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InterviewsTue 21 Jan 2025

Why Do The Old Ladies Jump in the Pond?

Susan Baur is a retired journalist, author, and psychologist who founded Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage. With her group, she clears hundreds of ponds in New England, happily receiving cookies and hot cocoa as payment while raising awareness of the beautiful ecosystem around her.

A collection of trash fished out of a New England pond by the intrepid Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage (OLAUG).
Photo: Old Ladies Against Underwater GarbageA collection of trash fished out of a New England pond by the intrepid Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage (OLAUG). Photo: Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage

How do you feel when you try to “do the right thing” for the environment? What is your motivation behind recycling, volunteering to pick up garbage in your local park, or opting out of single-use plastics?

“What motivates most people to do environmental work?” Susan Baur, the founder of Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage, or OLAUG, asks, catching me off guard. From my own experience, I think of my fear or the trauma of witnessing the dwindling nature around us, so I answer accordingly.

“Some of our members would say, ‘I’m doing this for the environment,’ and some would say, ‘I’m doing this for the adventure, or comradeship,’ but what drives this group is people finding a better way to be happy,” Susan illuminates.

OLAUG’s mission is pretty straightforward, as you can see in its name: to clean all the ponds in New England of years of accumulated trash. These old ladies (it’s in the group’s name), aged 64 to 85, bravely dive into the depths, clearing out decades of rubbish and waste.

“You’d come out with golf balls, fish lures, and even car batteries!” Susan shares the dynamic list of the items she finds with the other ladies. “We’d have a kayak guiding us. This is a serious task – you’d have to be able to swim half a mile in 30 minutes. You must be prepared to be in the water without touching the bottom for an hour. You need to have a very deep familiarity with the water.”

OLAUG founder, Susan Baur, stands next to a particularly impressive trash haul.
Photo: Old Ladies Against Underwater GarbageOLAUG founder, Susan Baur, stands next to a particularly impressive trash haul. Photo: Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage

The old ladies who comprise the group come from diverse backgrounds–retired nurses, lawyers, teachers, and more. However, they have one thing in common: they love inspiring other women their age to join in and get empowered. There’s also a shared love of the feeling they get as their faces hit the water and the smell of delicious homemade cookies–OLAUG’s favourite form of payment.

For this group, the Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage is a joyous organisation.

“These are women who are finding their full joy at a time when their life is supposedly ending,” Susan exclaims. “But we don’t dwindle, you know. Everyone in my group would tell you we have expanded both as individuals and as a group.”

Two members of OLAUG pose for a picture before they begin diving for trash.
Photo: Old Ladies Against Underwater GarbageTwo members of OLAUG pose for a picture before they begin diving for trash. Photo: Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage

Susan herself comes from a vibrant background; an experienced traveller, she describes trips to many countries, including Japan, Egypt, and Lebanon–fluent Arabic phrases roll off her tongue to my amazement. She’s also an award-winning journalist, an author who’s written several books, including The Edge of an Unfamiliar World: A History of Oceanography, and most recently, she’s worked as a psychologist. How does she have time for all that? “I don’t own a TV, and I don’t overthink what I want to eat – I eat what I have at home, which leaves me a great deal of time for reading books and learning new things,” she says.

Despite her varied career experiences, deep-diving ponds to pick up underwater garbage wasn’t in Susan’s plans: OLAUG’s conception was deliciously accidental.

“I started swimming in ponds when I moved to Cape Cod to avoid the notorious rip currents,” she explains. “When I first started swimming in ponds, I thought they were horrible. They had 50-pound snapping turtles, water lilies, and mud, which felt like swimming through yoghurt.”

When I first started swimming in ponds, I thought they were horrible. They had 50-pound snapping turtles, water lilies, and mud, which felt like swimming through yoghurt.

Susan Baur

Initially, Susan used the trash at the bottom of the pond to gain courage while navigating the muddy water. After a while, she was confident enough to swim without them. During this time, she started learning more about the ponds, especially the turtles. She studied them carefully and started a photo collection observing them.

One day, when Susan was swimming near several musk turtles, something remarkable happened. A turtle with an unusual marking that looked like pine needles on his shell, began swimming fast around Susan as if to show off. Soon, the little fella latched himself onto Susan in an unmistakable attempt to mate with her.

The most common kind of trash OLAUG brings up from the depths? Sand toys, fishing lures, cans, and golf balls.
Photo: Old Ladies Against Underwater GarbageThe most common kind of trash OLAUG brings up from the depths? Sand toys, fishing lures, cans, and golf balls. Photo: Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage

“With a joyful shock, I realised for the first time that I wasn’t the only ‘thinking being’ in the underwater world,”  Susan adds. “I looked at everything in relationship to me.  Did this friendly turtle help me get good photos?  Did that patch of water lilies prevent me from going where I wanted to go? I failed to see that turtles and I were citizens of a common world.”

It hit Susan that she had to help these “incredible, hard-shelled teachers.” Removing the trash from their ponds was one way to do that.

OLAUG was founded in 2017,  and they have been cleaning up ponds on Cape Cods as often as they could meet up. The old ladies have quickly gained recognition from all over the nation, and now the team has expanded to more than 20 people, with more wanting to join every year. They clean close to twenty ponds each season and pull out between twenty and a hundred pounds of junk from each one.

Members of OLAUG stand together, proudly displaying maps of the New England ponds they’re cleaning.
Photo: Old Ladies Against Underwater GarbageMembers of OLAUG stand together, proudly displaying maps of the New England ponds they’re cleaning. Photo: Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage

Susan suggests repositioning thoughts around caring for the environment. She asks, “‘What would happen if you felt really happy?’ What would happen if you felt your life and your joy expanding as you felt closer to the natural world? We would understand that happiness is not powered by natural and fossil gas. It's powered by being part of nature and seeing that we all live in a common world.”

For Susan, her joy of being with nature is as clear as the will of life of a snapping turtle and the coldness on her face when she dives into a pond. It is her strongest motivator.

“When everything in the natural world goes from a thing you can use to a being you can relate to. You see things a lot differently. It's an insight that you can't undo.”

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