Ranting with Dave


Before MCSEA was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, there was the matter of de-laming the Wootton environmental club. I wanted the Club to be a place where fiery, passionate people would gather, learn about issues, and then find ways to make their voices heard. I was 16 at this point, with absolutely no meaningful training. But I had ideas, issues to talk about, and (thanks to a boring summer trip to Israel) a beard. Somehow, that proved to be enough.

The problem with all high school clubs, environmental or otherwise, is that they mostly consist of meetings. Actually, that’s the problem for almost all volunteer organizations, student or otherwise. Meetings are generally pretty boring. If you’re a busy person (and everyone is), the first thing you’re likely to cut from your time “diet” is attendance at some boring meeting. Workshops on running a meeting tend to offer bad advice on this account. They tend to offer recommendations like “provide food,” and “make sure things start and end on time.” That isn’t *actually* the secret to effective meetings though. The secret is marvelous in its simplicity. Meetings should be fun. Meetings should be effective. That is all. If they aren’t fun, people will do something fun instead next time. If they aren’t effective – if people don’t leave the meeting feeling like they just accomplished something by attending – they’ll do something *else* that’s fun next time.

No one had taught me this when I took over the Club. But my experience with a year of boring, ineffective meetings led me in the right direction. The most important innovation was a 10- or 20-minute segment of every meeting called “Ranting with Dave.” During this section, after we’d discussed any club business or upcoming projects, I would start pacing back and forth, talking about some environmental topic that I’d been reading about. This proved to be a real draw. Watch the bearded kid foam at the mouth over National Forests, or takings legislation, or the wise use movement. Gingrich and company provided ample material, and my reading retention skills were good enough that I was able to marshall the latest outrages reported in Sierra magazine into a generally educational, highly entertaining segment.

To put this in perspective, let me give you some numbers. Wootton had, at that time, around 1,500 students. For the first four months of the school year, environmental club meetings boasted regular weekly attendance of between 50 and 80 people. Our biggest meeting had over 100. We didn’t *do* a lot with this attendance, because we started out without any personal connections to the larger movement. But this yielded a core of students who wanted to do more. The students who are outraged, who every year attend one or two meetings, then realize this isn’t an outlet for their concerns, stuck around for the ranting and decided that this, indeed, was the place for them.

I don’t rant anymore. I can’t, actually. By the time I graduated high school, I had learned enough about leadership, the issues, and public speaking skills to start tempering my outrage. My public speaking style became more sophisticated. Speeches became more targeted at teaching a lesson, or moving people to a specific action step. I long for those days, though. I was a young man possessed, railing against a global society that is undermining its own life support system, destroying everything I hold valuable along the way, and I was determined to make my voice heard. I still hold the “green fire” Aldo Leopold speaks of in my heart. But it no longer consumes me the way it once did. And that was one hell of a time.

Three chance encounters led the core of activists the rants brought together to start looking for something bigger. The amazing thing is how easily any one of these things could have simply not happened. In early October, I was held up at the end of the meeting and ended up talking for an extended period with our advisor. We didn’t have a lot of interaction, and I liked it that way, but this time I think there were pending permission slips or something. At the end of our conversation, he noted, “oh, I almost forgot, I received some letter for environmental club presidents. Stop by tomorrow to pick it up.”

The letter was from Jenny Kirby, the first red-blooded high school activist I ever met. Jenny was a senior at Blair high school, but had finagled a deal where she was spending most of the semester doing an internship with Greenpeace. She wanted to help high school environmental clubs network with each other, and tie them in with some of the local activist events. I called her right away. As it turns out, I was the only club president to do so. Not surprising, most of them probably didn’t even get the letter. If I hadn’t, I would have been stuck ranting all year, but never would have found much else for my crew to get involved in.

The timing of Jenny’s letter couldn’t have been better. I had a large audience for the rants, but nothing much for us to do. We wrote letters to our congresspeople, but all of them were Dems with high LCV scores. They were voting the right way already. Jenny told me about a protest happening that very weekend (my first one). They were on the tail end of a multi-year campaign to stop a new incinerator from being constructed in Poolesville. It was a losing effort – the protest was to occur at the already-completed incinerator, on the day when it was going into operation. You don’t get more last-ditch-effort than this. Turning out a half-dozen students to the event wasn’t going to stop the incinerator. It was going to introduce us to Greg Smith, the Eco-Civic Network, and the local Sierra Club group, though. And making noise at that protest gave us a sense of purpose, of community, and of needing to get *bigger*.

The final step came in November. The club was still huge and was getting involved with the local environmental scene. A few of us had started attending the monthly Sierra Club conservation committee meetings, which, as an aside, would make a great case example of how NOT to get students (or anyone else) involved in your organization. So we were attending meetings, going to protests, listening to rants, and, every once in awhile, going for local hikes. We organized one canoe trip in western Maryland, which clearly required permission slips and other scholastic hurdles. But at the end of one fateful meeting in November, Brian Sawyer got up to announce a hike the following week, and our sponsor just LOST it. “You can’t do that. You CAN NOT do that!” It was fine for a few of us to go hiking in the backwoods. But if we were going to actually *tell* people about it, that created liability. Forms needed to be filled out and handed in weeks in advance. This sort of thing needed to be scheduled. He was livid. I thought the whole thing was stupid. Who cares whether we announce the hike during the meeting rather than just after it? Its just a bunch of us walking in the woods, anyway. What’s more, the sponsor suggested that we really should have permission slips for all these other meetings and events, too.

Well, fuck that.

All those stupid hoops were because we were affiliated with the school. And high school sucks anyway, what we were doing was much cooler. Maybe we didn’t need to be affiliated anyway.

Like I said in the last posting, I’ve never been a big thinker. My stance has always been, learn a system, learn its problems, and then come up with solutions that make it better. Charles Lindblom, a great political scientist, describes this as “Incrementalism” and suggests it’s a pretty good way of approaching most things. Confronted with an awful environmental club, we developed activities to make the club less lame. In so doing, the makings of a solid community of good people came together. Confronted with stupid bureaucracy, we had new problems to solve. The next thing we needed was an idea, and the inspiration to move it forward…