There are many, many ways an environmental volunteer can impact the issues they care about. One of the volunteers I met while writing my book volunteered for political campaigns, working for candidates who supported the environmental policies that she also supported. She made sure that the person elected was someone who had similar values and would protect and preserve her kinds of environmental interests. Leading up to the midterm elections next month, the League of Conservation Voters is mobilizing its members to do the same thing. The operation is called GreenRoots and it’s aimed at making sure candidates who will work for the environment are elected in a number of key Senate races. It is another way that people passionate about the environment can work, as a volunteer, to protect it.
Having lived in Philadelphia for a year, I’ve spent some time experiencing every part of that city. It’s not hard to imagine how the teens mentioned in this article from Philly.com might get very little exposure to nature and green spaces. Luckily, there are groups such as the Student Conservation Association, which spends six weeks every summer leading groups of inner-city teens in volunteer projects. The volunteer work includes removing invasive species and clearing nature trails. It also provides mentoring and real-world skills which the teens can take with them into their future education and career. This great program is providing these teens with job skills and a connection to nature that they might have little or no opportunity get.
This editorial from The Chronicle Herald in Nova Scotia caught my attention from the first moment I saw the headline: “Fracking: Environmental volunteers got it right.” The author of the editorial, Zack Metcalfe, celebrates the fact that Nova Scotia is moving towards banning high-volume fracking for onshore oil and gas from shale, with legislation toward that end recently introduced by the government. Metcalfe offers praise to the people who worked with dedication and passion to make this happen, saying, “Around the table were well-informed, hard-working and often sleep-deprived people, sharing their ideas in a cafe once a week, most of them volunteers, finding time between work and home just to attend our meetings.” If the ban holds and there is no fracking in Nova Scotia, it may be in large part to the work of those dedicated volunteers.
In urban and suburban areas, small patches of green space are invaluable and always in need of protection. Often, if not most of the time, it’s volunteers who do the protecting. In Haddon Township, in the middle of the heavily developed Camden County, New Jersey, the tiny piece of forest known as Saddler’s Woods is maintained and preserved by an all-volunteer organization, the Saddler’s Woods Conservation Association. The work they do is invaluable and goes a long way to ensure that people living in this thickly settled forest of suburbia have “an oasis of beauty and tranquility” to experience and enjoy. At only twenty-five acres large, and just five miles from the city of Philadelphia, it is an important oasis indeed.
(Photo by Robert Barossi)
Being Where You Are 