Earth Day at 40 (Part 2): Local vs. Global and A Sense of Place
This is part 2 of a three part report on a major Earth Day conference held in Madison WI on April 20-21, 2010. I am using that conference as an eavesdropping opportunity: What is the larger environmental movement discussing today? Rather than go talk-by-talk, I’ve pulled out four major themes from my pages of notes. Here are the first two:
[Bios from the speakers referred to below are available here.]
1. Think local. Act global.
Yes, it’s the familiar bumper sticker saying turned on its head. An estimated 10 million people celebrated the first Earth Day but this was not an organized campaign. There was no internet to coordinate events. There was a small office in Washington DC with a miniscule budget – but the 1500 colleges and 10,000 plus schools essentially organized themselves.
It is true that many of the important accomplishments of Earth Day in the next 10 years – legislation for clean air, clean water, protection of endangered species – came from Washington. However, the genius of Earth Day appears to be that it tapped grass roots power to move Washington, rather than the other way around. But the drive to pass legislation came from local people wanting to protect their own places. Moving a legislative agenda was not the primary motive of the early Earth Day organizers, and more than one speaker reminded us that no one would have been more surprised that Earth Day was still being celebrated 40 years later than Gaylord Nelson himself.
One of the perhaps unexpected effects of this decentralized movement was what Adam Rome, environmental historian from Penn State, called “superb leadership training.” Thousands of mostly young people had to figure out on their own what to do in their own communities – and the result was not only a tremendously successful national event but also the creation of what Rome calls ‘the first green generation.’
The lesson for the Creation Care movement? Our success will not come from large events in Washington or even world-wide internet events. These might be useful as occasional as markers of progress, but the gold is in a thousand congregations and ten thousand youth groups. When these are converted, the world will follow.
2. Place matters.
Introducing this conference report I noted that a surprising number of environmental heroes come from Wisconsin. This is not just local propaganda: Gaylord Nelson was standing on the shoulders of John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, and Aldo Leopold, author of Sand County Almanac and the concept of the “land ethic” which became our modern sustainability movement. Dr. William Cronan reminded us that Nelson also followed Frederick Jackson Turner whose work helped to articulate the importance of the frontier in American history and culture. Lesser known heroes were Increase Lapham who warned in the 1830’s of the dangers of deforestation of the great forests of northern Wisconsin, E. A. Birge, who established the science of limnology (the study of lakes), and Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a ‘prophet of organic building and architecture.’ All of these are sons of Wisconsin.
More important than the names is a question that has challenged me since I moved to this state: Why Wisconsin? Is there something in the water?
We seem to have three things in Wisconsin that others don’t have:
First, in our “middling landscape” urban, suburban, rural and wilderness are not far from each other. It is possible even in modern Wisconsin to experience all four of these in a single day. We live with daily knowledge of the effects of the ice age – the ‘Wisconsin glaciation’ explains every bump in our landscape. Those who live here, and especially those who grow up here, can’t help but develop a sense of the presence and importance of the countryside.
Second, we have an unusual university. Unlike many other states where a liberal arts university sits separate from a practical Land Grant college, here the two became one. The classic liberal arts were taught alongside the new and practical fields of agronomy, forestry and engineering. This may seem like an obscure connection that only an academic would make – but there are practical implications: Our resource people and our poets were working together, and that proximity tempered both groups.
And third, we have the “Wisconsin Idea” which states that the university exists to benefit every home in the state. “The boundaries of the campus are the boundaries of the state.” This mission drove the university to seek to understand and develop Wisconsin’s natural resources as belonging to the entire population, and not merely to captains of industry who just happened to arrive before anyone else.
What this boils down to is what is called a strong sense of place. People here knew and cared about the landscape where they lived. They learned about and developed an appreciation for the natural world around them. Environmental concerns grew naturally from that soil.
As Creation Care proponents, this principle like the last points us to the importance of the local even when we need to reach globally. People will care for what they love, and they will love what they know. Encouraging local church leaders to get to know their own places so they can communicate that love to their communities is the place to start.
[To be continued...]
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