On May 12, Burlington temperatures climbed to 79 degrees, delivering a welcome breath of summer after a raw, rainy weekend. Twentysomethings headed to the beach. Parents and children hit the bike path. And Julie Silverman trekked to the mouth of the Winooski River to see what the swollen waterway was dumping into Lake Champlain.
“People go out bird-watching. I go out garbage-watching,” she said. Wearing long sleeves, long pants and a ponytail under her baseball cap, she toted a pink bucket, gloves, trash bags and her “crazy-awesome” trash picker, the blue one with the strongest grip.
Silverman, 59, is the Conservation Law Foundation‘s senior lakekeeper, the eyes, ears, heart and voice of Lake Champlain. Her employer, an advocacy group working to protect New England’s environment through laws, science and the market, added a lakekeeper to its staff in 2002. Silverman is its seventh.
It’s her perfect job, she said: a combination advocate, educator and watchdog for the water quality in Lake Champlain and the health of its watershed, the more than 8,000 square miles of land that drain into it.
“We made these problems, and we can fix them.” Julie Silverman
It’s a difficult body of water to keep clean. The lake mirrors the land, Silverman said, because everything flows downstream and eventually ends up there: oil, gasoline, litter, pesticides and pet waste. And Lake Champlain, stretched like a gnarly string bean for 120 miles between Whitehall, N.Y., and the Richelieu River in Québec, has an unusually high ratio of watershed to water: 19-to-1. At Lake Tahoe, by comparison, the ratio is 1.6-to-1.
Lake Champlain has 587 miles of shoreline and 239 towns in its watershed. Policies that affect water quality are set by two states, one province and two countries. “And that’s a challenge,” Silverman said.
Vermonters play an outsize role, accounting for two-thirds of the people in the watershed.
At the moment, Silverman said, Lake Champlain “needs a lot of TLC.”
The Lake Champlain Basin Program‘s 2024 State of the Lake and Ecosystems Indicators report cites improvements, such as a comeback in wild-born lake trout and declining mercury levels in fish, but other measures remain concerning.
Chloride has risen by between 20 and 54 percent since 1992. The chemical, mostly from deicing salts, can contaminate wells and harm fish and wildlife. Recommended limits for phosphorus, one of the main causes of potentially toxic cyanobacteria blooms, are consistently exceeded in St. Albans Bay, Missisquoi Bay and southern parts of the lake. Fifty-one non-native and invasive species are present, though no new ones have become established since 2018.
Three floods between July 2023 and July 2024 inundated the lake with pollution. Roughly half of its targeted phosphorus load for one year poured into Lake Champlain in the week after the July 2023 flood.
Just as the lake knows no political boundaries, Silverman’s work often overlaps with that of other advocates and researchers. She paddles a kayak to Law Island to monitor cyanobacteria for the Lake Champlain Committee. While there, she picks up debris. Much gets trapped on the island’s south side.
As one of dozens of volunteers in the state’s lay monitoring program, Silverman collects water samples to look for phosphorus and chlorophyll-a — which indicate favorable conditions for cyanobacteria — and caffeine, which passes through human bodies and, if found in the lake, suggests septic system failure.
She also educates about water stewardship, as on a chilly morning in early May when she joined instructors from a constellation of institutions on Burlington’s Texaco Beach to teach 270 Edmunds Middle School students how to survey for microplastics.
On that summery Monday a week later, acting on a tip that several plastic bottles littered the banks of the Winooski at its mouth, Silverman stopped on the bridge there to point out a line far out on the lake, where the water turned from the brackish brown of the sediment plume to bluish green.
Down on the bank, she found fishing line, bits of aluminum-sided construction foam and pieces of white foam that looked like pumice stones. But there were remarkably few bottles. Someone had already cleaned up, or the current had carried them away. One bottle bobbed lazily toward the bank but stayed just out of reach of Silverman’s awesome trash picker.
“There it goes,” she said, as it moved toward the lake. “I will probably find that — or its equivalent — on Law Island.”
Silverman, the Conservation Law Foundation’s lakekeeper for the past three years, grew up recreating in Lake Champlain and has spent the bulk of her career promoting practices to protect it. She knows what she is sure to find every time she collects debris in its waters and along its beaches. “There’s almost always a balloon. There’s almost always a straw, always a food wrapper, always a water bottle,” she said. Also: a flip-flop, a Croc and plastic foam, commonly called Styrofoam.
The state has outlawed foam drinking cups, takeout containers and, as of last year, unencapsulated foam under docks, but not foam coolers, bait containers or meat trays. Plastic — including plastic foam — is among the worst pollutants because it can leach chemicals and it never goes away.
Silverman left the mouth of the Winooski to head upstream and see what had collected at the Winooski One hydroelectric power plant. Swirling among masses of reed stalks were several tennis balls, a softball, a football, a flip-flop, a big plastic bottle that may have held dish soap, a tiny glass bottle that likely contained a nip of alcohol, and “foam, foam, foam, foam, foam,” Silverman said. She spotted a flat strip of wood with red and black stripes that looked like a hockey stick. For a minute, it broke away from the mass, and Silverman got a better look.
“Oh, my God, is that a cross-country ski?” she gasped. “OK, that’s a first.”
And then: “There’s the Croc,” she said. “Always a Croc.”
Silverman’s whole life has led her to this job. “I grew up boating and water-skiing and snorkeling and sailing and sticking my head under the water and looking for fish,” she said. As a kid, she dreamed of being on the TV show “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” but not as the host.
“I didn’t want to be Marlin Perkins, talking,” she said. “I wanted to be the person wrangling the alligator and the person in the water with the fish.”
Her family embraced water sports when they relocated from Long Island, N.Y., to Essex in 1969, when she was 3. They settled in Pinewood Manor, a subdivision populated by IBM engineers such as Silverman’s father, Ron. It had a pool.
That first summer, Silverman saw a child her age swim the length of the pool and vowed she would do it, too, before the summer was out. “And she did,” said her mother, June. Julie was swimming at age 3, water-skiing at 6 and lifeguarding at the town’s Sand Hill Pool when she was 14.
She and her two older brothers explored the woods and ponds behind their house, catching bullfrogs and building forts, where they occasionally spent the night. Pinewood was the kind of neighborhood where parents turned out their children in the morning and didn’t expect to see them until dinner.
Nearly everyone had a boat. Every summer, families hitched them up, packed up their kids and moved the neighborhood an hour north to Lake Carmi for a week or two.
After graduating from Wheaton College with a biology degree, Silverman took a job in a Boston law firm, thinking she might want to go into environmental law. She hated the work and began volunteering at the New England Aquarium. She earned a master’s degree in science education at Tufts University but learned she was too edgy for public schools when, as a student teacher, she showed up to administer a biology quiz dressed as an amoeba. “I was their quiz,” she said. Other teachers disapproved.
After a couple of years of teaching, she worked at the Museum of Science in Boston “and got to be the Miss Frizzle that I always wanted to be,” she said, referring to the fictional teacher from the book and TV series The Magic School Bus. She got to hold owls, frogs, snakes and groundhogs, she said. “I’ve handled the alligator.”
A friend who had also grown up in Essex kept Silverman apprised of Burlington’s efforts to improve its waterfront, including the plan to create a science center there. “You need to come back and build this,” her friend told her.
The Lake Champlain Basin Science Center, which opened in the U.S. Naval Reserve building in 1995, eventually became ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain. Silverman was its first employee. For 20 years, she developed and ran programs and exhibits.
“Science is fun,” and Silverman embodies “the wonder and the joy of science,” said Betsy Rosenbluth, one of the two codirectors who hired Silverman. Rosenbluth said Silverman understood the science center’s “mission of getting people excited about learning more and then becoming stewards of place.”
That job, like Silverman’s earlier work, focused on education and advocacy. Her current job “has more teeth,” she said.
Now, when she sees problems along the lake, she has the power to fix them. Working alongside Conservation Law Foundation lawyers, she pushes for policy and legal changes.
When testifying before a Vermont legislative committee about the hazards of unencapsulated dock foam, she brought a big chunk of it to the Statehouse. Legislators asked her to take it out of the bag. “And they all had their coffee cups sitting around on the table,” she said.
Old dock foam breaks down into tiny pellets that scatter. They look like fish eggs. Birds eat them. If Silverman pulled the foam out of the bag, bits would likely have ended up in the lawmakers’ coffee. “I’m like, ‘You really don’t want to be drinking the plastic out of that,'” Silverman recalled telling them.
The foam ban, part of the 2024 Flood Safety Act, became law.
At Texaco Beach earlier this month, Silverman taught Edmunds students to skim a quarter-inch of sand off the top of a one-meter sample square, called a quadrat, pass it through two sieves, and then toss what remained into a bucket of water. The flecks that floated were plastic. Scientists may sample additional layers, she explained, and record what they find in each: fibers, rubber, foam and nurdles — pellets that are the raw material used to make plastic products.
Then they try to determine where the pollution is coming from and how to stop it.
Lake Champlain holds about 6.8 trillion gallons of water. Caring for it can be as painstaking as sifting sand to collect tiny shards of plastic.
“It is overwhelming,” Silverman said, but she remains inspired.
“We made these problems, and we can fix them,” she said. “And it actually isn’t like curing cancer. Some of these problems have really straightforward solutions.”
Anyone Can Be a Lakekeeper
Conservation Law Foundation senior lakekeeper Julie Silverman would like to put herself out of a job. Here’s how you can help.
- Bring a reusable container to restaurants for your leftovers.
- Avoid single-use plastics. Only 5 to 6 percent of the plastics tossed into American recycling bins actually get recycled.
- Keep your car tuned up. Leaked oil can end up in the lake.
- Plant native trees and shrubs to take up water and help prevent runoff.
- Raise the blade on your lawn mower to three inches. Longer grass has longer roots that hold more water.
- Don’t use pesticides, herbicides or chemical fertilizers. “Whatever you’re putting on your property doesn’t just stay on your property,” Silverman said.
- Pick up pet waste.
- Clean debris from stormwater drains to prevent localized flooding and to keep leaves, which turn to phosphorus, out of the lake. Learn more at vt.adopt-a-drain.org.
- Direct downspouts onto lawns or into rain barrels, not onto streets and sidewalks.
- Be a citizen scientist and help monitor cyanobacteria and water quality. Learn more at lakechamplaincommittee.org and dec.vermont.gov/watershed/lakes-ponds/learn.
- Spend as little as 10 minutes picking up debris along lakes and rivers, then record what you find on an app to contribute to global databases. Learn more at nurdlepatrol.org/app and debristracker.org.
- Participate in a cleanup day organized by one of the watershed groups up and down the lake.
- Keep clean water and a healthy environment in mind when you vote.
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Lorax for the Lake | Lakekeeper Julie Silverman is an advocate, educator and watchdog for Lake Champlain”
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This article appears in The Summer Preview 2025.
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