by Jeffrey Stanley
BFS lifer Ian Phillips '78 was born in New York and raised in Brooklyn. His father Mike Phillips, a practicing Quaker who attended the school for one year in high school, was part of the reason Ian and his brothers enrolled here. The other was the school's nearness to their home in Cobble Hill.
"BFS worked well for me," he said recently. "I particularly liked the interaction of students of all ages in a single building," he said of 375 Pearl Street. Dad Mike also served as BFS School Committee Clerk (Board Chair, we call it now) during this time.
In Middle School Ian quickly earned street cred with the older students as "the kid whose dad drove him to school on a motorcycle." For a sixth grader that was a golden ticket, earning him the luxury of hanging out with Upper Schoolers in the old rec room at Schermerhorn Street.Still, he often volunteered in the Lower School providing early morning day care. "I felt BFS was more of a multi-sibling family than a single grade of students or a separate lower, middle and high school."
Nearly a third of his class were also lifers and they all graduated together. "We know each other extremely well," he said. "When we see each other it's extremely comfortable. There are no airs of pretension. We're able to pick up conversations as if we had seen each other yesterday, not over 30 years ago."
After BFS he attended Vassar to major in chemistry, and wrote the college's first environmental chemistry thesis. He next went to grad school at UMass Lowell and earned an MS in environmental studies. Today he's a licensed site professional and Principal Scientist for Roux Associates, an environmental consulting firm headquartered on Long Island, with offices in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Denver. Ian is based in Burlington, Massachusetts.
He has garnered much praise from the community for his work in cleaning up hazardous waste sites, and in 2009 received The Founders' Award from Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE), a volunteer organization for social justice and environmental protection.
Essentially Ian's job is "investigating how a release of contamination occurred, where and how the contamination has spread, and determing how to clean it up." Experience has taught him that being a good scientist is only part of the job. "The key to being an excellent consultant is the ability to translate scientific data and interpretations into the language of my clients," he explained. "I often tell people I work with that science is relatively easy. It's communicating science that is hard."
A particularly memorable project involved a landowner trying to sell a property that contained contaminated groundwater in fractured bedrock, "extremely rare in the environmental cleanup industry," he said. Ian was able to resolve the problem and bring the land up to EPA regulations so it could be safely sold and put to use.
Another standout consulting project involved his expert testimony in a legal case, specifically his "technical argument that PCBs at a particular Superfund site were from transformers and not capacitors." This might sound like scientific hair-splitting to most of us but it helped place costs on the party responsible for the contamination, resulting in his client's share of cleanup costs being reduced from 100% to 30%.
Ian has also been publicly lauded for his pro bono work volunteering on environmental projects for citizens' groups in his community, "trying to help them understand the impacts of contamination and get the protections they deserve from the parties responsible and from the regulators." He's currently volunteering on a major project to solve an all-too-common crisis these days: the discovery that schools, churches, public parks and private homes are built on contaminated land.
Did any BFS faculty influence him to pursue a career in environmental science? "The EPA was less than eight years old and Love Canal was just being 'discovered' in 1978," recalled Ian. "I remember teachers Paul Asch and Priscilla Neisch-Sloane." They weren't science teachers but they helped Ian gain confidence and encourage creative problem-solving. "This broad thinking has been critical to my work because environmental science isn't just about pollution. It's about the economics of businesses and communities, laws and regulations, and engineering science."
The Quaker values he learned from his family and BFS have also been an influence in his work and personal life. He summarizes it in two well-known Friends aphorisms: ’Tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free, by Elder Joseph Brackett, Jr., and There is no way to peace, peace is the way, by A. J. Muste. "I'm not sure I have much to add except I wish I could be better at living them every day." He encourages today's BFS students to follow similar courses regardless of their career choices. "Each person has skills and knowledge that are valuable to others," he said, "even if we think that our skills and knowledge are only valuable in special circumstances. People should seek out opportunities."
Ian and his wife Rachael are happily rearing two sons, Julian, a freshman at NYU, and Lucas, a sophomore in high school. They try to spend as much time together as possible. "Luckily we've raised our children to share our love of travel and museums. Luckier still," he quipped, "they tolerate our company."