The Wootton High School Environmental Club
High school environmental clubs are, as a general rule, really lame. I mean like really, really lame. They do exactly two things: 1. Pick up trash. 2. Recycle stuff. Both of these are valiant community services. Both of them are environmentally-related. Both of them are terribly wimpy.
The Wootton environmental club was a paradigmatic example of this. We had one trash pick up per semester. We went around the school with big bins to collect and sort cans. And that was about it. Newt Gingrich was threatening the Endangered Species Act and trying to defund the EPA. We were cutting up those plastic six-pack containers. Feel dispirited yet? If not, I can pretty much guarantee that, given a month or so, you would.
I like to summarize my experience with that club during my sophomore year through a single conversation I had. It was at the end of the year, after I’d been elected its new president, and it was with Josh Tsang, the outgoing president. Asking him for advice, he revealed two things to me. First, he didn’t believe in evolution, because he felt that it disagreed with his Christianity. Second, he didn’t think “serious environmentalism” was necessary, because the apocalypse was coming reeeeally soon. Yeah, that was our club PRESIDENT. In retrospect, it’s good I was gaining such inspiration from nature, because I sure as hell wasn’t getting a good first impression of the movement.
My experience with this environmental club was central to the eventual formation of MCSEA, because the truth is that I’ve never been much of a “big thinker.” Adam Werbach, who founded the SSC, was a big thinker. He looked at the movement and said, “what this thing needs is a national student organization.” I’ve never understood how someone could do that, at least at that age (he was 17 at the time). How am I to know what the national movement needs, anyway? What makes me the expert, anyway? By contrast, I *knew* that my environmental club was lame, and I had good reason to believe that everyone else’s was too. Most of the people in my school who felt a passion for nature quickly gave up on the Club. What we needed was to get together with other people like us and cause a big ruckus. It doesn’t take big thinking to get from there to MCSEA. It takes some good ideas, good people, the right issue, and inspiration. As my junior year of high school started, each of those elements started to fall into place…
High school environmental clubs are, as a general rule, really lame. I mean like really, really lame. They do exactly two things: 1. Pick up trash. 2. Recycle stuff. Both of these are valiant community services. Both of them are environmentally-related. Both of them are terribly wimpy.
The Wootton environmental club was a paradigmatic example of this. We had one trash pick up per semester. We went around the school with big bins to collect and sort cans. And that was about it. Newt Gingrich was threatening the Endangered Species Act and trying to defund the EPA. We were cutting up those plastic six-pack containers. Feel dispirited yet? If not, I can pretty much guarantee that, given a month or so, you would.
I like to summarize my experience with that club during my sophomore year through a single conversation I had. It was at the end of the year, after I’d been elected its new president, and it was with Josh Tsang, the outgoing president. Asking him for advice, he revealed two things to me. First, he didn’t believe in evolution, because he felt that it disagreed with his Christianity. Second, he didn’t think “serious environmentalism” was necessary, because the apocalypse was coming reeeeally soon. Yeah, that was our club PRESIDENT. In retrospect, it’s good I was gaining such inspiration from nature, because I sure as hell wasn’t getting a good first impression of the movement.
My experience with this environmental club was central to the eventual formation of MCSEA, because the truth is that I’ve never been much of a “big thinker.” Adam Werbach, who founded the SSC, was a big thinker. He looked at the movement and said, “what this thing needs is a national student organization.” I’ve never understood how someone could do that, at least at that age (he was 17 at the time). How am I to know what the national movement needs, anyway? What makes me the expert, anyway? By contrast, I *knew* that my environmental club was lame, and I had good reason to believe that everyone else’s was too. Most of the people in my school who felt a passion for nature quickly gave up on the Club. What we needed was to get together with other people like us and cause a big ruckus. It doesn’t take big thinking to get from there to MCSEA. It takes some good ideas, good people, the right issue, and inspiration. As my junior year of high school started, each of those elements started to fall into place…
posted by sierradave at 5:18 PM
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