Carla Gould studies pigeons near Central Park.

On a busy corner of Central Park, shivering tourists clench their overcoats and frantically hail taxis. Seemingly impervious to the cold and commotion, environmentalist Carla Gould sits alone on a bench, her eyes fixed on a cluster of pigeons at the foot of a nearby statue. She’s motionless except for the occasional scribble on her notepad.

Except for a Canadian accent, the 30-year-old is effortlessly New York chic—tall and slim with dark hair and delicate features that show subtle traces of well-applied iridescent make-up—perhaps an unconscious tribute to her subject, the pigeon.

She has come here with one mission: to revitalize the pigeon’s reputation. New York City is her laboratory, and these so-called “rats with wings” are the focus of her thesis: “Re-contextualizing the Pigeon Through Space and Interaction.

Carla Gould

Ms. Gould is a visiting fellow at New York University’s xClinic, a research center that focuses on how health is affected by environmental factors, such as human interaction with pigeons. Instead of advocating pharmaceuticals, the clinic’s research emphasizes action plans – even ostensibly unpopular ones like Ms. Gould’s.

On leave from her undergraduate studies in Toronto, Ms. Gould finds the human-pigeon dynamic to be romantic, despite the bird’s reputation as a pest. “It’s a rich relationship that has been ignored,” she says with conviction.

The first step in her evangelistic action plan is “to change the public perception of the pigeon,” she says. Most people believe that guano, or pigeon excrement, carries disease. Gould strongly disagrees, so she’ll start her mission by “showing how much of a misconception this guano fear is.” In the clinic’s two-room office in Manhattan’s East Village, she has begun writing a handbook about the many virtues of guano, including its use as a fertilizer.

The second step is to inspire an attitude adjustment since many think the pigeon is a nuisance. “We haven’t learned how to properly cohabitate with them,” she says. But given two minutes, she says she can change skeptics’ minds and show that city life and nature are not mutually exclusive.

She usually begins with a story about the pigeon’s work as a revered messenger during World War I. Because of their innate ability to fly long distances, “carrier” pigeons were often dispatched to deliver military intelligence to base camps and were credited with saving lives. “I get teary-eyed when I talk about it,” she says.

She then segues to its journey to America. Early settlers brought pigeons as a sign of affluence and a delicacy to eat. “The story captivates people,” she says. “People will say, ‘Oh, my God, that’s incredible. They’re not just freeloading off my AC unit and shitting on my front door.’”

Natalie Jereminjenko, xClinic’s founder and Ms. Gould’s supervisor, is also pro-pigeon. “The pigeon is a critical tool to understanding urban health,” she says. The two paired up when Dr. Jereminjenko gave a speech at the Ontario College of Art and Design, where Ms. Gould is a student. Afterwards, Ms. Gould approached her and pitched her pigeon project, to which Dr. Jereminjenko responded with an invitation to work at the clinic.

Six months later, Ms. Gould moved into a crammed sublet a few blocks from the NYU campus. Her typical day may include her two-minute tutorials on the street, or testing pigeons’ food preferences (breadcrumbs trump French fries).

She’ll spend hours on some afternoons observing a flock of birds. Occasionally, it’ll be an impromptu session, as Chris Denda, her boyfriend, learned on a recent visit from Toronto. “We’ll be walking down the street and she’ll stop without telling me. I turn around and she’s ‘interacting’ with the birds—looking at them, ‘being’ with them,” he says. “I don’t think they even notice her. They probably think, ‘Oh, it’s Carla again.’”

The flock might not notice Ms. Gould because a component of her research involves pretending to be one of them. During a 30-minute “pigeon embodiment exercise,” Ms. Gould and her xClinic colleagues stood in a stairwell near the office, closed their eyes and opened their minds to what it would feel like to be a pigeon. They arched their backs and cocked their necks to impersonate a tail and beak. Extended arms became wings, shifting back and forth as if in flight. The exercise prompted giggles in the beginning, but soon the group fell silent. “We imagined how the legs would be positioned and how to walk accordingly. It was nuts because you’re growing a tail in this peaceful state,” Ms. Gould says.

“Channeling” pigeons is far afield from Ms. Gould’s initial career track. After weathering through academic probation in high school, she and her parents agreed vocational training suited her off-beat nature more so than the formal higher education route. She studied hair and make-up and got a job as a make-up artist on Canadian Idol. Six years later, the show-biz glamour had worn off and she decided to give higher education another shot, enrolling in an industrial design program at her art school in Ontario. This time, it stuck.

Ms. Gould concedes the pigeon is an unlikely muse. “A lot of people laughed, and I thought it was funny at first, too. But I was passionate about this story that was unfolding,” she reflects.

New York is one research stop on an itinerary she hopes will take her around the globe for her studies. She has created a survey designed to compare the pigeon-human interaction in Boston, Vancouver and Hawaii. The 20-point questionnaire will gather scientific data, such as pigeon population sizes and locations, plus photos and anecdotal evidence from her observations.

Surveys aside, the bigger picture is a harmonious human-pigeon living environment, says Ms. Gould. She envisions a scenario where air-conditioning window units are someday used as platforms for pigeon families, and apartment residents collect their guano to fertilize rooftop gardens.

While the goals are conceptual for now, the potential impact is considerable. “This is not just a playful little design project,” says Dr. Jereminjenko, Ms. Gould’s supervisor at the xClinic. “This has real implications to your health, to my health, everyone’s health.”

Her success may be hard to quantify, says her professor and advisor, Carl Hastrich. Ms. Gould’s objective is “not a tangible, sellable result,” he says. Her aim is to increase awareness, but “how do you know when you’ve created a dialogue that’s successful?” he asks. “How you measure success is an open-ended adventure.”

Ms. Gould is not the first pigeon advocate. She freely acknowledges that “a few people” have put pigeons on the map, citing two mainstream books called Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan and Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird Pigeon as required reading.

“I really want to be a part of what happens next,” she says.

Some of her future research is still on ice. Tucked away in her freezer are two birds—a woodpecker and sparrow—awaiting a dissection to compare its wing structure to the pigeons’.

“Congress and Mr. President, hear our call for responsive legislation,” Ms. Flynn urged, clutching an old microphone and peering out over black, thick-rimmed glasses. “Take responsibility for this continuing public health disaster.”

It is a scene that Ms. Flynn, a one-time actress, plays out across the city in community meetings, rallies and hearings. Her script – demanding proper clean-up, recognition and treatment of illnesses that appeared in the wake of 9/11 – holds the words she has come to live by. In the years since that September day, lower Manhattan has embarked on an arduous recovery, rebuilding new office towers, businesses and lives. Still, Ms. Flynn insists, the recovery is far from over.

A decade ago, Ms. Flynn worked as a dramaturge, alternating as an actress, drama professor and theater consultant. Between work on projects like Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, Flynn volunteered with ACT UP New York, an AIDS social justice coalition. It was only New York’s aggressive 1999 pesticide campaign against the West Nile virus that sparked Flynn’s initial foray into environmental activism.

That evening began like any other. Ms. Flynn finished up dinner and left her Upper West Side apartment for a nightly stroll along Riverside Drive. But as she walked through the park, she paused at the odd sensation of a tightening in her chest. “I’d been keeping track of the spray schedule, and I thought to myself, ‘are they supposed to spray Riverside Drive?’” she recalls. “Then I thought, ‘no, they weren’t.’”

Joggers got drenched in the pesticide, she said, and parents and nannies pulled their kids from the sandboxes and fleed the park. Shocked, she called the city’s office of emergency management. She says all she heard was “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” followed by: “What are you gonna do about it? Sue us?”

She did. Ms. Flynn joined the No Spray Coalition, a group opposed to the pesticide campaign, as a paralegal and research assistant in its lawsuit against the city. By September 2001, Ms. Flynn had gotten a strong-enough introduction to the nuances of environmental justice that she began to set her sights on other issues. She worked with colleagues from the No Spray Coalition to order private lab tests of the World Trade Center dust. When those tests revealed toxic levels of asbestos, Ms. Flynn and her colleagues sprang into action, educating the community about the dangers of the dust through fliers and meetings.

Even without any close personal ties to the disaster, Ms. Flynn says she simply reacted as many New Yorkers did. “I feel like there was such a dire need to step in and offer whatever skills we had,” she says. “I would have been useless removing rubble from the pile. But what I did know how to do was to organize the community.”

Eight years later, Ms. Flynn remains at the front of an environmental movement facing dwindling funds and shrinking ranks. Now a petite 53-year-old with fading, gray-streaked brown hair, Ms. Flynn readily acknowledges these challenges. She blames them on what she calls “compassion fatigue.”

But her own fatigue is something else entirely. Asked to estimate the number of hours she devotes to 9/11 each week, Ms. Flynn draws an anxious pair of hands to her temples. She runs through a list of roles at 11 different community groups and settles on 40 hours. Her days are filled with phone calls, meetings, research, drafting fliers and legal testimony and planning outreach, events and agendas. When pressed, she admits the workweek often creeps upwards of 50 or 60 hours.

“She lives and breathes this fight,” says Esther Regelson, secretary of the 9/11 Environmental Action committee that Flynn founded in 2002. “She’s given up quite a lot to do this, and she will see it that way if you point it out to her, but she tries not to stop and look at that, because it will interfere.”

Ms. Flynn balks at any discussion of her sacrifices because she believes they will never compare to those of individuals directly affected by 9/11. Still, the ones she will discuss are hardly trivial. Nearly all of her 9/11 work is done on a voluntary basis, meaning she’s lived without a steady salary for over eight years. So as the money from her theater days has been running out, she’s taken on debt and adjusted her standard of living.Recently relocated from the Upper West Side to an apartment building blocks away from Ground Zero, Ms. Flynn lives on her own and admits her dedication has left little time for social life.

Despite Ms. Flynn’s dogged commitment, the question of what, exactly, her efforts have yielded remains. Rob Spencer, who co-chairs a community advisory committee with Ms. Flynn, calls her “a pivotal player” in the fight for environmental justice.

“There’s no doubt about that,” he says. “I think she’s ensured that the struggle will move forward in ways very few other folks have.” He points to her role in the successful battle to ensure a safe demolition of the Deutsche Bank building. Ms. Flynn, he says, was instrumental in raising awareness of the dangers standard demolition posed and convincing key community players to get involved in the issue.

But Mr. Spencer also acknowledged that tangible victories seldom emerge in her chosen causes. “It’s very difficult in some of these struggles to look at the victories as ‘We won this,’ “ he says. Instead, Mr. Spencer contends that the victories are in the process, and largely about raising awareness and strategizing the most effective ways to demand change.

And by Ms. Flynn’s own admission, victories are rare and nearly always fleeting. They are the times when a protest outside a taping of the David Letterman Show caused the talk show-host to cross-examine former Environmental Protection Agency head Christine Todd Whitman on the agency’s post-9/11 policies. Or the release of the 2003 Environmental Protection Agency Inspector General’s Report, which reflected the inadequacies of the agency’s response to 9/11 that Flynn and others had pointed to for nearly two years. “But she definitely won’t stop and take a breath,” says Ms. Regelson. “She’ll be celebratory, but she’s always ready to move on to the next thing.”

Ms. Flynn is now focusing the bulk of her attention on the launch of the 9/11 Pediatric Outreach Project. Flynn’s goal is to increase awareness of 9/11’s impact on the health of children and adolescents, and the resources WTC’s Environmental Health Center at Bellevue Hospital can provide for pediatric patients. She’s hoping they’ll be able to secure grant money for the initiative, which would provide her with some kind of income, no matter how small or temporary.

If not, there will be more debt to incur and new sacrifices to be made. But Ms. Flynn is undeterred. “I don’t know whether you can still call it an obsession,” she says. “People still have that fire in their bellies from the first flame of outrage. It’s not hard to ignite that again.”

Haney is the proprietor of Marble Valley Farm and part of a growing trend of female farmers in the U.S. Today, one in three of the country’s 2.2 million farms are run by women, a 30% increase since 2002.

Marble Valley is an organic farm that’s run by Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Situated in a quiet enclave of Conn. known as Kent, locals pay for the farm’s upkeep in exchange for a share of its produce. In just three years under Haney’s care, the farm has grown from a modest 14 shares in the first year to an expected 50 this upcoming season, making it one of only 12,000 functioning CSA-farms in the US.

Her career and her life both go against the grain.

Haney grew up in Brooklyn in the seventies, where the air typically smelled of garbage, not cow manure, and fingernails were dirty from city smut, not a day in the fields. Unlike her peers, Haney skipped playing hopscotch on blacktops in favor of a 9×12 ft. plot of green in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Haney and her brother spent weekends at the Children’s Garden, a place that allows inner-city kids the opportunity to explore country life and plant herbs, radishes and corn. “We would throw [the vegetables] in our black plastic bags and tie it on the back of our Stingray bikes and bring it back home down Flatbush Avenue,” she said. There, their mother would make the best of their hard work, cooking stews with produce near-wilted from the sticky, New York heat.

After college on the East Coast, Haney moved West to intern at Stanford University’s Center for Conservation Biology, a department charged with researching endangered and near-extinct species. She pored over papers that discussed world hunger and how to supply a growing population with food while maintaining a diverse plant life through sustainable agriculture. She studied the World Bank and concluded that academics had spent too much time talking to each other instead of local farmers. Then Haney had an epiphany. “There I was working for these two talking heads at Stanford, and saying… the World Bank failed because it was dealing on a talking-head level, and we are all talking heads,” she said. “So how are we any different from them and what can we do about it?”

Haney wanted to pick her head out of the books and dig her hands in the dirt. The “talking heads” at Stanford agreed and sent her off to work for Full Belly Farm, a pioneer in organic farming based in California’s Bay Area. There, she was encouraged to attend farm school, and in 1990, she enrolled in a six-month farming apprenticeship program at the University of California Santa Cruz.

The program was founded by a British gardener named Alan Chadwick, a man whose own life challenged convention. A former actor with the British Royal Shakespeare Company, Chadwick left life among the British gliterati and moved to India, where he rid himself of most material possessions. He became, somewhat by happenstance, a gardener at UC Santa Cruz in the late sixties. Chadwick carved out plateaus in the hillside for organic produce and flowerbeds with a shovel and bare hands. He did not believe in using mechanical equipment.

Chadwick died a decade before Haney set foot in his garden, but by then it had developed into one of America’s oldest and most prestigious programs for non-mechanized farming. Haney was intrigued by this simplistic form of agriculture and wanted to build an organic farm that would follow the same principals. In 1999, some friends from Santa Cruz had come across a few acres of land in Bethany, Conn., and Haney moved back East to make that dream a reality.

Mad Mares Farm, as they named it, was a CSA farm and a “fork and spade farm.” Haney spent much of her time in the field digging and planting with bare hands. The farm was able to sustain 100 shares, but earning about $5,000 per year wasn’t enough to make a living. After a while it became clear to Haney that if she wanted to succeed as a farmer, she would have to let go of some of her Chadwick-inspired idealism. She would have to forgo a fork and spade and learn how to use a tractor.

Haney started at the bottom rung of mechanized farming, planting vegetables for an orchardist who showed her the ropes. After a year on staff, she felt she’d proved her worth. She asked the orchardist for tractor lessons in exchange for her labor, but the orchardist said he didn’t need a tractor driver and couldn’t afford to waste the hours.

Two weeks later, Haney learned the orchardist taught Brendan, a 14-year-old boy, how to use the tractor. Haney said this was her first real encounter with what she calls “the ole boys network,” farmers with decades of experience and a stubborn sense of how the world should function. She felt the orchardist would never teach her what she needed to know because she was a woman.

Haney called the Extension Agent at the University of Connecticut, hoping to take advantage of his connections with regional farmers. Extension Agents work with agricultural departments at universities to implement their research from laboratories and study halls across local, working fields. Haney hoped the Extension Agent could provide her with a few names of farmers who’d be willing to give her tractor lessons, but the Extension Agent said, “I don’t think any of the guys I work with are going to go for that… They are not going to want to teach a woman to do anything.”

In 2004, she finally caught a break. Laura McKinney, a fellow female farmer and graduate of UC Santa Cruz, hired Haney at their Riverbank Farm in Roxbury, Conn. “Megan came by with a friend and I really liked her; I liked her sincerity, so I just hired her,” said McKinney. Haney proved to be a good worker, doing a bit of everything on the farm while learning to use the tractor.

She stayed on for three years before McKinney spotted an ad for a farmer with organic farming experience placed by the Kent Land Trust in the Natural Farmer. The Trust, an organization committed to keeping Kent, Conn. rural, was looking for someone to lease and run the farm that today is Marble Valley Farm. McKinney encouraged Haney to apply.

From her meager beginnings in a 9×12 ft. plot, Haney now has four tilled acres and a greenhouse to grow organic vegetables, herbs, roots, and whatever else her heart desires. Haney smiled with satisfaction and said, “Not bad for a girl from Brooklyn.”

A week later, the wood nymph is now in a khaki uniform, accessorized with a tie, wide-brimmed safari hat, and tool belt, lecturing first graders on entomology. “Who likes bugs?” she projects theatrically across a group of mesmerized seven-year-olds with pencils and journals at the ready, about to set off on a nature hike through the Ramble of Central Park. “Everyone?! That’s absolutely fantastic!”

The two scenes reflect the seemingly paradoxical sides of Sgt. Sunny Corrao who came to New York City to pursue her passion for the stage. Today, seven years later, she rescues wild animals, leads nature hikes, and teaches children about caring for trees as a ranger with the Urban Park Rangers in Central Park.
“She’s not a typical city girl. We are all surprised that she has stayed so long,” said her younger sister, Gina Corrao. Yet, she added: “ She likes to go against the current, she is a dramatic person.”

Drama has always been a part of Corrao’s life. She was born and raised in a rowdy “typical Italian family” in Las Vegas, where her father worked as a computer operator at the Rio Casino, and family office parties often featured dancing showgirls. Her father, an amateur pilot, would announce on Saturday morning that they were going to have breakfast 300 miles away, and so the family would fly off for pancakes. One winter day, he filled the back of his pick-up truck with piles of snow from the mountains to surprise the family with a front yard ready for snowman making.

“Our parents brought us up showing us everything. They encouraged us to be whatever we wanted to be and they supported us no matter what,” said sister Gina Corrao.

Now, at age 29, Corrao is tall and sturdy, with long dark hair parted in the middle and pulled severely into a ponytail under her ranger hat – the handcuffs, baton and pepper spray on her tool belt make one feel reassured about any chance encounter with, say, a rabid raccoon, or other threat in the wild.

“You have to have that physical aspect, that physicality and endurance,” she explained in a gentle voice that contradicts her almost intimidating appearance and the exuberant actress she becomes in front of a crowd. “You are on your feet a lot during the day – you are out there protecting the park”.

Despite the flamboyance of Las Vegas, Corrao craved the outdoors and adventure. The family scuba-dived and skied together on vacations. But when it came to hiking and camping, it was Sunny, the oldest of three girls, who went off with her father, while the younger two stayed home. Although she always loved nature, Corrao never thought that she would be a park ranger; rather, her choice of a future career was constantly changing: “I wanted to be a doctor or an artist,” she remembered.

When Corrao graduated from the University of Nevada in 2002 with a degree in environmental science, it was not the lure of nursing injured swans in Central Park that drew her to New York. Rather, she came, like so many others before her, to star in musical theater, a passion she developed in high school and college.

When audition after audition didn’t lead to any roles, Corrao, who had always been a talented seamstress, worked on costume production for Juilliard and The Pearl Theatre Company. But after three and a half years, the appeal of the outdoors was too strong to resist. She was tired of being “stuck inside,” as she describes it, yet still wanted to stay in New York to attend the theater performances that originally drew her here.

In the summer of 2006, she applied to the Urban Park Rangers program (where salaries start at around $35,000), and began work three months later. She was promoted to supervisor in September 2008, and now manages three other rangers.

“You wouldn’t think that these two professions mix but they kind of do. I like to perform,” she said. One major attraction she leads is a Creepy, Crawly Adventure Tour, which is a summer crowd pleaser. “You have to be comfortable speaking in a group, you have to be engaging and to read your audience. I still get that aspect out of me and I get to educate people about what they have around them.”

During the first grade entomology class, Corrao asks the students rhetorical questions and emphasizes her points with large dramatic arm gestures and a voice that spans octaves. She teaches bug body parts by leading a round of “Head, Thorax, Abdomen,” to the tune of “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” and explains bee communication by initiating a “Waggle Dance.” It’s hard to tell who’s having a better time.

“She’s an entertainer, which is an important part of being a ranger,” said Sara Aucoin, Director of the Urban Park Rangers.

Noting that sometimes the people in the park can be more challenging than the animals, Aucoin attributes Corrao’s success to her pleasant manner. Yet Corrao admits that she struggles when it comes to patrolling the grounds. Although she has never been in danger, she acknowledges that Central Park is an urban park, and there is a fear of what can happen when admonishing a wrong-doer.

“We always have to be prepared for the worst,” Corrao said, acknowledging her role as sergeant. “But I tell myself, ‘this is my costume and I’m acting a part’.”

Corrao’s day starts on foot, patrolling the park, issuing warnings to dog-owners with dogs off the leash or to bicyclists riding on the pedestrian path. She chooses a different route each morning to keep repeat offenders on guard.

The occasional emergency crops up – rescuing a raccoon with a limp leg that needs to be evaluated or capturing a boa constrictor that has been spotted devouring squirrels in a tree. A couple of times a year, nature and city intersect, and Corrao will be the one to get called out of the park. She has escorted baby ducklings from Park Avenue to the Harlem Meer, and rescued a red-tailed hawk standing guard on a Madison Avenue traffic light. New Yorkers “ooh” and “ahh” when they see the outfitted Ranger herding nature back to the park.

But most of her time is spent educating the public on the park she is so passionate about. “It really hurts me when people litter. I want people to feel pride in the park and enjoy it,” said Corrao. “If you are not a birder, maybe don’t notice the bird, but notice a new plant. Don’t be blind!”

After a long day, Corrao changed to street clothes (“We sometimes get funny looks and a lot of questions when we leave the park for lunch,” she said) and headed on home to Ridgewood, Queens.

Currently single – though romances among the rangers have been known to ignite during the regular Ranger Happy Hours – she lives with a male roommate, an aspiring fashion designer. The two-bedroom apartment houses two sewing machines, a mannequin dress model, bolts of fabric, a cutting table and racks of their creations. Watching “Project Runway” together is a weekly ritual.

Perhaps for a girl who grew up in Las Vegas, a desert town built for fantasies and where sometimes there’s snow in the front yard, working in the wilderness against a backdrop of skyscrapers doesn’t require much imagination.

“I don’t think I’d be happy at just any ABC job,” said the 26-year-old out-of-work environmental lawyer.

While the White House is grappling with record-breaking unemployment rates, for some, a job per se has never been in the cards. As certain 20somethings will attest, it’s a fulfilling career they’re after, even in the midst of recession.

“A lot of my friends have kind of settled and taken jobs that they probably didn’t really want, but they’re earning money, they’re living life. But I don’t think that’s it for me,” said Auerbach.

A nearly six-month employment search has been futile, partially because Auerbach refuses to settle on a career opportunity that’s anything short of what he wants. His everyday responsibilities now include walking his and his girlfriend’s two dogs and taking photos of feet (more on that later), but Auerbach is also working on finding his purpose (and building his CV) in environmental advocacy.

Representing his neighborhood on the Upper East Side, Auerbach joined Community Board 8 earlier this year in part to push his environmental agenda. Recently he’s had some success in trying to change the old guard’s thoughts about transportation and sustainability. In October, he drafted a motion that detailed the community board’s support for the Department of Transportation to conduct a study on the feasibility of installing protected bike lanes on the Upper East Side. He’s excited about the local press he’s been getting now that the motion passed 38-1.

“I think after I proposed that bike resolution – that was kind of like my coming out party,” said Auerbach. He finds that the veteran board members respect him more now that he’s contributing to the conversation. Last Wednesday they were receptive to his new idea involving the Department of Education and Department of Motor Vehicles joining forces to help teach kids the biking rules of the road.

But serving the Upper East Side, an area known for its affluence and traditionalists, offers a unique set of obstacles for a guy who rides a bike and eats organic. “You’ve got to make that connection and show them if you do this little bit now, you’ll reap these benefits later,” explained Auerbach of his relationship with members of the community. “It’s a harder road to climb, but I think that makes it more worthwhile.”

At a full board meeting of Community Board 8 last month, Auerbach fidgeted in his seat, walked out of the auditorium, then came back in. The board was arguing about the wording he used in a motion he drafted, and he didn’t understand their objections. In order to implement biking education, Auerbach wanted the board to partner with Transportation Alternatives – a group committed to advocating for the interests of pedestrians, cyclists and mass transit riders. Problem was, Auerbach is an extremely active member of Transportation Alternatives (in fact, he was just voted volunteer of the year) and his fellow board members knew it. They argued that the word “partner” was too strong and suggestive of a relationship that shouldn’t and couldn’t exist.

So, after muttering his disappointment to a colleague, Community Board 8’s youngest board member abstained when the vote was called. Auerbach later maintained that he learned a valuable lesson about compromise after that night, but at the meeting, he wouldn’t budge. “I can’t vote for a motion that’s not my motion,” he said.

Auerbach’s 23-year old brother, Matt, isn’t surprised at Michael’s reaction. “Michael likes to get his way. He doesn’t really acquiesce to the other party that much,” said Matt.

Matt recalled a time when his older brother actually pleaded with his parents to get a blue Chevy Trail Blazer with black interior. (Michael hadn’t yet made the switch to two wheel transportation.) He just had to have that specific make and model. “Once he believes in something he really believes in it, and it’s hard to change that,” said Matt.

But Michael believes in such a myriad of unrelated things, that in a niche market, he refuses to settle on any one specialty. The New York Law alum double majored in international business and sports management while at George Washington University. At one point he seriously considered a career in journalism, and he now co-authors a blog, www.streetsneak.com., dedicated to increasing sneaker visibility by showcasing the Converses and high-tops in the city. (Auerbach himself owns 25 pairs.) This past Thanksgiving, he simultaneously prepared caramelized corn with mint while researching a now defunct route of the Long Island Railroad. Given his kaleidoscope of interests, his view is focused but always shifting.

“He’s terrified of doing something he doesn’t want to do, and he’s terrified of being unhappy,” said Matt, who sees his brother is a role model for him and his 17-year-old sister, Gaby. “I don’t think he’ll ever have a job he hates.”

When Michael’s former boss at the New York City Department of Education inquired as to whether he would like to apply to extend his temporary position, Auerbach politely declined the offer. Having completed his memo about trends in school violence after nearly seven months of work, Auerbach no longer desired to be a policy analyst and was now ready to apply for legal positions. He left the job in June.

“It seemed like the project was kind of over for me at that point,” he said. “I knew there were bigger fish to fry out there somewhere.”

Brent Madoo, Auerbach’s former colleague at the Department of Education agreed. “He was appreciative of the work we were doing there, but I don’t think it was something that he was necessarily passionate about,” said Madoo.

Currently Auerbach is focusing most of his attention on Upper Green Side – a nonprofit committed to helping create sustainable neighborhoods on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side. He recently became the group’s president.

Upper Green Side founder Glenn McAnanama resigned from the position after moving to Morningside Heights, and he nominated Auerbach to take his place.

“He’ll bring a different flavor and different ideas, and based on everything I’ve seen, I like where he’s going,” said McAnanama. Auerbach will focus on transportation issues, while McAnanama will continue to push for the expansion of green markets and recycling facilities.

Another huge component of Auerbach’s presidency involves maintaining the Upper Green Side blog. “It’s really about self motivation,” said Auerbach, who’s grown accustomed to the challenges of blogging with www.streetsneak.com. After just a few of weeks of posting, Auerbach said that there were roughly 800 viewers in the month of November.

But once this helmet-wearing, sneaker-philic young man adds a 9-5 into the mix, how will his advocacy efforts morph?

Auerbach, who regrets not taking any time off between undergrad and graduate school, says law school was “just the next step for me.” Now he’s begun to seriously consider a career in politics after getting a taste of community advisory this year. “And sure, I do still have premonitions about going down to North Carolina and just trying to play golf professionally,” said Auerbach. (He’s got a three handicap.)

“What Michael aspires to be, it changes every month,” said his brother Matt. “He wants his hands in everything.”

As member of a generation who was often promised fulfillment and happiness in addition to a paycheck, “You find out what you’re good at, and if the passion sticks, good things will come from it. That’s what I believe in,” said Auerbach. “I have a few passions, so I’m just seeing how long they’ll stick.”