Constructive Action

Each year, Earth Island Institute, which publishes the Journal, honors upcoming leaders in environmental activism through its Brower Youth Awards. On Tuesday, I was lucky enough to attend the awards ceremony for this year’s six activists, held in Berkeley, California, where Earth Island is headquartered. This was the first live BYA ceremony since the pandemic, so the small theater in which it was held — the Freight & Salvage — was abuzz with the energy of both an awards program and a reunion, as people danced to music, hugged, smiled and gave raucous rounds of standing ovations. Each youth leader is inspiring in their own way, and you can read more about them here.
 
What struck me most is that their projects are both manageable and inspirational at once. Take for example the work of Raghav Kalyanaraman. His project, Eagles for the Environment, restores prairie ecosystems in north Texas. This requires intensive labor, including the painstaking raking of non-native grass litter so that native seeds can be planted. It is ecologically important work, as prairies sequester more carbon dioxide than forest do. — but it is also important community work, undertaken acre by acre by a small group of dedicated people.
 
This is the kind of work we should all undertake, inside the knowledge of interdependence and interconnection. I have been reading Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, which urges us to “foster a deep-rooted interdependence, not as some cheery platitude, but as a guiding ethos for regenerating life on this planet.” Justice work, Benjamin says, is rooted in connection, “not just to other living things, but to those yet born.” It is the work of world building.
 
The Brower Youth Award winners are engaged exactly this kind of work. This construction in action builds from one person to the next, one project to the next. These projects then start to interlock, to rebuild the world. We need more of it, and we need everyone to take part in it. I would encourage each of you this week to take a look at your backyard, your neighborhood, your community, and find a place to build something, or restore something, or simply to pitch in where something is being built. The right ethos starts there, and, as any of these young leaders will tell you, it matters.

Yours in action,
 

Image: Ken Mattison

Log It Or Leave It

The state of Washington appears eager to cash in on its thousands of acres of “mature” forests, so much so that it has a little-known law in place that makes lumber a part of its climate strategy.

Close to Home

Paris, ever the global trendsetter, pioneered the idea of 15-minute cities — an urban planning concept in which most of our daily necessities can be met by either walking or biking 15 minutes from our homes. Now other cities across the world are following suit.

Making Sense of Place

How does place — the way we lay out our towns and cities — reflect our dreams, our imagination, our future?

Send this to a friend: