Reflections

Reflections – Environment

As I completely rewrite my Reflection on Environment, I am 74, “allegedly retired” from a career in urban planning, and just months away from having spent three-quarters of a century on this planet. My first meaningful involvement in environmental advocacy came at age 20, while in college at Cleveland State University. So much has happened since then that I have seen multiple waves of activism and activity around environmental issues and realize that each generation grows up with its own challenges that shape its perspectives. And experience has served to deepen and broaden my own outlook on the care of creation. 

I came of age as the modern environmental movement came of age, with the dawn of Earth Day in 1970 and the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act, the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the assortment of regulations that exist today. Back then, many leading corporations were suspicious of the environmental movement. Today, admittedly with varying degrees of sincerity, many embrace it and even have policies for addressing climate change. 

By the time the first Earth Day rolled around, in 1970, I was a sophomore at Cleveland State University, earning a BA in Political Science. The Cuyahoga River had burned, the air pollution from the steel industry was palpable on a daily basis, and I began to wonder what we could all do about it. found myself organizing the student environmental group on campus, reading numerous books and articles, and getting involved in community coalitions around a number of issues that were attracting attention in the Cleveland area. It was all part of the nation’s growing idealism about improving the quality of its air, land, and water. The policy commitments that followed drove innovation and changed our sense of what mattered. There is nothing unusual about this. Our nation first decided to send men to the moon; it then went about the business of figuring out how to do it. Likewise, we committed ourselves to cleaning up the environment, and the technology and expertise grew over time.

In the years that followed, I remained active and found my way to Iowa, where I eventually acquired Master’s degrees in both Urban and Regional Planning and Journalism. Both sets of skills offered opportunities to expand my environmental interests, both professionally and through volunteer work. 

LITERARY EFFORTS

Not all of my professional work involved my full-time employment; by 1994, I had written and published two books in my spare time. The first, Raising Less Corn and More Hell (University of Illinois Press, 1988) addressed farm issues in the Midwest. The second, Deeper Shades of Green (Sierra Club Books, 1994) more directly drew upon my experiences in college and growing up in the Cleveland area in the 1960s, but projected that experience into the struggles of blue-collar and minority environmental advocates in the early 1990s. It was one of the earliest books on the nascent environmental justice movement that continues to advocate for disadvantaged populations today. 

Mary Ellender and Peggy Frankland of Calcasieu League for Environmental Action Now walk in Gulf of Mexico at Holly Beach, Louisiana, April 1991. Louisiana’s retreating coastal wetlands were a source of concern then and remain so even more now, after the successive impacts of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, to say nothing of sea level rise and climate change.

Deeper Shades of Green was a major effort to honor as well as analyze the grass roots activism that has arisen in working-class and minority communities across the U.S. around environmental justice issues. That book had its roots in my Cleveland experience, from three summers of work in a chemical plant earning college money, to direct experience with community groups there throughout the 1970s. 

VOLUNTARY EFFORTS

In Chicago I found an ideal way to marry environmental concerns with motivations arising from religious faith. Shortly after the 1988 merger of three Lutheran denominations into today’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, I was among a number of people invited to a discussion of how to form a committee to address environmental stewardship within the ELCA’s new Metropolitan Chicago Synod. At that very first meeting, in the fall of 1989, I found myself drafted to chair the Environmental Concerns Working Group. I finally stepped down from this post in 2010, succeeded by the very capable Ken Westlake, who is now retired from four decades of work at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Early on, our group, largely consisting of lay people, took a practical bent, seeking ways to demonstrate care of the earth through practical projects, so that we were not simply one more church committee talking about applying our faith to an issue without actually doing something concrete to improve matters. 

We started with a pilot project at Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park (my own church). We helped identify opportunities for saving energy (and money) through lighting efficiency changes, and proposed options for doing so. Te congregation voted to spend $3,000 to undertake the pilot project and implemented a number of lighting changes. The result was a 40 percent reduction in electricity consumption and a one-third reduction in electricity costs, totaling about $1,200 in annual savings. As I began to tell other congregations, these are savings that allow members to see more of their money go to the mission of the church instead of paying utility bills and polluting the environment through power plant emissions.

The following year, the ELCA offered us a $5,000 seed grant to launch a revolving loan fund to aid other congregations in making similar changes. Over time, our mustard seed has grown, chiefly with the help of a $65,000 grant in 2000 from the Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation, $45,000 of which expanded the loan fund, so that today we have nearly $60,000 in working capital. We have worked with nearly two dozen of our synod’s 200 congregations; the money keeps rolling over, and in some cases, we have helped churches with schools or day care centers to find additional money from other sources. 

In more recent years, those efforts have been expanded to include support for solar energy installations. At Augustana, where I became leader of the Adult Forum in 2017, we conducted an 11-week series of discussions on climate change in early 2022. That led to the formation of a Green Team by that fall, affiliated with the regional interfaith environmental organization Faith in Place, part of the national Interfaith Power and Light. By August 2023, we submitted a grant proposal (of which I led the writing) for money from the City of Chicago’s Climate Infrastructure Fund. Early in 2024, we learned we had won a grant of more than $230,000 to support installation of a rooftop solar panel system that will generate, on average, at least as much electricity as the building uses. We expect this project to be completed in the fall of 2024. 

PROFESSIONAL EFFORTS

I was fortunate to be able to advance those commitments in my career as well. The American Planning Association is committed to sensible environmental planning, to using professional skills to help create a quality environment in our communities, and I shepherded a number of research and training projects over the years that have worked toward those goals. Most especially, those concerns morphed into a focus on hazard mitigation and disaster recovery, and eventually an intense focus on climate change, a shift that in time became the hallmark of my career. 

I was often involved in speaking or training on environmental planning issues in various forums, on issues like urban forestry and wildlife habitat preservation. For five years, I edited an APA newsletter, Environment & Development. Later, based on my familiarity with agricultural and rural planning issues, I was asked to produce another PAS Report, Planning and Zoning for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (1998). From 2007-2008, as the project manager for Planning the Urban Forest: Ecology, Economy, and Community Development (2009), I became the voice of APA on urban forest planning issues. We later developed a one-day training workshop based on that report, under a matching grant from the U.S. Forest Service, which also provided a matching grant for the report in combination with support from American Forests and the International Society of Arboriculture.  Later, we collaborated with the Forest Service to convene a June 2014 symposium in Washington, DC, that included representatives of several federal agencies including FEMA, on “Hazardous Tree Management and Post-Disaster Recovery,” exploring ways to reduce vegetative debris resulting from major natural disasters.

But the issues for which I am most remembered now involved disasters and climate change. A quick review of my bibliography either on this or my consulting website reveals a host of articles and publications, as well as numerous talks, on subjects like disaster recovery, resilience, and climate adaptation. In my judgment, however, certain products stand out as not only significant, but transformational, in their content and guidance:

I left APA in 2017, engaging in consulting, teaching, and writing. But soon, the realms of professional work and volunteerism merged when I was elected to the leadership of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery (HMDR) Planning Division, which I led through the COVID-19 pandemic, and I note these developments in the Reflection on Community. The professionals of this APA membership division became my professional community in most ways, and I am glad we have been able to make HMDR one of the most vibrant divisions in APA. 

I might also note that in recent years, I have served on an advisory board for the Morton Arboretum’s Chicago Region Trees Initiative. Again, professional skills have merged with volunteer activity.

One thing I love about all this: There is almost no day when I fail to learn something that I consider valuable. I am grateful to live in a time and society where such opportunity is abundant. I hope we can all live in our Information Age using our knowledge responsibly. I am personally both happy and proud to have used all I have learned to somehow make a positive difference.

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