Sustainability: Suddenly the Action is Local
Ten years ago, we were searching for examples of local-level sustainability efforts. Now they are everywhere.
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Around the time Our Towns was published six years ago, in 2018, people would occasionally ask us whether we had found projects about the environment and climate change in the communities we visited. We remember thinking, “a few, but actually not that much,” as we scrambled to come up with examples. For instance:
In 2016 we saw wind turbines installed on farmland in Spearville, Kansas, east of Dodge City, which generated energy and brought a windfall to local farmers and to the town.
Since its founding, Redlands, California has been progressive about trees. There’s now an annual tree giveaway, and expanded programs for education and incentives to replace grass yards with native plants.
The A.J. Whittenberg Elementary School of Engineering in Greenville, South Carolina constructed a greenhouse from recycled gallon-size plastic bottles and waged a campaign to stop vehicles from idling outside the school entrances.
That was about it. Maybe we hadn’t looked hard enough, we thought. Or maybe there wasn’t yet enough to see.
Emerging sustainability stories from communities everywhere
The ramp-up over the last several years of reporting on small-scale local environmental activity astonishes us. Today and every day, the inbox floods with stories about climate, environmental, and sustainability projects. Here’s a sampling from a typical day:
A story from Cleveland’s online non-profit news organization The Land, about high schoolers who created a climate summit to educate and problem solve about local issues in their neighborhoods, from environmental justice to advocacy training
A story about a lending library of tools in Buffalo, which grew into a so-called repair café, manned by local volunteers with their tools and fix-it skills.
A regular newsletter from KneeDeep Times in the Bay Area of northern California, highlighting a podcast by a local elementary school teacher and how she integrates “nature based learning” into her classroom lessons.
Another newsletter about the impacts of noise on health and the ecosphere, and how communities can take on the work of protecting themselves.
And another newsletter that includes stories about environmental issues of all sorts in rural communities in America.
All these stories are from just a single day.
A new generation of ‘Sustainability Natives’
Many of the new projects deliberately make room for young people, at their schools or clubs. This is no small thing; they are now growing up as sustainability-natives, comparable to the digital-natives of the preceding generation.
Here’s one example of how a commitment to sustainability takes hold:
Deb recently returned from a visit to the farm in Redlands CA, called SURF (The Sustainable University of Redlands Farm), which is a collaborative between the University of Redlands and California’s Climate Action Corps (CCAC). The two students Deb met on this visit were drawn to the program explicitly because of their exposure to environmental and climate-related issues earlier in their young lives.
One young woman had become interested through a high school club where she learned about recycling and climate change, an experience that she said had sorted her into the climate action direction. The other became the president of the environmental action club in college. The lesson here? The kids are paying attention, and they are growing up absorbing the facts of sustainability, climate change, and the environment. And this can lead to taking action.
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Where to find the stories
The number of outlets and organizations reporting about a range of local-renewal projects, including sustainability efforts like these, are also growing. Some are seriously funded by big philanthropy, and others are very modestly funded locally.
There are organizations that collaborate and share, like Climate Central, founded in 2008, which is a resource for science, data, and technology, to help journalists and media reporters tell rich stories about the environment that they could never develop alone.
There are digital magazines like KneeDeep Times, started in 2021, which reports stories on local climate adaptation efforts from communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Other online publications have dedicated sections for coverage of sustainability issues. One is the online magazine, Reasons to be Cheerful, founded in 2018 by the musician and artist David Byrne.
Other groups train or encourage or sponsor journalists to report about the environment. Report for America, (RFA) founded in 2017, places mid-level journalists into local media outlets. Of their current 600 fellows, 40 of the 2023 members are on some kind of environmental beat.
RFA, in collaboration with the Missouri School of Journalism, launched the Mississippi River Basin Ag and Water Desk in 2021, reporting on environmental stories up and down the Mississippi River watershed.
Covering Climate Now, founded in 2019, is a network of more than 500 media partners worldwide to improve climate reporting.
In New Jersey, the nonprofit news site Civic Story includes a project called the New Jersey Sustainability Reporting Hub, with their 6th class of university student reporters.
New ways to tell sustainability stories
An online format developed by Esri, the global mapping company (Esri is a founding sponsor of Our Towns Foundation) developed a storytelling platform, called StoryMap, that offers a menu of options to present different pieces of a story in different ways — whether by words, maps, photos and videos, audios clips, charts and graphs, and timelines. The creator of a StoryMap can be at once a writer, illustrator, geographer, data analyst, videographer, and sound reporter. The consumer manipulates the story and interacts as a reader, viewer, and listener.
Last year, Esri sponsored a storytelling contest about environmental topics, built using the StoryMaps platform. Our Towns decided to award our own prize, for a community-based StoryMap.
Our winners, Ella Ashford and Riley Forth, are students at Willamette University, studying environmental science and archeology . Their story documents the tale of locating and salvaging derelict crab pots that have sunk to the floor of the Salish Sea near the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state.
With a StoryMap, they covered the elaborate technology and trials and errors of the underwater robots used find and salvage the crab pots, the processing the massive data collection, the documenting of crabs (living and dead) they found, and the surprises of sea life and marine debris in the water.
Our Towns is heartened by the progress over the last decade: citizen engagement, particularly by young people, with local environmental initiatives; journalism’s commitment to tell the stories; dedication from many funding levels to support the work, the reporting, and the publication of the stories.
Please read the complete story about the sustainability surge here. Thanks!
I think it's up to at least 3000... and counting
One of the most popular efforts in our region is the repair cafe - a Saturday afternoon when neighbors who know how to fix things (from torn jeans to antique clocks, bikes to lawnmowers, brok furniture to lamps needing rewiring) fix them for neighbors who don't - for FREE! In firehouses, libraries, church halls. In northeast Columbia County, NY four towns formed a committee almost three years ago and in about a dozen events of different sizes have fixed at least 500 items - saving them from the landfill. It's a community event that makes everybody happy!