“I looked up the word ‘environment.’ It said ‘what surrounds you.’ You have to meet the people where environment is,” said Rogers, president of the Earth Day Network. “If there’s poor and dirty air, no tree cover, if subway’s far away, you’ll never gain affinity for the environment because your environment is so rotten.”
A crucial element of the work EDN does, Rogers said, is broadening the definition of “environment” to include any and all issues that affect people’s health or that of their communities and the environment. That could be anything from promoting activism to stop air and water pollution, greening deteriorated schools, or creating green jobs and investment.
All too often, Rogers said, the image of those most actively involved in the environmental movement is that of older White people. But by partnering with individuals like Antonio Gonzalez of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, Greg Moore of the NAACP and thousands of disparate individuals and organizations, a whole different constellation of players are now a part of the environmental effort in their respective communities.
And the areas they cover go well beyond the environment, Rogers explained, including civil rights, women’s rights and human rights.
“I call it environmental democracy which means sticking with the community,” she said. “You have to stick it out, meet the people where they are and do things like work on bond initiatives and dirty water. It seems so obvious so we do this on a micro-scale,” Rogers said.
“All of our programs are focused on equality. We keep on trying. If we’re not going to invest, why would they vote for green issues? It’s really importance to change this equation and view voters as people we can invest in. We feel this way in every country in which we operate,” she said.
EDN is currently active in 192 countries and is working with more than 50,000 partners on a variety of projects, whether it’s environmental campaigns, voter registration drives, town halls, or organizing federal and state legislative campaigns to green school facilities, promoting green economic policies, improving food in schools and enhancing environmental education and civic engagement.
Affecting this type of large-scale change is one Rogers likened to Sisyphus rolling a huge stone up a mountain.
“People like me, we’re pathology optimists. We can’t stop being optimistic. It’s a weird, positive sickness,” she said with a laugh. “We’re not here for the big bucks; we have a sense of right and wrong, a strain, a genetic predisposition. And we’re Sisyphean – rolling a big boulder up the hill.”
Special to the NNPA from The Washington Informer
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