
“You can always count on people to do what is right financially for themselves,” Mazur said. “So if you’re able to find solutions that are economically feasible to environmental problems, and market them well, then people will be conserving the environment just by living their daily life.”
Mazur’s interest in environmental finance stems from his high school capstone project. He examined beavers as a tool for ecosystem restoration, making conservation economically viable.
“The big problem with conservation is that ecosystem services aren’t evaluated financially,” Mazur said. “If they’re not quantified, they can’t be monetized.”
The capstone project involved sampling soil from beaver sites to measure carbon storage and researching ways to bundle multiple ecosystem services into a profitable model. Mazur explained that beavers are particularly promising, as they provide several environmental benefits at once.
Instead of relying on individual landowners, the project ultimately focused on insurance companies, which already assess flood and fire risk — two issues beavers naturally mitigate.
“The capstone project is what sent me down the rabbit hole of environmental finance,” Mazur said. “Because it’s really money that encourages things. If it’s financially viable, it will stick.”
After this realization, Mazur decided to double major in finance as well as environmental science. He described finance as one of the better “levers to pull” to encourage conservation. Thus, he rushed Alpha Kappa Psi last fall.
Mazur said he was drawn to the business fraternity’s community.
“They’re all really passionate and really driven. They want each other to succeed, and that’s just the best,” Mazur said. “You have to surround yourself with those kinds of people so then you become one of them.”
While joining Alpha Kappa Psi was recent, Mazur’s entrepreneurial spirit began freshman year, when he started a woodworking business called Scraps Woodshop. Woodworking started as a solution to giving bad Christmas presents but eventually became something he enjoyed.
“It’s a good attention-to-detail kind of activity,” he said. “I sometimes like focusing on the big picture, so the smaller details can escape me. I like having an activity where I can practice not doing that.”
Mazur asked people in Colonial Williamsburg for their scrap wood and used the sculpture studio in Andrews Hall to turn it into cutting boards or utensils. He sold his creations at Williamsburg’s Second Sundays.
“I liked taking something that isn’t all that usable in its one form and making it something nice again while still preserving that carbon,” Mazur said. “You get that environmentally friendly buzzword, but it’s not really a buzzword to me, it’s just the best way to do things. There’s so much beauty lying around that you wouldn’t otherwise see unless you take the time to give it a little bit of help.”
When Mazur is not spending time in nature, he is reading about it. He casually described studies about mycorrhizal fungi networks and the usage of gas chromatography to explain how individual plants do not compete against one another for sunlight; rather, they work as a unit to survive.
“The scientific approach is always about evolutionary fitness and species outcompeting one another for the chance to survive,” Mazur said. “But forests really don’t abide by that at all, which I think is beautiful. And you can kind of just sense that if you spend an hour just sitting outside. You get that feeling that comes over you.”
The outdoor classroom would not only get students out in nature to experience the feeling Mazur described, but also demonstrate to other environmentally-conscious students what is possible when they take a risk.
“All these crazy ideas, if you go out and actually do them, they become so much less crazy,” Mazur said. “It’s just about taking that first step. If one of them gets done, like the outdoor classroom, then it shows what’s possible.”
