Monday, July 24, 2006

Justice for All Communities

July 24, 2006

Los Angeles, CA

I am here in Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University for a week long training sponsored by the Building Bridges to the Outdoors Project in partnership with the Sierra Student Caolaition and the Sierra Club's Environmental Justice Program. We have over twenty five diverse young people from around the country who are taking a week out of their lives to learn activist skills to go back into their local communities and make a difference. We spent the day learning about each other and the environmental challenges all of our communities face. A hike through Ken Hahn State Reacreational Area in the crenshaw distriuct of Los Angeles gave us all of a chance to see the poor air quality of LA while marvelling at the birds and natural areas that still find a way to prosper here. We learned about the horrible attrocities by DOW in Bhopal, India from a presentaion by Students for Bhopal a group made up of youth who were not alive when the 22, 000 people died in 1984. http://www.studentsforbhopal.org/

Many young people today are presented as self involved and lazy, these young people show that is a serious mischaracterization. One of our teams has a student from rural Oklahoma who is interested in stopping corporate agriculture from bankrupting local family farms in her community working with a young man from South Central Los Angeles who is determined to clean up a toxic waste site in his community. They may not look alike and come from completely different backgrounds but they care about a quality of life that can benefit their neighbors and family. Together they are the new face of environmentalism. Don't discount the energy and smarts of young people to rise up and take back there communities.

At our annual board meeting in Seattle last week the Sierra Club reaffirmed its commitment to giving young people an opportunity to experience nature firts hand so they can lead the way in facing the environmental challenegs of the future.

A great sidenote- Rich Louv's Last Child in the Woods a year after its initial publication moved up to 35th on the New York Times non fiction bestseller list. Here is a great interview with Rich in Grist http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/03/30/louv/