To the Editor:

One question that keeps going over and over in my mind is, will there be an environmental movement soon? Who is out there to lead the charge? It seems to me to be more urgent now than ever with the current government and the state of our country. 

Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First and the Wildland Project, in his 1991 book Confessions Of An Eco-Warrior states: “The crisis we now face calls for passion. Along with passion, we need vision. Passion and vision are essential, but without action they are empty.”

In the 1800s we had Thoreau, Muir, Jefferson and Pinchot, the founding of the Sierra Club and National Audubon Society. In the 1900s we had Carson, Peterson, Leopold, Teddy Roosevelt, Ansel Adams and E.O. Wilson, the passing of the Wilderness Act and the Clean Air Act and the establishment of the EPA and Wilderness Society. 

I googled “21st century environmentalists” and “21st century conservationists.” The only entries that came up were listings of events or rulings that have taken place, most of which have negatively affected the earth.

Who is there today? There is no one person who stands out, no one who is rallying the country to fight together for the sake of the environment. There are many who are taking on single projects. But there is no one who stands out or who has stepped up like John Muir or Rachel Carson.

We need someone who is a combination of John Muir and Charles Kuralt. Someone who knows the land and someone who knows the people. Muir, a conservationist, was passionate about nature, wilderness, and the interconnectedness between the flora, fauna and humans. Kuralt, a journalist, was passionate about the people of America’s back roads who are ordinary and often unnoticed, giving their stories and their lives meaning. 

Today, if there would come forward a person with both passions, for nature and people, that is what this country needs. There is power in numbers. If the common people are rallied together to bring about change, to help everyone understand the meaning of ecology, then species can be saved, ecosystems can continue to survive, there would be a decline in the extinction rate. All things have intrinsic value and inherent worth. John Muir believed “that all things are connected, interrelated, that human beings are merely one of the millions of species that have been shaped by the process of evolution” for 4.5 billion years. We humans do not have the right to control and use all of earth. As Edward Abbey the, author of Desert Solitare said, “We have a right to be here, yes, but not everywhere, all at once.”

Today there is a lack of compassion. There is no regard for the mother bear who is hunted and killed leaving her young abandoned in the woods. There is no regard for the last trillium under the canopy of the forest that will not be able to continue to grow once it is picked. 

As David Brower, past director of the Sierra Club once stated, “You cannot imprison a California Condor in the San Diego Zoo and still have a condor. The being of a condor does not end at the tips of the black feathers on its wings. The condor is place as well; it is the thermals rising over the Coast Range, the outcroppings on which it lays its eggs, the carrion on which it feeds.” 

This applies to all wild animals. It applies to native plants. Once dug up and placed in a pot it is not able to thrive and multiply as it once did in its natural environment. 

In college there was a buzzword, NIMBY. This stood for Not In My Backyard. If the destruction was not done in my backyard, neighborhood or city then it was of no concern to me. We need to take care of what is affecting our backyard, neighborhood and city, but also see the bigger picture. This is where vision comes in. What happens here effects what happens there. And what happens there, whether it is in the U.S. or Europe or Africa, it affects what happens here.

Where are the visionaries of the 21st century?  Dave Foreman’s vision in 1991 was, “to challenge the government and the people with a vision … of humans living modestly in a community that also includes bears and rattlesnakes and salmon and oaks and sagebrush and mosquitoes and algae and streams and rocks and clouds.”

Mary Olson

Canton