Thursday, 30 Aug 2001
LONG ISLAND, N.Y.
The end of another week, and with it the reminder that summer is almost over. I glance at the calendar — is this really Labor Day weekend? Several of my coworkers in the Sustainable Energy Alliance emailed me reminders (some funny, some stern), scolding me not to work over a holiday weekend. They all know Friday is the day chapter drafts are due for the citizens energy plan. I promised I wouldn’t, but I think they know better.
I left several messages for our website guy, Brian, today, but no answer. The link to the SEA website is down (again) and that’s causing problems. I have already sent requests to member groups asking them to link their sites with ours, so it is rather embarrassing if people go there and it is not working … not to mention Grist readers trying to do the same thing. Every day lost is not good, especially when we are trying to gather public support for our citizens energy plan.
I check the rest of my messages — my director asks if I would like to speak at next week’s press conference on Wednesday. Absolutely, I tell him, and email him back with some preferences regarding what I would like to talk about. Next message is a press release from a local legislator’s office in Suffolk County — she is directing the county energy advisory committee to develop and submit their own energy master plan for Long Island by no later than December 2002. Although this legislator says their committee must “consider and evaluate any report or recommendations issued by the Sustainable Energy Alliance,” I wonder just what kind of impact this will have on our efforts. On the one hand, our plan will be done way before December 2002, so they won’t steal our thunder by releasing something first. But if legislators drag their feet — which politicians are known to do — it could be bad for us, too. I am concerned they will simply relegate our plan to the sidelines and claim they can’t do anything until their own plan is finished. I sent off an email to my director right away, asking him what he thinks about all this. No wonder I dislike politics so much these days.
On the bright side, I received a wonderful pastoral letter from an official with the Catholic Diocese here on Long Island, a member group of SEA. The author wanted my opinion on its contents and tone before submitting it to higher officials. In this letter, he discusses the increasing commitment by the church over the past decade to a challenge issued in 1991 by the U.S. Catholic Conference entitled “Renewing the Earth.” Issues of spiritual stewardship, air and water quality, open space preservation, and a vision for a sustainable energy future are all eloquently addressed. Personally, I welcome this embrace by the Catholic church and hope its influence will help guide us to much-needed change. Very often, environmentalists are ridiculed as tree-huggers, rather than good stewards of the environment. But, when the Church steps forward and reiterates the same ideals, people listen and respect the message.
The following is from “Environmentalism is not Just for Tree-Huggers,” by Ken Midkiff of the Missouri Sierra Club. I think it is an appropriate way to end my week of diaries and the message of sustainability our alliance is striving to convey here on Long Island.
A very wise man a couple of millennia ago stated: “What you do to the least of these, you do also to me.” That is the essence of environmentalism. We cannot abuse the earth without suffering the consequences. We cannot stand apart. Environmentalism is all about protecting people — our communities, our neighborhoods. It is not some pie-in-the-sky idealism, rather it is directed at the very core of life.”
