Farewell, David Zeek

By Isabella MacKinnon

David Zeek is a Nebraska native and attended the University of Nebraska “back when they had a winning football team,” he said. He spent his early career in Dallas working for Texas Instruments. A job at Raytheon Technologies first took him to the northeast and in 2004, after 30 years in Texas, he moved to Massachusetts. He remains in North Reading eighteen years later and, after seven years of incredible volunteer work, will be departing the Sierra Club this month. 

It was in MA that Zeek was first introduced to the Sierra Club. With three college degrees and thirty years worth of professional experience in problem solving, project management and team leadership, Zeek was an optimal candidate for volunteering at the club. He was recruited by a national staff member shortly after arriving on the east coast. 

He officially began volunteering following his retirement in 2015. Zeek found himself looking to branch out in retired life. “I was looking for something quite different,” he said. “ I wanted to just have a clean break, to do something entirely different. And this was an opportunity to do that–to volunteer.”

Zeek’s work with the Sierra Club has focused primarily around two paths of environmental advocacy, gas leaks and offshore wind, both of which he became involved with soon after joining the club. Zeek’s arrival at Sierra Club coincided with a growing momentum in both addressing gas leaks and adopting offshore wind.

“That was really a happy coincidence,” he said. “Here's something that nobody else is doing, that I can jump right into, and, whatever I do, it's going to be a new thought.”

In 2014, the state legislature passed An Act Relative to Natural Gas Leaks, which stated that gas companies were required to report gas leaks for classification. When Zeek joined the Sierra Club, the state had only recently obtained an “explosion” of information on the age and severity of leaks across the commonwealth. Public awareness of the number of gas leaks in residential areas led to the introduction of a handful of bills in 2015 to address gas leaks. Local environmental and community organizations, including the Sierra Club, joined together to form the Gas Leaks Allies, a group advocating to address gas leaks. Along with the Sierra Club, Zeek attended a slew of town meetings, garnering the support of around 35 municipal leadership groups on the regulation bills they hoped to pass. 

It was at this time that Zeek was offered the helm of the Sierra Club’s work addressing gas leaks. The same year Boston University released a study by Margaret Hendrick that showed that 7% of the gas leaks in Boston were causing 50% of the city's methane emissions. This allowed the group to adopt a more targeted approach towards addressing the most destructive leaks instead of trying to address each of the roughly 17,000 mapped leaks. 

“It was an issue that people could understand,” Zeek said. “They could understand the smell, they could understand the danger, they could understand that they were paying for waste. I mean, it just clicked all the buttons. So if you didn't care about climate, maybe you cared about wasting money, or maybe you cared about seeing that money on your gas bill.”

In 2016, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court passed Kain v. Department of Environmental Protection which found that the Department of Environmental Protection was not acting in compliance with the Massachusetts Global Warming Solutions Act, a law passed eight years prior. The Gas Leaks Allies then worked with local gas companies to formulate plans for measuring and addressing the gas leaks identified in the BU study. Additionally, the Gas Leaks Allies introduced a measure for lost and unaccounted for gas which obligated gas companies to conduct strict bookkeeping of the gas they purchased and the gas delivered to customers. 

Most recently, in 2020, the Gas Leaks Allies released “GSEP at the Six-Year Mark”, a report on the Gas System Enhancement Plan, which assessed the plan’s effectiveness in improving safety and reducing emissions. The Department of Public Works also launched the “Investigation Assessing the Future of Natural Gas in Massachusetts” to look into the future implementation of the Global Warming Solutions Act by gas companies. 

Alongside his work addressing gas leaks, Zeek became involved with the Club’s work in offshore wind shortly after joining as a volunteer. In 2015, Zeek attended the kickoff event for the Block Island Wind Farm–the first offshore wind farm in the country. The following year, Governor Baker signed the Massachusetts Energy Diversity Act, which among other components, set the first offshore wind goals for 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind. 

(L to R: Sierra Club Massachusetts volunteer David Zeek, Sierra Club Beyond Coal representative Drew Grande, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse [D-RI], former Sierra Club Rhode Island director Abel Collins, and former Sierra Club Massachusetts director Emily Norton at today's Deepwater Wind announcement celebration in Rhode Island.)

In 2018, the first offshore wind farm was awarded to Vineyard Wind for 800 megawatts. Then another law doubled the original goal of 1,600 megawatts to 3,200 megawatts. Consequently, the Bureau of Ocean Engineering Management auctioned off three offshore wind leases in the waters around Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket for a total of almost a half-billion dollars. The popularity of offshore wind rose in the subsequent years, and the Sierra Club began to join forces with other offshore wind advocacy groups including New England for Offshore Wind. 

In 2021, Vineyard Wind received its approvals and Governor Baker passed “An Act Creating a Next-Generation Roadmap for Massachusetts Climate Policy”, which increased the power goal to 5,600 megawatts. Zeek is enthusiastic about offshore wind’s future in Massachusetts and in the country as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has most recently considered areas off the coast of Oregon and in the Central Atlantic for leasing. 

Among the extensive work put into addressing the gas leaks, Zeek recalls many moments of levity. The team once threw a birthday party for one of Boston’s oldest gas leaks. This leak, which had just turned 30, was not considered dangerous and therefore had not been addressed. Zeek and his team found the recorded date of the leak’s discovery and celebrated. “We went out there where the leak was, we had a birthday cake, and we had a little party and everything which was kind of fun,” he said.

Zeek’s accomplishments in his gas leak work range from the success of legislation supported by the Sierra Club and the Gas Leaks Allies to the access he was granted to decision-making rooms. He worked closely with the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Public Utilities. 

“We had enough credibility finally, especially through working with the gas companies on the large volume leaks, that we were invited into their technical sessions to talk about how the leaks should be handled, how they should be reported and what kind of goals should be set,” he said. 

In his years of experience, Zeek has found that extensive knowledge is not always necessary to become immersed in a project.  Zeek says that volunteers should move away from the idea of filling a “job description” in the work they take part in, and instead focus on bringing their own strengths to the table. 

“There was a guy I worked on a project with who was an actor. I thought he was the most effective communicator because he would talk about the projects that were kind of tech-y. And the people who were interested in the tech-y part, when they talked about it, it really sounded terrible, and then he talked about it and it sounded fun.”

Zeek attributes the “cowboy” like environment of the club when he joined to his later success in leadership positions. He recalled that he was able to take projects and run with them, and through trial and error, learn what worked best for his own advocacy. 

“You want volunteers who can be the next leaders,” he said. “And they only do that if they have a chance to try out some things, have their own ideas, fail, or maybe succeed. I think that's what's really important for a volunteer is to get a sense, not that they've participated or contributed, but that there really was a way to make a difference.”

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