“Answering the Call: Asian American Youth Get Real, Give Back to the Environment with SCA” Asian Week February 23, 2007
by Christina Wong, SCA Board Member and Alumna

“Do I dare disturb the universe?”

This is what I asked myself when I first noticed our nation’s frightening levels of air pollution, contaminated drinking water, climate change and other ‘inconvenient truths:’ the reality that our planet is in serious decay. Repercussions of environmental neglect are readily apparent, and never before has the urgency to confront these ecological dilemmas been more pressing. The future of our planet is at stake, and America’s youth must come front and center to give a voice through conservation advocacy, awareness and, above all, action.

These and other environmental passions led me to the Student Conservation Association (SCA), which for 50 years has been the nation’s largest provider of conservation service opportunities, outdoor education, and leadership training for young adults. With its steadfast commitment to diversity, SCA allows Asian American youth to better connect with nature while promoting a unique, hands-on perspective to an underexposed field - not to mention presenting new career options that we may never have been considered. In fact, I am a living testament to SCA’s impact. (more…)

provided by Joshua Stearns, SCA Alumnus and Board Member
As part of my series of reflections on community, service, and environment, I want to pass along an article by a friend, Keith Morton, a professor of American Studies at Providence College. This short article has been published in a few sources, and is available in various places on the web, but I don’t know that it has ever been considered in terms of our work in conservation. It is meant to provoke dialogue about how we define and think about our work in communities, and I hope you will add your voice in the comments section.

Enjoy! JS
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by Keith Morton
One of the most popular stories in community service events is that of the starfish: a (fill in your description, usually young) person is running, hurling starfish deposited on the beach by a storm back into the sea. “What are you doing,” asks a (fill in your description, usually old) person, “you can’t possibly throw all the starfish back. Your effort makes no difference.” “It makes a difference to this one,” replies the first person, who continues off down the beach.

The usual conclusions drawn from this hackneyed tale are about the importance of making a difference where you can, one person or problem at a time; about not being put off by skepticism or criticism or cynicism. The story acknowledges the relief that comes when we find a way to relieve suffering. A somewhat deeper reading is that there is merit in jumping into a situation and finding a way to act - the first step in determining what possibilities for action might exist.

But the tale is, ultimately, mis-educative and I wish people would stop using it. (more…)

From An Inconvenient Truth
Sung My Melissa Etheridge at the Oscars

Have I been sleeping?
I’ve been so still
Afraid of crumbling
Have I been careless?
Dismissing all the distant rumblings
Take me where I am supposed to be
To comprehend the things that I can’t see

Cause I need to move
I need to wake up
I need to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now

And as a child
I danced like it was 1999
My dreams were wild
The promise of this new world
Would be mine
Now I am throwing off the carelessness of youth
To listen to an inconvenient truth

That I need to move
I need to wake up
I need to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now

I am not an island
I am not alone
I am my intentions
Trapped here in this flesh and bone

And I need to move
I need to wake up
I need to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now

“The will to act is a renewable resource.” — Al Gore

Conservation That Builds Relationships
by Joshua Stearns, SCA Board Member and Alumnus

“Service has the power to connect people across generations, connect landscapes across geographies, and connect our work to a greater good.”

SCA offered me the opportunity to develop life-changing relationships. In SCA’s New York Adirondack AmeriCorps program I lived with 19 other corps members, three SCA staff, and two employees of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. I worked with teachers from LP Quinn Elementary School in Tupper Lake on curricula design, painted a community center with youth from Lake Placid, rebuilt the foundation of a ranger’s outpost with local stonemasons, constructed a lean-to with a forest ranger, helped to maintain a historic great camp with skilled carpenters, ran a naturalist club after school, repaired one of the last fire towers in the Adirondacks, and much, much more. The relationships I formed through SCA were not limited to the people I worked with, but extended to the landscapes I worked in. In service, people, landscapes, and the work at hand mingle, and it is difficult to talk about any one without the others. (more…)

Connecting Soul, Soil, and Society
by Joshua Stearns, SCA Board Member and Alumnus

In recent years SCA has taken its work out of the wilderness and into the community, changing lives and serving nature in local classrooms and community venues as well as state forests and national parks. This is important because while SCA has long been helping young people develop an ethic of care and stewardship for the natural world, they are also now helping students build a civic ethic as well as a land ethic. More and more, SCA members are building communities as well as building trails. (more…)

News from Vermont, by Janisse Ray

Two hundred years ago, eating local was a way of life. Vermonters stocked root cellars, smoked meat, made sauerkraut and pickles, and canned fruits and vegetables for winter. Now, eating local has become an important way to decrease dependence on fossil fuels and to help build a more dependable, decentralized food system. The average calorie travels 1,500 miles to arrive on our plates.

To help us get back to eating locally produced foods, Vermont Localvore is sponsoring the Winter Localvore Challenge in the Mad River Valley, Vermont, for one week: January 29- February 4, 2007. The challenge is to eat only foods grown, produced, or raised within a 100-mile radius of your home - for a meal, a day, a week - you decide what is a challenge for you. Click here to join the Winter Eat Local Challenge. All Winter Challenge participants will have access to an email list where they can post questions and receive email updates about the Challenge. (more…)

by Joshua Stearns, SCA Board Member and Alumnus

Bill McKibben’s new initiative, Step It Up!, is creating quite a buzz in the green corners of the internet. Although McKibben has been a long time advocate for various environmental causes through his writing (The End of Nature, Enough, Hope Human and Wild, etc…) in the last five years he has become an increasingly prominent face and voice for the environmental movement, especially the fight against global climate change. Through his op-ed pieces in support of the proposed Adirondack wind park, his Vermont Global-Warming March, and his new book Deep Economy, McKibben is charging ahead on as many fronts as possible. He writes with beauty and passion, he speaks with a poetic urgency, and he is quickly proving himself an able organizer as well. (more…)

Janisse Ray is a writer and naturalist born in Baxley, Georgia, who has graciously agreed to write for our blog. Her book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, recounts growing up in a junkyard, the daughter of a poor, white, fundamentalist family, and her latest book, Pinhook, Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land, tells the story of the land that connects the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia and Osceola National Forest in Florida.

Open Letter to U.S. Senators and Representatives
by Janisse Ray
Carbon emissions have already increased global temperatures by over 1 degree Fahrenheit. We are seeing dramatic results.

Our planet, due to rising levels of atmospheric CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases, is experiencing:

• thawing permafrost
• melting glaciers
• melting sea ice
• rising sea levels
• an increase in hurricane intensity
• shifts in drought and rainfall
• changes in migration patterns of insects and animals.

(more…)

A recent Newsweek article offers up 10 “easy” tips towards green living for the new year. The idea of the article is that if everyone does their part with small things everyday, a big difference will be made in our net resource consumption.

In other words, instead of lambasting Humvee driving suburbanites, we can all just switch our incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescent ones (ok, ok maybe a little lambasting too) and turn the lights out when we leave the room.

Turn the fluorescent lights off when you leave the room? I recall hearing somewhere that it actually can use more resources to turn fluorescent lights off and on frequently. After doing some research it seems that no one can really agree, but I think I have found a workable solution…

(more…)

‘Tis the season for noting Americans’ behaviors, habits and peccadilloes.

The Census Bureau has just issued its 2007 Statistical Abstract. Divorces are down – likely due to fewer marriages than truer love, we now drink more bottled water than bottled beer, and more of us are injured by wheelchairs than lawnmowers (though it would appear that DWI is a diminishing factor in such accidents).

(more…)