Pittsburgh environmental activist’s ‘Sustainability Salons’ foster community

This story appears as part of Newsapalooza at Point Park University held Sept. 26-28 – celebrating local journalism in southwestern Pennsylvania. Newspalooza.org.

This story was first published July 31, 2024. The radio story won a 2025 Golden Quill from The Press Club of Western Pennsylvania for Excellence in Audio Journalism, Profile.

Maren Cooke sits on her back porch on one of the rare cool mornings in Pittsburgh this summer. 

“I tend to be interested in everything and so I try to help wherever I can,” she says. 

Cooke, 62, organizes a monthly environmental education event she’s coined “Sustainability Salons.” In July, she celebrated her 150th.

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A planetary scientist by training, Cooke is now a volunteer, educator, and activist. She serves on the board of Group Against Smog and Pollution, and steering committees of 350 Pittsburgh, Pittsburghers Against Single-Use Plastic, ReImagine Food Systems, Pittsburgh Green New Deal and the Climate Action Plan Justice Coalition. She also contributes to a number of other organizations. Cooke also volunteers as an Urban Ecosteward, a Tree Tender and a Master Gardener and is pursuing a Master Naturalist certification.

She’s pulled out a pair of cushions (they’re from a garage sale, she says) to rest against the porch’s bench constructed from locally milled black locust wood. Her dog, Peaches, climbs onto her lap, and she strokes the dog’s fur absentmindedly. 

Cooke has always been passionate about the environment.

“I don’t use the word sacred much, but it is a word that speaks to the force with which I feel that there are things that shouldn’t be messed with. And so I think of nature as the way things are, the way things work,” she says. “I’ve always had a really strong connection to nature and a feeling that it shouldn’t [be] destroyed.”

Cooke grew up in the woods of the Hudson Valley on land where her grandmother ran a summer camp from the 1930s to the ’50s. She got her start in environmental activism when high-voltage power lines were slated to come through the valley. As a high schooler, she attended meetings with the Citizens for Safe Power Transmission and created artwork for the organization’s newsletter. 

Cooke’s parents built their house “completely from scratch” at the back of the camp property, even down to the bricks they spent a whole summer casting. She finds echoes of her childhood house’s environmentally friendly design in her own home today. 

An oasis for nature in the city

Situated near Frick Park — what Cooke calls her 600-acre backyard — is a home she’s spent the last two decades rebuilding to make it both green and creative, like the enclosed porch with a stone mosaic of dragons on the floor.

She calls her home biophilic, “a term meaning humans’ innate connection to and desire for nature,” she explains.

The land surrounding her home is lush with greenery, well-tended yet wild as if the very leaves themselves know Cooke’s home is a safe place to thrive. 

Walking along the stone path to the backyard, gently moving overgrown branches aside, one is greeted with a wooden gate promising access to a food forest. Bushes brimming with berries, an orchard of pear, apple, cherry, and peach trees, the breeze rustling through their leaves. 

A herby, earthy aroma emanates from the vegetable garden and the rain garden. The rooftop houses yet another garden and a place for beekeeping. 

Water trickles in the distance at the pond near Cooke’s favorite place on her property, what she calls the grotto.

“It’s a little stone patio surrounded by osier dogwood and pussy willow and black walnut and overhung by a catalpa tree, which at the right time of year, drops little orchid flowers on you,” she says. “And the Wi-Fi reaches it.”

Sustainability Salons

The backyard is also where Cooke hosts her Sustainability Salons.

“And [that’s] salons in the French Enlightenment tradition of conversational salons, not hair salons,” she jokes, “which, as you can see, I don’t participate in by virtue of the fact that I have four feet of hair [and] keep it braided all the time.”

Cooke describes the monthly events as “giant potluck mini-conferences” where people gather to learn and discuss environmental issues. 

Cooke opens her home to the public and invites a speaker – grassroots activist, nonprofit leader, scientist, policymaker, journalist – you name it. 

Some of the themes her salons have focused on include air quality, energy, climate, plastics, food, and water privatization. Several attendees at the 150th salon, which she dedicated simply to “celebration,” say they appreciate the variety of topics. 

“Literally every facet of the way we live has been explored at some point,” Tommaso Giampapa says. “Having that power and that knowledge is great, because I can tell the people around me and break those hidden lifestyle habits [that] we don’t realize are harmful.”

Tommaso Giampapa at the 150th Sustainability Salon. Photo by Kathy Knauer / The Allegheny Front

Gabrielle Marsden at the 150th Sustainability Salon. Photo by Kathy Knauer / The Allegheny Front

David Blair at the 150th Sustainability Salon. Photo by Kathy Knauer / The Allegheny Front

Gabrielle Marsden says Cooke “talks about so many different levels of what we need to make this world a better place.”

Cultivating knowledge for herself and others is at the core of Cooke’s work. She calls herself a compulsive educator and learner.

“I am a curious soul, and I like to be around other curious souls,” she says.

Salons are also about community for Cooke. Their genesis sprang from a conversation she had with her friend, Mark Dixon, a fellow environmental activist and a filmmaker. After Dixon offered her a ride home from an event back in 2011, she invited him in for tea. 

“We had an amazing conversation at my dinner table,” she says. While she can’t recall the contents of the discussion, she does remember “that evening I said, there need to be more people at this table.” 

A few months later, Cooke held the first Sustainability Salon to talk about the rooftop solar system she had just installed.

Cooke’s salons have welcomed thousands of people to the table she’s created: a network of Pittsburghers concerned about the environment or who want to learn more. 

Dixon says people come to salons to deepen connectivity with others and find ways they can participate in the Pittsburgh environmental community. 

“In many ways, I feel like Maren’s Sustainability Salon is a group of people holding candles for all of these different environmental issues,” Dixon says, “and it’s the perfect place to come find them when you’re ready to add your light.”

Dave Blair thinks of Cooke’s salons as a central hub. 

“Everybody here has a different area of expertise,” he says, “and so it’s quite an interesting exchange of ideas.”

Cooke says fostering connection through salons has always been the intent, and it’s why she always makes sure there’s food available at her events, including her own specialty dish: homemade pesto prepared with ingredients grown on her property. 

“We break bread together with food that most attendees are contributing to, and that’s very powerful,” she says. 

Cooke says she’s been able to maintain salons for more than 12 years through “dogged determination.” It’s a quality she needed when COVID-19 brought events like hers to an indefinite halt because she knew she couldn’t let the pandemic stop her.

The day before her March 14, 2020, salon, Cooke signed up for a Zoom account and spent the day teaching herself how to use the platform. Once vaccinations became available, she slowly returned to in-person events, albeit outdoors. She still offers a Zoom option for folks who can’t make it in person and for when the weather forces her event indoors. 

Cooke doesn’t plan to stop volunteering or hosting Sustainability Salons anytime soon, and her persistence sheds light on how she thinks about nature itself.

“Life is vigorous, and that vigor enables it to overcome a lot of obstacles,” she says. “We’ve all seen the weed growing through a crack in the sidewalk, but if you just keep paving over that sidewalk, sooner or later, that plant won’t be able to get through. And that is what people are doing to the planet.” 

Cooke says vulnerable and marginalized people face the most dire consequences of this destruction but can least afford to counteract it. That’s why she feels compelled to do this work.