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Environmentalist from Valley feels at home on East Coast
POLAND
Despite growing up in the land-locked Mahoning Valley, Sara Hallas knew she loved the ocean and the animals that inhabit it.
Hallas, 29, now lives in Manteo, N.C., where she works as an environmental educator with the nonprofit North Carolina Coastal Federation. She is a 2000 graduate of Poland Seminary High School and an alumna of Wittenberg University.
Last month, Hallas was one of 16 educators selected to attend the Marine Mammal Institute. During the institute, participants traveled north from the Carolinas and visited aquariums and research facilities.
“The goal was to emphasize climate-change education and specifically how marine mammals are an indicator of climate change,” Hallas said.
For example, many marine animals, particularly seals, are dying not only from eating trash or plastic but also rocks.
“They’re normally lying on ice and eat the ice for water source, but they don’t realize they’re on sandy beaches” as the ice disappears because of climate change, she said. “They’re not able to digest rocks and end up sick and stranded.”
Hallas will take what she learned back to her institute’s classroom, where the focus is primarily on restoration projects along the North Carolina coast.
Hallas said she always “had a passion for marine animals.”
“I would ask for special consideration from my schoolteacher to pick a marine mammal as my research topic,” she said.
Her parents, Suzie and Howard Hallas, who still live in Poland, say they aren’t sure what sparked Sara’s interest in marine life.
“We don’t know where it came from. She was an animal lover in general all her life,” Suzie Hallas said.
Suzie said her daughter began seriously pursuing marine science in high school.
“Even when she went to college, we thought she’d change her major,” she said. “But she loved it and stayed with it.”
Suzie said she and Howard encouraged Sara and her brother Keith, 33, to pursue their interests. Family trips often included a visit to an aquarium, she added.
“That’s all we could do is support their dreams,” Suzie said.