by Kevin Hamilton

You may not know Rebecca but you’d be a better person if you did. Altered, at the very least.

Rebecca has directed dozens of SCA trail and restoration projects. She is wise, optimistic and caring. Tender, patient, and a bit shy; she would probably prefer that I not post this. But most of all, she is passionate. About nature. About stewardship. About life.

I haven’t seen her in years and I miss her. She’s been in the Yuha Desert, leading a steady rotation of volunteers in erasing the braided tracks of off-road vehicles from acres and acres of wounded landscape. The work is tedious. “We move rocks [and] sweep the sand off the desert floor to another place on the desert floor,” she recently reported in her typically understated way. But it’s also effective: overwhelmingly, riders have left the restored areas alone. (more…)

by Joshua Stearns, SCA Board Member and Alumnus

Almost everyone has heard at least some small snippet of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous I Have a Dream speech, given at the March on Washington in August of 1967. It is one of the great speeches of our time. However, whenever I hear a recording of that speech, or see a video of it, I am struck by the moment just before Dr. King begins to speak. As he steps up to the podium, he is introduced to the crowd as the “moral leader” of the country. Perhaps this attribution seems so striking to me because it is hard to imagine someone in our society today being given such a moniker. Who is the moral leader of America today? What does moral leadership look like in 2007? A lot has changed since 1967—and a lot has not. (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…)