• Quote of the Month
• Welcome to "The Green"
• Question of the Month
• Column: Cross-Movement Unity: The Fundamental Necessity
• Environmental Clubs: Black Pine Circle
• Book Review: Ishmael
• Poetry: "Undying is her love" by Rebecca Smith

Mission Statement: We are attempting to strengthen and unify the young environmental community in the Bay Area by sharing interests, information, and calls to action between 1,500 local youth. We seek to inspire participation in projects and events between groups, strenghten journalistic skills, and foster career exploration.

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

-Henry David Thoreau

Welcome to "The Green"
Jenny Cade, Editor

Welcome to the second edition of EarthTeam's new monthly student-written newsletter, "The Green". So this is how this newsletter is going to work. We have a current staff of five student editors for five sections: Editor's Notes, Environmental News, Opinions, Interviews and Poetry. The editors are responsible for coordinating contributions from you, the readers, and/or writing their own articles each month. If you would like to be an editor (we need more) , please contact me at jennyc@acterra.org and I'll forward your writeups or interests to the appropriate person. Join us! Letters to the Editor, what's happening at your school, you r writings and opinions are all important!

What do you think is the most important environmental issue and why?

Jenny Cade, Acterra Schools Group:
I could go on forever listing the specific environmental issues that concern me, but I think they all have the same root causes. I see our materialistic, consumer-driven economy and lifestyles as the biggest contributers to many environmental and social justice problems, as we exploit ecosystems and laborers for more and more profit and commodities. I don't want to place all blame on big, nasty corporations, as all of us (with few exceptions) play a part in this extraction of wealth and resources into the into our hands, as the priviledged minority. This, in turn, seems to stem from our basic denial of taking part in the huge system we call life. I feel if we truly embraced our role in the environment and the world, we wouldn't be so quick to live in ways that are perpetually harming life.

Sarah Stoller, College Prep High School:
One environmental issue that really concerns me is finding alternative energy sources to normal hydrocarbon power. Without alternative energy, we destroy our environment as well as possibly provoking political disputes.

Jonathon Wachter, College Prep High School:
I think the issue of over-population is the most important problem because is the main cause of the desperate situation we're in right now. If there weren't as many people, less logging would have to be done, fewer cars would be driven (therefore less air pollution), less trash would be produced, and so on.

Rebecca Smith, California High School:
I'm most concerned about possible oil drilling in Alaska. Alaska is one of our wildernesses left and I think we need to preserve it for future generations. The land on the northern Alaska coast is a reserve, so you'd think that means it is safe from those who would want to dig it up and destroy it. Yet, the government can make it accessible to oil drillers if it wants to. What is the good of laws if future generations can reverse them? This land is important for several reasons. Most important, it is fairly pristine arctic tundra and is home to many animals. Yet it is critical habitat for one particular animal - the caribou. This land is the only place where all the requirements for birthing their calves is met. The unique land conformations shelter them from wind and harsh conditions, among other things. If they are forced off this land, their offspring have a much smaller chance of survival during their first few weeks. Just as important as the caribou are the people who depend on them - the Gwitchen tribe. Their culture has survived thousands of years, and the caribou is their way of life. If the caribou die, this culture dies out, too. We must save Alaska for the animals and the people and not let it succumb to the greed of oil drillers.

Sara Hamilton, Berkeley High School: The most important environmental issue is Environmental Justice.

Thien Le, De Anza High School:
I'm frustrated at how little people take notice of health warnings. I live in a community consisted of most bilingual families. That means that English is not their native language. And most of the health campaign ads were printed in English, therefore the bilingual people couldn't read the messages from the warnings. In short words, my concern is: the distribution of health notice should adapt to the diversity of languages in targetted area.

Zach Bjornson-Hooper, Las Lomas High School:
The environmental issue I'm most concerned about: lossof biodiversity, forests, everything that exists naturally, basically. Of course that's the end goal of everything, to prevent umbrella loss. Specifically, probably protecting rain forests and getting rid of unethical food industries.

Shortly after I first got involved in environmental activism, I became relatively committed to a fundamental change in the way we perceive the Earth. Rather than as a source of resources to be maintained for future human use, I began to sense the Earth as both the single greatest organism in the universe, and as the original source of human spirituality. This period was during my sophomore year in high school, and was a time of rapidly expanding spiritual and intellectual horizons for me. The focus of my increased interest in higher consciousness centered around radical environmentalism. I have maintained a commitment to environmental change, and have had another expansion of consciousness since then.

It was in this work that I began to get a sense of the larger picture -- of the concept that the human economy is structurally arranged according to a fundamentally flawed and unsustainable exemplar. I realized that environmental sustainability did not just mean the reform of some corporations, or the switching of one technology to another: we’re talking about a revolution of consciousness when we talk about sustainability. It was this realization that led me to see the narrow-mindedness and intolerance of the mainstream American environmental movement. Don’t get me wrong here, I support movements from the Sierra Club to the Forests Forever Initiative to Earth First!, however I have come to see that there is a whole different environment, arguably more fundamental to our survival, whose salvation the mainstream movement is choosing not to involve itself in. That environment is the human one. I think the crimes we commit against each other every day are of equal, if not greater, detriment to the ultimate salvation of the Earth as a whole, as well as our species as physical and spiritual beings.

Any way I look at it, I come to the conclusion that social justice is a fundamental prerequisite to a sustainable society. While human conflict and empire expansion consume a huge amount of "natural resources" in an utterly unsustainable fashion, I think the most fundamental "resource" wasted in this process is the youth. The human capital, the potential for life-affirming revolution, wasted in front of the television (Corporate Americas apparent weapon of choice against the youth) alone is incredible. Factor in the corporate wonderland of brands, advertising, and cross-marketing most of us grow up in, and you have a class consisting mostly of ineffective, consumer-zombies, incapable of the most basic critical thought or act of anonymous compassion. Sound familiar?

While such mind-numbing tools are being used against white middle-class youth (the base of the youth environmental movement) the institutions wielding such weapons are also struggling to maintain a status quo that includes the oppression of people of color, women, and sexual minorities, not to mention the second and third world. While the institutions and structures that maintain this inequality are actively destroying human and non-human habitat, they are also serving a subtler and fundamentally destructive purpose: they are crippling our societies’ ability to repair itself.

The inequality between the demographics that tend to work for environmental sustainability (middle class white folks) and those that work for social justice (urban people of color and white academics) greatly impair our ability to work effectively to create the changes that all of us are calling for. Because of the fact that we even have the mental categories in which we operate "environmental" and "social" I think we are less capable of identifying and organizing for what are many of our basic mutual goals: reorganization of society into a just and sustainable form.

While freedom fighter/environmentalist synergy might not look like an anti-racist activist working together and forest defense activist to protect the rights of trees of color, it can look like an Earth First! cell and labor union (representing many people of color) fighting for sustainable jobs for loggers and mill workers, or marine habitat group working with local fishermen/women to fish sustainably, decreasing dependence on industrial fish-farming for companies like McDonalds. Another excellent contemporary example of a powerful union of social justice and environmental movements in synergy are the anti-war rallies of October 26th. America hasn’t seen such mobilization since the Vietnam War protests, which were the focus of the beginnings of a social revolution, and a major part of American history, symptomatic of fundamental changes underway. Today we are a more savvy movement facing a far more savvy and merciless institutional structure. We need every single advantage we can get, and I believe that loving unity is not only an advantage, it needs to be the very underpinning of a social change movement in itself.

By engaging kids at a young age in environmental activities, Black Pine Circle, a Kindergarten through eighth grade school in Berkeley, hopes to raise environmental awareness and caring within the community. Students are introduced in the lower elementary grades to a school garden and later, in middle school begin to work on service learning projects. The school has worked intensively under the direction of Liza Malm to develop a comprehensive recycling program. Black Pine Circle also strives to incorporate all environmental awareness projects into the science curriculum. Coordinating with the science program in past years students have learned about the anatomy of worms to aid them in their cultivation of a worm bin and a compost pile for the school garden. Students also get involved in other projects within the greater community. Several times a year the school does neighborhood cleanups.

Through raising awareness among youth, one of the program’s goals is to instill a sense of environmental responsibility in the students. Science teacher Barbara Stebbins who is involved in the environmental program believes that by involving them in hands-on activities, students will better understand their role in the ecosystem and also understand that they have the capability to change their environment for the better. Stebbins also stresses that given the opportunity to make a difference at a young age, students will learn to really care about the world they live in.

You know a book is bound to be good when it begins with a man reading the text, “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to change the world,” in the personal ads. And you know it’s great when said teacher turns out to be a half-ton silverback gorilla.

It’s difficult to describe the story, as there are few actual events. Most of the book is teacher-student dialogue between Ishmael, the gorilla, and the narrator. They discuss humanity’s role in the world – from how it developed to our current mentality to the choices for the future – in an abstract (rather than scientific) context.

First published in 1977, Ishmael has become a best seller, won the Turner Tomorrow Award, and is now the centerpiece of a virtual community of ecologically-minded individuals. I read this book in a couple sittings (it’s a surprisingly easy read for such a serious piece, by the way). It should also be noted that I have yet to hear of someone who has read this book and not had it affect the way they look at the world. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in developing a global consciousness and, of course, has “an earnest desire to change the world.”

Undying Is Her Love
by Rebecca Smith

Peering over the horizon,
The sun stretches out its arms
With undying love.
For a moment, the world stands still,
As the sky is warmed with pastoral colors of dawn,
The sun's blessings bestowed upon all in attendance.
Creatures stir as the sun brushes their eyelids,
Calling them to welcome the new day.

Graceful as a queen of old is the sun,
Sweeping upwards toward her throne of gold,
Her subjects gathered below,
Her radiance reflecting off their laughing faces.
As she reaches her place of reflection
She surveys her domain,
Her presence overpowering.

Slowly she descends,
Satisfaction illumining her features.
In reverence, the bustling of life slowly diminishes
As the world relaxes,
Preparing to settle down for the night's rest.

She turns to take leave of all her faithful,
Her smile causing the sky to blush pink and gold.
Smiling, she hands her crown to her sleepy husband,
The guardian of the night.
Tomorrow shall she come again.