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…

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…

In my life thus far, there are two things that I’m truly proud of. As a high school student, I was involved in the creation of an extraordinary environmental group – Montgomery County Student Environmental Activists (MCSEA). Afterward, in college, I developed a system of trainings to help other young leaders start similar groups. Years have passed since those days, the group just celebrated its tenth anniversary, in fact. This blog is an attempt to preserve some of my favorite memories and, along with them, the lessons learned along the way. It is meant for fellow MCSEAns, old and new, for Sierra Student Coalition (SSC) leaders and trainers who might still want to use some of those stories, and for anyone interested in reading about how organizing changes lives.

PRECURSORS

Some background on my personal story…

Growing up, I was pretty much your basic suburban kid. Getting anywhere meant bugging my parents for a ride, but that was okay as the tv and Nintendo were right there. You know those statistics about how much tv American children watch? Yeah, I was the one dragging the average upward. In junior high, I developed an *obsession* with the mall, and would spend a few hours there every weekend, always traveling around to the same four or five stores. It was not an upbringing that you would commonly expect of an environmental leader. Nature was never really in the picture.

My first meaningful interaction with the outdoors came in the summer of 1994. I was attending a two-week leadership program in Starlight, PA, sponsored by BBYO, a jewish youth group. I was not, at the time, a particularly happy kid. No, scratch that, I was miserable. I was the classic smart kid who lacked direction, social skills, and self-esteem. Teachers regularly regarded me as one of those students with potential who consistently failed to apply themselves. Classmates regarded me as, frankly, kinda weird.

Do you remember the quiet, socially awkward kid from summer camp? Of course you don’t, nobody does. That, it turned out, was something of a blessing in disguise. With no one to talk to for a couple of weeks, I took to sitting on a log by a lake. I had plenty of issues keeping me awake at night, things I couldn’t let go of. I don’t know how it happened, exactly, but at some point while I sat at that lake, nature stopped being *scenery*. I later learned a name for the experience: a transcendental moment. It is a profound realization to accept the world around you as being a whole that you are a part of, rather than a backdrop to the play that is your life. To this day, I carry it as something of a quiet religious conviction – a conviction that I believe undergirds much of the environmental movement: humanity is not the only thing of value in this world. True, spiritual meaning – wisdom, if you will – comes from something beyond us.

For the following year, I spent as much time as I could hiking, creekwalking, or sitting by a stream, reading whatever I could. I discovered Thoreau, “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World,” and found a creed in Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic.” Think of it as a crash course in loving the outdoors, if you will. My time by the lake had inspired a certain instinct in me. It took some time, considering what that instinct might mean.

Now, notice, this meant that I spent the fall of 1994 discovering in environmentalism. Pop quiz: what *else* happened in the fall of 1994? Say… November? Think “apolcaypse.” Okay, times up, what did you come up with? Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution? Gooood answer.

This was a distinctive time for the environmental movement. In 1990, nothing was cooler than being an environmentalist. Seriously, it was a genuine fad. At that point, Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) was able to launch a 6,000-person conference based largely on a magazine ad. Try that today, I dare you. By 1994, major newspapers were declaring the death of the movement. The Sierra Club’s membership was decreasing, all the organizations were facing financial pressures, and all the landmark environmental laws of the 1970s seemed to be in danger. The problem, we eventually learned, was that decades of Democratic control of Congress had made organizations too reliant on professional lobbyists. We had forgotten how to organize people. Bob Bingaman, the Sierra Club’s National Field Director and my mentor and friend, likes to say that there are two types of power in American politics: money and people. Progressive movements will never win with money – the opposition will always be better funded – but through organizing people, we can perform miracles.

One central moment happened in the winter of ‘94/’95. My grandmother gave me a Sierra Club membership for my birthday, and I also spent $35 to join Greenpeace. Over the course of the following year, the Sierra Club sent me local, state, and national activist newsletters, along with a magazine that detailed the “War on the Environment” being waged by Newt and company. Greenpeace sent me five mailings that year, all telling me that they were doing great work and asking that I please send more money. Sierra wanted me to become a member, Greenpeace wanted a supporter. I have been a devoted Sierran ever since.